the context
Whether you liked it or not, history has been a part of your lives for quite a while already. Making its appearance as a subject in your Social Science books quite early in school, all of you had to grapple with it until the 10th standard. Some you studied it further voluntarily, as a standalone subject, for another two years in school. And a smaller number are now studying it in college.
Regardless of your personal relationship with history as an academic subject, you would have noticed a couple of things about it: First, history is closely tied to the idea of the nation and country—the history that we studied in school was mostly ‘history of India’ (with a snippet of ‘world history’ and ‘regional history’ tagged alongside). In fact, if you remember, the opening pages of the Social Science textbook often began with either a pledge to the nation, or the national anthem, or with the Preamble to the Indian Constitution—sometimes all three. Second, the textbooks, especially in the junior classes, usually began with the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent, after which history proper began, usually again, with the Indus Valley Civilization.
The second of the two points above ought to make you pause and ask: If, as we saw last week, we know so much about deep time—the origins of the earth and the geological making of the Indian subcontinent—why do our history books commence at a point in the past that is so much later than those events? And, why do they not use the geologic time scale and its units, but the vague term ‘prehistory’, which is broken up into stone, bronze, and iron ages? What qualifies a certain passage of time in the past as point of departure for ‘history’ proper? Also, if geologists and evolutionary biologists use rock samples and fossil records as evidence for their reconstruction of the deep past, how do historians reconstruct the historical past, its events and processes? And again, as we did in the case of deep time, we will contrast historical time with mythic time. For example, how do historians engage with mythical texts?
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These are some of the questions that will be taken up in class this week in our enquiry into the origins of India in the light of yet another register of time— historical time. As part of this exploration we will look briefly at the Indus Valley Civilization and get glimpses of how historians engage with their 'sources'.
Click to watch Episode 1: Beginnings
preparing for the week
READINGS:
There are two assigned readings--each a book chapter--for this week. Both readings address the question of India’s historical beginnings, but complement each other well in terms of the ground they cover. One of them is by Upinder Singh, one of the finest historians of ancient India. In it, she discusses how historians make sense of and study the past, and the issues India's past present to historians studying it. The other reading is by Thomas Trautmann, an equally well-regarded historian and anthropologist. It tells us what, in the Indian case, is the threshold for the 'beginning' of history and natural-environmental factors that structured its course.
VIEWING:
This week, we will watch the first episode of the expansive, six-part documentary on Indian history, The Story of India, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2007 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of India’s independence from British rule. The episode is aptly titled, "The Beginning".
All the six episodes of The Story of India are anchored and narrated by Michael Wood, a historian, documentarian, and an Indophile. Each episode is visually gorgeous. In tracing India's history, they take us to different places across the globe. Michael Wood is a compelling presenter with infectious enthusiasm for his subject. We will watch the documentaries in the series as much for enjoyment as for learning. But, importantly, we will watch them critically. In that, we will pay attention to what Mr. Wood actually says, to how the story of India is verbally and visually presented to the audience. What aspect of India’s past do the documentaries emphasize? Are there significant personalities, events, and processes that are either downplayed or left out? What kind of visual language do the documentaries have, and so on. We will be mindful of any emergent patterns in these regards and discuss what the patterns mean.
Key CONCEPTS:
In order to make better sense of the readings and the viewing, you will need to know what the following key concepts are about: (i) writing; (ii) historical time, history, prehistory, and protohistory; (iii) periodization; and (iv) sources
Watch this short documentary that explores the Indus Valley Civilization.
Here is another documentary where a Pakistani film maker explores the meanings of the ancient history of Mohenjadaro in the present.
Watch this documentary on the history of writing
key concept #1:
WRITING
Writing is the first key concept that we will address here, because the time of emergence of writing is often taken to be the beginning of historical time. Why this is the case is discussed below, under the key concept ‘history’. Here, we will instead focus on ‘writing’ itself. For it is one those deceptive notions that appears to be self-apparent at the first glance, but, like many of the other key concepts in this course, is hardly so when you actually reflect on it.
Writing is the use of symbols to code and communicate meaningful sounds in a given language. It is then, fundamentally, a visual technology. Take away the faculty of vision and writing as we know it becomes irrelevant. As a medium of communication, one has to be ‘schooled’ in the script, i.e., the set of symbols or alphabets that a linguistic community conventionally uses, to put writing to use. A person who does not know how to properly decode the symbols in terms of their corresponding sounds is considered illiterate in that language.
Much of our misconception about writing emerges from the ‘natural’ association we make between the written word and the language the word sounds out. However, there is absolutely no natural relationship between the symbols/characters we use for writing and the language they sound out, make intelligible, and communicate. This relationship is entirely a matter of convention. For example, right now, we are using the Latin alphabet but writing English, i.e., the sounds the letters make, taken together, are meaningful in the English language. But one can use the same alphabet system to write Spanish, or send a text message in Marathi, for that matter. Similarly, the numerals we typically use for written communication in English are actually Arabic numerals. Consider yet another example: the Punjabi language. It is written in three different scripts, usually depending on one’s religion. A Muslim Punjabi uses the nastaliq script, which also used for writing Urdu and Persian. A Sikh usually uses the Gurmukhi script, while a Hindu Punjabi uses the Devanagari script.
Why is it important to keep all this about writing in mind? That is because not only are written records from the past the bread and butter of historical enquiry, they also have important implications for determining the beginning of historical time in a given context.
Here is another short video on the history of writing.
key conceptS#2:
historical time,
history, prehistory, protohistory
If deep time is that scale of time over which geological and evolutionary processes and events are charted, starting with the earth’s ‘origin’ 4.5 billion years ago, then historical time’s threshold of departure is incalculably more recent and its extent a mere speck of dust when compared to deep time. At its deepest end, historical time is usually pegged at around 3,200 BC (note the change in unit of measuring time)—a mere 5,200 years ago.
Why, you might rightly ask, this particular point in the past not some other, like the beginning of settled agriculture, which seems like a pivotal transformation from the species life of the Homo Sapiens to the social life of humans? The reason is: this is the time to which the oldest available evidence of a novel technology of media and communication in the ancient world—writing—has been dated. In other words, rise of writing, in the form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyph, is seen to mark definite break with the past—with prehistory, i.e., the time before history. With writing, history began, as did that phase of human beings’ social existence which we call ‘civilization’. Why place so much importance writing, you might think? Well, let us take this question up for discussion in the class.
Few things we should note about such a framing of historical time: making the writing the point of inflection between prehistory and history implies that only literate people are historical and, indeed, civilized; people without writing are, therefore, not properly historical and inadequately civilized. This idea became a key justifying element for Europeans to violently colonize the non-western world, on the pretext that colonialism would actually civilize the Native America, the African, and Indian by giving them ‘history’.
Second, ‘prehistory’ does not mean any and all before the emergence of writing. It, too, has a backward limit—around 3.3 million years before present, when, as per current evidence, stone tools crafting and use seemed to have started by the species Homo Habilis—an ancestor of the Homo Sapiens. The prehistorical time, then, stretches from the emergence of tool to the rise of writing. Third, there is the notion of protohistory, which is useful when the separation between the historical and the prehistorical is not so neat. As you will see Upinder Singh pointing out, early India, i.e., the time between the Indus Valley Civilization, whose script is yet to be deciphered, and the time to which the oldest evidence of writing in the Indian subcontinent has been dated—the 4th century BC—is a period that is best understood at protohistorical. It is a period that was most likely literate but nothing written from the time has survived into the present, or it has not been deciphered. It is, therefore, not quite prehistorical, neither is it entirely historical.
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One thing should, however, be clear from the presentation of the key concepts above: the soul of historical time--its foundation and reference--is the humankind, in and of itself, not just another species of another genus occupying the surface of the earth that is shaped by physiographic and geologic forces. This hold true for 'prehistory' as well. Insofar as it is defined in terms of 'history', it is human prehistory that we are interested in. Indeed, in the historical imagination, humans are the main actors in dramas of their own making.
Click the image below and begin browsing this interactive website that has a treasure trove of information on the Indus Valley Civilization
key concept #3:
periodization
Periodization is the way in which the historical past is typically broken down by historians for research and analysis. Successive periods are separated by on the basis of some definitive transformation in human society brough about by technological/ economic/ institutional/ environmental change. Prehistory, for example, is commonly broken up into a massively long Stone Age, followed by a relatively much shorter Bronze Age, and almost an equally short Iron Age. History, on the other hand, is divided into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Each period, both in history and prehistory, is further subdivided into smaller periods that enable greater focus for study. What is the reasoning behind these divisions? Who conceptualized them? Let us discuss these questions in class.
key concept#4:
SOURCES
Sources are building blocks of evidence with which historians reconstruct events, places, and processes and make sense of human pasts. The most privileged of a historian’s sources are written sources, whatever maybe the surface of recording—stone, metal, parchment, paper. This is not surprising, given that writing is what separates prehistory from history. However, considering that not only does human history go deeper into the past beyond the threshold of writing but also that most peoples of the world in the historical era were not literate, historians and archaeologists use a range of other material artifacts from the pre-/proto-/historical past for information and knowledge. Key in gleaning such information and piecing them together is techniques of interpretation that make sources meaningful in relation to other source materials.
Some take-aways
and
questions
In this part of the unit you were introduced to some basic concepts and analytical tools used by historians. The discussion on periodisation clearly shows the influence of the present on the past - how you divide up history and label them affects how you view the past.
Similarly, the choice of zero points affects how the historical narrative unfolds. The existence of the Indus Valley Civilization came to light only in the 1920s. How do you think this changed the narrative of Indian history?
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You have also learnt that evidence, in the form of ‘primary sources’, is central to the discipline of history and have had a glimpse into how historians critically analyze these sources. How do you think the historical perspective of how a particular belief system, say Vaishnavism developed, differs from that described in a mythical text such as the Vishnu Purana?
What are some of the dominant historical narratives that currently exist in public discourse? How would you evaluate them using the basic tools of a historian?
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Can you think of ways in which historical time intersects with deep time?