Two Accounts of the Same Village Protest
In a village 14 km from Nagaon town, three students must write a 150-word article for the school magazine on a local protest of the 1890s. Their teacher gives them three sources and bars the internet.
Source A - a district officer's report, 20 November 1894: 'About two hundred villagers assembled; two persons were injured; order was restored within three hours.'
Source B - their great-grandmother, aged 96, recorded on a phone in 2021: 'More than a thousand people came. The police fired. Three men from our village never came back.'
Source C - a stone slab in the Shiva temple, dated 1895, naming 41 donors who gave 'for the memorial of those taken'.
Source B dates the event 'the year after the great flood', and a revenue record puts that flood in 1892; Source A's date is 1894, while the teacher says the protest is usually placed in 1893. There is no time to visit the district archive before Friday, and the article must not invent facts.
1. The students cannot agree on a casualty figure. Using all three sources, explain how they should write about the deaths without either ignoring Source B or treating it as proven fact.
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Separate what is agreed from what is disputed. All three sources agree on the core: a crowd gathered, force was used, and people were hurt or killed. That core can be stated as fact.
Reliability is judged claim by claim, not source by source. Source A is a contemporary official record but was written to demonstrate that the administration was in control; a report showing two hundred rioters and three hours' disturbance reads better for the officer than a thousand mourners and three dead. Source B preserves the memory of loss but is recall after 60 years and numbers in oral testimony often swell to express the seriousness of an event rather than to count it.
Use Source C as the hinge. A memorial naming 41 donors is hard to explain if nobody died; it supports Source B's central claim (deaths occurred) without confirming its number.
Write it with attribution. For example: 'An official report of 1894 recorded two injured; villagers remember three dead, and a memorial slab of 1895 suggests the deaths were real.' Give the range and the source, and say plainly that the exact number cannot be settled from these sources. Do not average two and a thousand into a fake figure.
2. What can Source C establish, and what are its limits? How does it change the students' judgement about Source B?
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What it establishes: it is a physical, roughly contemporary object that is independent of both the officer and the family. It shows that a group of at least 41 people thought the dead worth commemorating and could organise and pay for a memorial - evidence of public significance, not just private grief.
Its limits: it records donors, not events. It gives no date of the protest, no number of dead, no cause. It may commemorate people killed in something else, or a later reburial. It names only those who could contribute, so it is silent about the poorest households, and a temple slab carries its own religious framing.
Effect on Source B: it does not verify the number 'three' or 'a thousand'. It does shift the balance on the key question of whether deaths occurred, because a claim supported by an independent material source is stronger than one resting on memory alone. Source B becomes more credible on the fact of killing and no more credible on the count.
Judgement for the article: treat Source B as evidence of experience and memory, Source A as evidence of official framing, and Source C as corroboration of consequence.
3. The teacher says: 'Never call a source a lie; ask what it was for.' Explain what Source A was written for and give one reason it might understate the crowd.
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Purpose shapes content. Source A is an official report produced within months of the event, moving upward through the district administration. Its function was to show that the disturbance was contained and that officers acted lawfully and promptly. Such a document is not usually fabricated, but it selects.
Reasons the crowd could be understated: (i) the officer may have counted only those in the front of the assembly, or only adult male householders, missing women, labourers and people from neighbouring villages who joined briefly; (ii) an official who reports 'about two hundred' can justify a small police response, whereas 'over a thousand' invites questions about why troops were not called earlier.
What this does not prove: it does not show the report is a lie or that a thousand is correct. Oral memory inflates; official records deflate. The students' task is to name the direction of the bias for each source rather than to decide which narrator is honest. That habit - asking who wrote a source, for whom, and what it was meant to achieve - is the transferable skill, and it applies equally to a newspaper, a government press note or a tourist brochure.