History: Events and Processes - Evidence, Schools and Causation
History: Events and Processes tests whether you can work like a historian: identify the kind of source, name the school of interpretation behind a claim, and explain an event through layered causes rather than a single sentence.
Evidence before narrative
- Primary sources are produced within the period: Ashokan edicts and inscriptions, coins, Persian tarikhs, Marathi bakhars, despatches, diaries, first-hand oral testimony.
- Secondary sources interpret afterwards: textbooks, monographs, journal articles, documentaries.
- In the Indian tradition, Kalhana's Rajatarangini (12th century, Kashmir) is valued because he consciously weighed his sources; the Puranic itihasa tradition serves a different purpose - genealogy, cosmology and moral instruction rather than verification.
Schools that shape answers
Ranke's empiricism claimed to show the past 'as it actually happened'; the Annales school turned to long-duration social and economic history; Marxist historiography reads change through class conflict; Subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha, 1982) recovered the voice of peasants and marginalised groups; feminist historiography reframed periods around women's work and status. Naming the method earns more than dropping a name.
Event and process
An event is dated and bounded - the Revolt of 1857. A process is cumulative and structural - the growth of anti-colonial nationalism between 1885 and 1947. Good answers separate the immediate trigger, the underlying causes and the long-term consequences, and say which evidence supports each layer.
Worked example
Why do interpretations of 1857 differ? Colonial writers, relying on official despatches and army records, described a 'Sepoy Mutiny' confined to soldiers. V. D. Savarkar (1909), writing from a nationalist standpoint, called it the First War of Independence, widening the evidence to civilian unrest and dispossessed elites. Both use real documents; they differ in the scale of analysis and the standpoint of the writer. So answer in three moves: interpretation, evidence base, historian's perspective.
Traps that cost marks
Treating any old writing as primary; retelling the story without stating causes; giving one cause when the question says 'discuss'; crediting the Rajatarangini to a Mughal chronicler; mixing up the Cambridge School (Anil Seal, elite competition) with Subaltern studies.