extra notes on class 7 th history ch.1
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As you have seen meanings of words change over time. Term “Hindustan”, is known as “India,” the modern nation-state today. The term was first used in the 13th century by Minhaj-i-Siraj, a chronicler who wrote in Persian and contains the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna. The term was used in a political sense for lands that were a part of the dominions of the Delhi Sultan. Areas included in this term shifted with the extent of the Sultanate, but it never included South India. In early 16th century, Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent, same as how 14th-century poet Amir Khusrau used the word “Hind”. Even if the idea of a geographical and cultural entity like “India” did exist, the term “Hindustan” did not carry the political and national meanings associated with it today.
A simple term like “foreigner” is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval 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 might regard a forest-dweller as a “foreigner”, but two peasants living in the same village are not foreigners to each other, even if they have different religious or caste backgrounds.
Historians and their Sources
Historians use different types of sources to learn about the past based on their period of study and nature of the investigation. Coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records will provide information. The number and variety of textual records increased dramatically during this period, slowly displacing other types of available information. Paper gradually became cheaper and more widely available. It is used to write holy texts, chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and for registers of accounts and taxes. Manuscripts collected by wealthy people, rulers, monasteries and temples and placed in libraries and archives provide a lot of detailed information to historians but are also difficult to use. No printing press so scribes had to copy the manuscripts by hand and they made slight changes while doing so. These changes over the centuries grew thus making manuscripts of the same text different from each other. Hence, to find the manuscript by the original author became difficult and have to depend on copies by scribes. So, to comprehend the full information we have to read varied manuscripts of the same text to know what was originally written.
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