TRACING CHANGES THROUGH A THOUSAND YEARS

 

Indian subcontinent (Map -1)

                       

The first map of the Indian subcontinent was made in 1154 CE by the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi and in the 1720s by a French cartographer. Actually both are of the same area but there are a lot of differences between them. In al-Idrisi’s map, south India is where we would expect to find north India and Sri Lanka is the island at the top.Map 2 was made nearly 600 years after Map 1. The second map indicates that Europeans were the most familiar with the Indian subcontinent and in this map the name of the places are very clearly like kanauj in Uttar Pradesh.

 Indian subcontinent (Map- 2)

               

Cartographer 

A person who makes maps.

New and Old Terminologies

Historical records exist in a variety of languages which have changed considerably over the years.Medieval Persian, for example, is different from modern Persian. The difference is not just with regard to grammar and vocabulary; the meanings of words also change over time.

   Take the term “Hindustan”, for example. Today we understand it as “India”, the modern nation-state. 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. By contrast, in the early sixteenth century Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent. As we will see later in the chapter, this was somewhat similar to the way the fourteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau used the word “Hind”. While the idea of a geographical and cultural entity like “India” did exist, the term “Hindustan” did not carry the political and national meanings which we associate with it today.A simple term like “foreigner”. It is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the mediaeval period a “foreigner” was any stranger who appeared in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture. (In Hindi the term pardesi might be used to describe such a person and in Persian, ajnabi.) A city-dweller, therefore, might have regarded a forest-dweller as a “foreigner”, but two peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though they may have had different religious or caste backgrounds.

Historians and their Sources

You will notice some continuity in the sources used by historians for the study of this period. They still rely on coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records for information. But there is also considerable discontinuity. The number and variety of textual records increased dramatically during this period. 

The value of paper

In the middle of the thirteenth century a scholar wanted to copy a book. But he did not have enough paper. So he washed the writing off a manuscript he did not want, dried the paper and used it.

 A century later, if you bought some food in the market you could be lucky and have the shopkeeper wrap it for you in some paper.

widely available. People used it to write holy texts, chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and for registers of accounts and taxes. Manuscripts were collected by wealthy people, rulers, monasteries and temples. They were placed in libraries and archives. These manuscripts and documents provide a lot of detailed information to historians but they are also difficult to use.

There was no printing press in those days so scribes copied manuscripts by hand. If you have ever copied a friend’s homework you would know that this is not a simple exercise. Sometimes you cannot read your friend’s handwriting and are forced to guess what is written. As a result there are small but significant differences in your copy of your friend’s work. Manuscript copying is somewhat similar. 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 texts became substantially different from one another. This is a serious problem because we rarely find the original manuscript of the author today. We are totally dependent upon the copies made by later scribes. As a result historians have to read different manuscript versions of the same text to guess what the author had originally written.