Introduction: Tracing Changes Through a Thousand Years
Geographical Influence on History
- Geography directly or indirectly affects the history of a region.
- Favourable environments lead to:
- Dense population
- Cultural interaction with outsiders/travellers
- Unfavourable environments lead to:
- Sparse population
- Less external cultural influence
Maps and Medieval India
- Cartography is the art/science of making maps.
- A cartographer is a person who studies or creates maps.
- Ancient Indians did not know about map-making.
- Medieval trade and empire expansion increased the need for accurate maps.
- Arabs and Europeans first developed the science of Cartography.
- Contact with Arabs and Europeans helped Indians learn map-making.
- Map-1 (by Arab geographer Al-Idrisi, 1154 CE):
- Shows South India and Sri Lanka at the top
- Place names are in Arabic
- Spellings differ from what we know today
- Map-2 (by French cartographer Guillaume de l'Isle, 1720s):
- Shows South India and Sri Lanka at the bottom (like modern maps)
- More familiar to present-day viewers
- Based on updated information
- Historians study maps in the context of the time they were made.
📘 New and Old Terminologies
- Language and meanings change over time depending on the context in which information is produced.
- Historical records are written in different languages, which have changed significantly over the years.
- Medieval Persian is different from modern Persian, not just in grammar and vocabulary but also in word meanings.
- 🌍 The Term “Hindustan”
- Today, "Hindustan" means India, the modern nation-state.
- In the 13th century, chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj used "Hindustan" to refer to Punjab, Haryana, and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna.
- He used it in a political sense, for lands under the Delhi Sultanate.
- The areas included under “Hindustan” changed with the Sultanate’s expansion but never included South India.
- In the 16th century, Babur used "Hindustan" to describe geography, animals, and culture, not politics.
- Amir Khusrau (14th-century poet) also used the term "Hind" in a cultural and geographical sense.
- The idea of India as a region existed, but “Hindustan” did not have the political or national meaning it has today.
- 👨🏫 Historians and Use of Terms
- Historians must be careful while using terms from the past because meanings have changed over time.
- The word “foreigner” today means someone who is not Indian.
- In medieval times, a “foreigner” was any stranger who did not belong to a specific village or culture.
- Example: A city-dweller might call a forest-dweller a foreigner.
- But two peasants from the same village were not foreigners to each other, even if they had different religions or castes.
- Words used to describe foreigners:
- In Hindi: Pardesi
- In Persian: Ajnabi
📚 Historians and Their Sources
- 🔍 Nature of Historical Sources.
- Historians use different types of sources based on the time period and the nature of their study.
- For the period 700 to 1750, historians use:
- Coins
- Inscriptions
- Architecture
- Textual records
- 🔁 Continuity and Change in Sources
- There is continuity in the use of older sources (like coins, inscriptions), but also discontinuity due to the increase in textual records.
- During this period, paper became cheaper and widely available, making writing more common.
- 📝 Types of Textual Records
- People used paper to write:
- Religious texts
- Royal chronicles
- Letters and teachings of saints
- Petitions and court records
- Registers of accounts and taxes
- Manuscripts were preserved by:
- Rulers
- Wealthy people
- Monasteries
- Temples
- These were kept in libraries and archives and are important but difficult to use.
- ✍️ Problems with Manuscripts
- There was no printing press, so scribes hand-copied manuscripts.
- Copying by hand caused errors – scribes:
- Misread original text
- Introduced small changes (e.g., a word or sentence)
- Over centuries, copies of the same text became quite different, creating a challenge for historians.
- Original manuscripts are rarely available – historians depend on copies made by later scribes.
- To understand the original content, historians compare different versions of the same manuscript.
- 📖 Example: Ziyauddin Barani
- Ziyauddin Barani, a 14th-century chronicler, wrote a historical chronicle in:
- 1356 (first version)
- 1358 (revised version)
- The two versions differ from each other.
- The first version was discovered only in the 1960s in a large library collection.
- This shows that some important texts remained unknown for centuries.
✅ Assertion and Reason Questions
Choose the correct option for each below question based on the given assertions and reasons:
a) Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
b) Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
c) A is true, but R is false
d) A is false, but R is true
- Q1
- Assertion (A): Historians rely only on coins, inscriptions, and architecture to study the period from 700 to 1750.
- Reason (R): Textual records were not available in that period.
- Q2
- Assertion (A): Paper became cheaper and widely available during the period 700–1750.
- Reason (R): This led to the increase in writing of texts like religious books, chronicles, and court records.
- Q3
- Assertion (A): Scribes introduced small changes while copying manuscripts.
- Reason (R): Copying manuscripts by hand was a simple and error-free process.
- Q4
- Assertion (A): Historians often find the original manuscript written by an author.
- Reason (R): Manuscripts were carefully preserved and printed using the printing press.
- Q5
- Assertion (A): Historians compare different versions of the same manuscript to understand the original text.
- Reason (R): The original manuscripts are rarely available and copies often differ due to manual copying errors.
- Q6
- Assertion (A): Ziyauddin Barani’s first chronicle was lost and discovered only in the 1960s.
- Reason (R): Historical manuscripts often remain hidden in large libraries and archives for centuries.