The concept of ‘Marginal Man’ was propounded by

The correct answer is A) Robert E. Park. In his 1928 essay 'Human Migration and the Marginal Man' in the American Journal of Sociology, Park described the marginal man as a person living between two cultures, belonging fully to neither, such as a migrant or a second-generation immigrant caught between the old home culture and the new one. This sits within the Chicago School of urban sociology.

• B) Robert Redfield is known for the folk-urban continuum and his study of Tepoztlán, a Mexican village. He did not propound the marginal man concept.
• C) Louis Wirth wrote 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' (1938), which defines the city through size, density and heterogeneity. He is a Chicago School thinker too, which is why he is often confused with Park.
• D) Louis Dumont is a French structuralist famous for 'Homo Hierarchicus' on caste. He has no link to the marginal man idea.

Core concept: marginality as a product of cultural hybridity and migration. For Mains, this connects to identity, diaspora and integration debates, and to how migrants in Indian cities straddle rural kinship norms and urban individualism.

Trap: candidates pick Redfield or Wirth simply because they are the famous Chicago School names. Keep the authorship tied to the specific text: Park, 1928, migration.