Historical Method and Historiography Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The answer is (A) is wrong, but (B) is right.

Statement (A) repeats the colonial periodisation that James Mill made popular, dividing Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. NCERT explains why historians reject it: it assumes the religion of rulers was the only important change, and it ignores the rich diversity of economy, society and culture within each period.

Statement (B) is accepted: processes such as the spread of agriculture, the growth of a language or the formation of new social groups happened gradually, so precise dates and time spans are hard to assign to them. Since (A) is wrong, the options treating it as correct are wrong.

Answer: B

BCE stands for Before Common Era.

BCE and CE (Common Era) are religiously neutral equivalents of BC and AD. NCERT's Class 6 history explains that dates once written as BC, 'before Christ', are now often written BCE, with CE in place of AD, and that the numbering of years stays the same.

'Before Christian Era', 'Before Caesar Era' and 'Before Contemporary Era' are not what the abbreviation stands for. BC itself means 'Before Christ', which is probably the source of the first distractor.

Answer: D

Such a place is called an archive.

An archive is a repository where documents and manuscripts are kept. All national and state governments maintain archives to preserve their old official records and transactions, and historians use them as sources.

A secretariat is the office where the government's administrative work is done, not a store of old records. A library keeps books and periodicals for readers rather than official records, and Parliament is the legislature that makes laws.

Answer: A

The secondary source is C.A. Bayly's An Illustrated History of Modern India.

A secondary source is a later account written by someone who studied primary sources, the records produced at the time. Bayly's book is a twentieth-century historian's account of the colonial period, so it is secondary.

The others are treated as primary sources. James Mill's A History of British India (1817) is studied, as in the NCERT Class VIII text, as evidence of how the British of that time viewed India. The Constitution of India is an original document of the period it governs, and a painting by Abanindranath Tagore is an original work of art from his time.

Answer: C

A is true but B is false.

The Scottish economist and philosopher James Mill published A History of British India in three volumes in 1817. But he did not divide Indian history into ancient, medieval and modern periods: he divided it into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, a classification based on the religion of rulers that historians have since criticised.

The ancient-medieval-modern division was borrowed later from European history-writing, so statement B attributes the wrong scheme to Mill. That rules out options A, B and D.

Answer: A

The key's answer is (a) and (d).

Sources are the concrete traces of the past that historians work from (a), such as inscriptions, coins and documents, and they include eye-witness accounts and personal letters (d).

Sources are not 'all historical' in a narrow sense (b), since geography, political science and other subjects use sources too, and they are not objective (c): every source reflects the viewpoint and purpose of whoever produced it, which is why historians read them critically. So options containing (b) or (c) are wrong.

Answer: A

The writings that cannot be a primary source are those of Muzaffar Alam.

A primary source is one produced in the period being studied. Muzaffar Alam is a modern historian of Mughal India; his books interpret the past from the evidence, so they are secondary sources.

Abul Fazl wrote the Akbar Nama in Akbar's reign, Ziyauddin Barani wrote the Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi in the fourteenth century, and Rashsundari Devi wrote Amar Jiban, the first autobiography in Bengali, in the nineteenth century. Their writings are primary sources for their own times.

Answer: B

The wrong source for ancient Indian history would be miniature paintings.

Indian miniature painting, in its Mughal, Rajput and Pahari schools, flourished from the sixteenth century onwards. It belongs to medieval and early modern India, so it cannot serve as evidence for ancient Indian history.

Cave paintings (such as those at Bhimbetka and Ajanta), inscriptions (such as Ashoka's edicts) and manuscripts (such as early texts copied on palm leaf and birch bark) are all standard sources for the ancient period.

Answer: D

The incorrect statement about archaeologists' work is Examine the written records.

Archaeologists study the material remains of the past. They explore and excavate (dig below the surface) to find tools, weapons, pots and pans, ornaments and coins, study the remains of buildings, paintings and sculpture, and look for bones of animals, birds and fish to find out what people ate.

Examining written records such as manuscripts is mainly the work of historians (and of epigraphists for inscriptions). Archaeologists may use written sources alongside their finds, but it is not the defining nature of their work, so this is the statement that does not fit.

Answer: B

The scholar is Benedict Anderson.

In Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson argued that the nation is an imagined political community, and that print capitalism, the spread of printed books and newspapers in vernacular languages, allowed people who would never meet to imagine themselves as one community. This is the classic analysis of print media's role in nationhood.

Perry Anderson, his brother, is a Marxist historian of the state. Victor Kiernan wrote on imperialism, and Walter Bagehot is known for The English Constitution.