Historical Sources, Historiography, and Methods of Historical Inquiry
This domain tests how historians classify evidence, criticise it, and explain change. You need to distinguish the source from the interpretation built on it, and to recognise the assumptions behind a school of history.
Types of source
- Primary: inscriptions, coins, excavation reports, archival files, newspapers, memoirs, oral testimony, material objects.
- Secondary: monographs and articles that interpret primary material.
- Each genre has its own logic: a land grant records a transaction that succeeded; a colonial report records what officials wanted to see; a memoir defends a reputation.
Criticism
- External: authenticity, date, authorship, transmission.
- Internal: meaning, vocabulary, purpose, audience, silences.
- Corroboration: independent sources agreeing is stronger than one source repeated.
Historiographical schools
- Colonial/imperialist writing explained India through difference and stagnation.
- Nationalist history recovered agency and indigenous achievement.
- Marxist analysis centred modes of production and class.
- Subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha) recovered peasant and marginal voices against elite archives.
- Feminist history interrogated categories such as 'public' and 'private'.
Worked example
A copper-plate grant records land given to a Brahmana. Reasoning: it establishes royal authority, the donor's piety, and the rights transferred; but it survives because it was preserved by the beneficiary, so it over-represents successful, literate transactions. Conclusion: useful for legitimation and land rights, unreliable for the scale of ordinary tenancy.
Traps
- Assuming official records are objective.
- Anachronism - importing modern categories into earlier periods.
- Citing one source as decisive.
- Confusing historiography (how history is written) with history (what happened).
- Using a quotation without identifying its author and date.