In each of the questions below, a sentence is given with two blanks. Choose the option that best fills both blanks to make the sentence grammatically and contextually correct. The historian’s otherwise ______________ account of the partition’s demographic consequences was significantly compromised by her uncritical acceptance of census methodologies that contemporary demographers have since demonstrated to be ______________ by the administrative anxieties of the colonial bureaucracy that produced them.

The sentence describes a historian’s account that is “otherwise” impressive in some quality — meaning the account has a generally strong characteristic that is then undermined by one specific flaw. The flaw is the uncritical acceptance of census methodologies shown to have been shaped by “administrative anxieties” of the colonial bureaucracy — meaning the data was distorted by the political and institutional pressures of the administration that created it. The second blank must describe what those administrative anxieties did to the census methodologies. Nuanced means characterised by subtle distinctions and careful, multifaceted analysis — precisely the quality one would expect from a serious historical account of a complex demographic event like partition, and the word that would make the flaw of uncritically accepting flawed data most pointed (a nuanced historian should have questioned the data). Contaminated means made impure or unreliable through the introduction of a corrupting influence — perfectly describing how administrative anxieties corrupted the reliability of the census methodologies, making the data an unreliable instrument for demographic analysis. Hence (c) is the correct answer.