Question

Answer
the
following questions
Give
ve one salient feature for
each period of Indian history​

Answer 1

Explanation:

1. Ancient Period :- Starts with oldest civilization and start of human evolution.
2. Medivial Period :- Very close to foreigners and attack of foreigners to indus.
3. Modern Period :- End of Mughal period and start of era of Most powerful nation of all time the british.

Answer 2

This is a significant conference precisely because it looks at contestations and it looks at the interplay between nationalism and the nation state and national histories and contestations. As I said, in the question that I asked in the earlier session, is it possible for the organ of a nation state, in this case, for instance, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, funded by the Indian tax payers money, and responsible to the Ministry of Human Resource and Development to actually come up with texts that subvert nationalism itself?

   I place this question before you because I think that this is an important question. And I will deliberately not answer it in seven minutes, I cannot. I will use my so called ‘workshop time’ to focus on the answer in some detail. I’ll describe to you the kind of books we in the NCERT, and I say ‘we’ because I worked for the NCERT from 2005 to 2012—for seven years. So, I’ll describe to you the kind of books we did in history in that period. These books were done between 2005 and 2008. First the context of why new books got to be written after 2005. Somebody said, when governments change, people write new books. Now, that may be so at one level, but in fact the books after 2005 were written not only because the government changed. The government did change, but there were other reasons too.

   So before this we had two kinds of history textbooks that the NCERT had done. One was way back in the 1970s and those are the books that have been mentioned in the previous discussion in several ways. Books done by what I will call ‘Nationalist Marxists’. I will not define the category right now nor defend it, I will place it before you as provocation. They were very good books. Our teachers and we owe a great deal to them. I think they were excellent books for their time, but they hadn’t been changed for a good thirty years, right? When the BJP came to power in 2002 for two years, they did their own books from 2002 to 2004. We needn’t spend too much time on those. They were communal, short-sighted, done very poorly, and badly executed.

   So, the real contrast or the comparison, if you like, is between the books that were done by professors Arjun Dev, Bipin Chandra, Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra in the 1970s and the NCERT textbooks done after 2005.

   Now, in 2005, why did we change those books? Number one, new research had happened that hadn’t found it’s way into the textbooks. because textbooks done in the 70’s were continuing upto about 2002. Number two, while the old textbooks were very comprehensive and very well done, in a scholastic sense, the very comprehensiveness of the books meant that they could have a lot of detail. And one questions, from a pedagogic point of view—as the chair said, ‘Pedagogy is very important’—what should be the extent of detail in a textbook? You might remember that a man called Yashpal in the early 90’s wrote a little tract called ‘Learning Without Burden’ in which he quoted from those history textbooks of the 70’s and said, ‘all of this detail is burden, isn’t it?’.

   But the second reason, therefore really was—could we produce history textbooks that have less detail—that may not talk of all of Indian history, every little bit that happened, even though the Parliament says no, no, you must teach everybody all of Indian history. Can we have selected themes? Can we reduce the detail? Can we reduce the burden on the children? The older books gave you on a platter what Indian history is. They didn’t allow the child to construct Indian history. They didn’t tell the child from where it was constructed. How do I know that what was demanded in 1940 by the Muslim League was indeed Pakistan? Does the child have access to the so-called Pakistan Resolution of 1940?

   The books didn’t have constructivist pedagogy. They didn’t allow the child to construct little nuggets of history. We all know children from class 6 to class 12 cannot write full-fledged histories, but surely you can give them the text of a resolution. You can give them some excerpt from a newspaper, you could give them the picture of an archeological find. You could try and get them to deconstruct these things and then construct a little nugget of history. That was the third reason why we changed these books.

  Thank you