Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• New And Old Terminologies
• If the information change with time=> Then language and meaning can also change.
• Medieval Persian, for example, is different from modern Persian.
• The term “Hindustan”, for example. Today we understand it as “India”.
• When the term was used in the thirteenth century by Minhaj-i-Siraj, a chronicler who wrote in Persian, he
meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna.
• He used the term in a political sense for lands that were a part of the dominions of the Delhi Sultan.
• The areas included in this term shifted with the extent of the Sultanate but the term never included south
India.
• Whereas in the early sixteenth century Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the
culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• Historians have to be very careful about the terms they use.
• Because they meant different things in the past.
• Take, for example, a simple term like “foreigner”.
• Historians and their sources:
• This year roughly we are going to study the thousand years from 700 to 1750.
• What are the sources to study history.
• Historians still rely on coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records.
• Textual records increased in this period.
• Through this period paper became cheaper and was available more widely.
People wrote old texts
Chronicles of rulers were written.
Letters and teachings of saints, petitions, and judicial records.
Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• Manuscripts and scribes
• What are manuscripts?=> Manuscripts were handwritten books usually collected by wealthy people, rulers,
monasteries and temples. They were kept in libraries and archives.
• Manuscripts are written by scribes .
• As scribes copied manuscripts, they also introduced small changes – a word here, a sentence there.
• These small differences grew over centuries of copying until manuscripts of the same text became substantially
different from one another.
Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• New Social and Political Group:
• (i) The study of the thousand years between 700 and 1750 is a huge challenge to historian largely because of
the scale and variety of developments that occurred over the period.
• (ii) It was a period of great mobility. One such group of people was Rajaputra. Other group of warriors were
Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Ahoms and Kayasthas.
• (iii) Throughout the period there was a gradual clearing of forests and the extension of agriculture. Challenges
in their habitat forced many forest-dwellers to migrate.
• (iv) As society became more differentiated people were grouped into jatis or sub-castes and ranked on the
basis of their backgrounds and their occupations.
• (v) Ranks were not fixed permanently, and varied according to the power, influence and resources controlled
by the members of the jati.
Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• Regions and Empires:
• (i) Large states like those of the Cholas, Tughluqs, or Mughals encompassed many regions.
• (ii) A Sanskrit prashsti that praises Delhi Sultan Balban tells that he was ruler of a vast empire that stretched from
Bengal in the east to Ghazni in Afghanistan in the west and included all of the South India (Dravida).
• (iii) There were considerable conflicts between various states.
• (iv) When the Mughal empire declined in the 18th century, it led to the re-emergence of regional states.
• Old and New Religions: (i) Religion was often closely associated with the social and economic organization of local
communities.
(ii) It was during the period that important changes occurred in religion. It included the worship of new deities,
construction of temples by royality, and the growing importance of Brahmanas in the Hindu religion.
(iii) Knowledge of Sanskrit helped Brahmins to earn respect.
(iv) Islam was patronized by many rulers.
Tracing Changes Through A Thousand Years
• Historical Periods:
(i) The British historians divided the history of India into three periods: Hindu, Muslim and British.
(ii) Most historians look to economic and social factors to characterize the major elements of different moments
of the past.
(iii) The life of hunter-gatherers, early farmers and early empires was called early societies.
(iv) The growth of imperial state formations, development of Hinduism and Islam as major religions and the
arrival of European trading companies was called medieval period.
(v) The last era was called modernity which carried a sense of material progress and intellectual development.
