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ASSIGNMENT SOLUTIONS GUIDE (2014-2015)

M.H.I.-3
Historiography
Disclaimer/Special Note: These are just the sample of the Answers/Solutions to some of the Questions given in the
Assignments. These Sample Answers/Solutions are prepared by Private Teacher/Tutors/Auhtors for the help and Guidance
of the student to get an idea of how he/she can answer the Questions of the Assignments. We do not claim 100% Accuracy
of these sample Answers as these are based on the knowledge and cabability of Private Teacher/Tutor. Sample answers
may be seen as the Guide/Help Book for the reference to prepare the answers of the Question given in the assignment. As
these solutions and answers are prepared by the private teacher/tutor so the chances of error or mistake cannot be denied.
Any Omission or Error is highly regretted though every care has been taken while preparing these Sample Answers/
Solutions. Please consult your own Teacher/Tutor before you prepare a Particular Answer & for uptodate and exact
information, data and solution. Student should must read and refer the official study material provided by the university.
Section - A
Q. 1. What is generalisation? Discuss the role of generalisation in history-writing.
Ans. Generalization has a long history in cartography as an art of creating maps for different scale and purpose.
Cartographic generalization is the process of selecting and representing information of a map in a way that adapts to the
scale of the display medium of the map. In this way, every map has, to some extent, been generalized to match the criteria
of display. This includes small-scale maps, which cannot convey every detail of the real world. Cartographers must decide
and then adjust the content within their maps to create a suitable and useful map that conveys geospatial information
within their representation of the world.
A generalisation of a concept is an extension of the concept to less-specific criteria. It is a foundational element of
logic and human reasoning. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more
common characteristics shared by those elements. As such, they are the essential basis of all valid deductive inferences.
The process of verification is necessary to determine whether a generalization holds true for any given situation.
The concept of generalization has broad application in many related disciplines, sometimes having a specialized
context or meaning. Of any two related concepts, such as A and B, A is a generalization of B, and B is a special case of
A, if and only if every instance of concept B is also an instance of concept A; and there are instances of concept A which
are not instances of concept B.
For instance, animal is a generalization of bird because every bird is an animal, and there are animals which are not
birds (dogs, for instance).
Generalization has a long history in cartography as an art of creating maps for different scale and purpose. Cartographic generalization is the process of selecting and representing information of a map in a way that adapts to the scale
of the display medium of the map. In this way, every map has, to some extent, been generalized to match the criteria of
display. This includes small-scale maps, which cannot convey every detail of the real world. Cartographers must decide
and then adjust the content within their maps to create a suitable and useful map that conveys geospatial information
within their representation of the world. Generalization is meant to be context-specific. That is to say, correctly generalized maps are those that emphasize the most important map elements while still representing the world in the most faithful
and recognizable way. The level of detail and importance in what is remaining on the map must outweigh the insignificance of items that were generalized, as to preserve the distinguishing characteristics of what makes the map useful and
important.
Historical generalizations are often suspect: The Renaissance encouraged innovative thinking, The Qing state
stifled independent commercial activity, The open frontier created a distinctively American popular culture. The problem with statements like these is their sweep; among other things, they imply that the Renaissance, the Qing state, or
American culture were essentially uniform social realities, and they erase the forms of variation that certainly existed -and that often constitute the most interesting of historical discoveries.
So grand generalizations in history are problematic. But then we have to ask a different sort of question. Specifically
-- what kinds of generalizations are possible in history? If we cant answer this question constructively, then historical

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research loses much of its interest and purpose. If historical knowledge were limited to statements about specific actors in
concrete local circumstances, it would have roughly the interest of a police report. Rather, the historian needs to aggregate
his/her understanding of the available evidence into statements about larger agglomerations: villages, towns, and cities;
crowds, classes, and professions; assemblies, riots, and movements. Moreover, we would like to be able to make something larger of the historians findings -- something that sheds light on broader social realities and trends. And each of
these requires generalization: statements that extend beyond the particular instances that are presented by the historical
record.
Q. 2. Discuss the main historians and their works associated with the Greco-Roman historiography.
Ans. Roman historiography is indebted to the Greeks, who invented the form. The Romans had great models to base
their works upon, such as Herodotus (c. 484 - 425 BCE) and Thucydides (c. 460 - c. 395 BCE). Roman historiographical
forms are different from the Greek ones however, and voice very Roman concerns. Unlike the Greeks, Roman historiography did not start out with an oral historical tradition. The Roman style of history was based on the way that the Annals
of the Pontifex Maximus, or the Annales Maximi, were recorded. The Annales Maximi include a wide array of information, including religious documents, names of consuls, deaths of priests, and various disasters throughout history. Also
part of the Annales Maximi are the White Tablets, or the Tabulae Albatae, which consist of information on the origin of
the republic. Greek and Roman Historiography is a collection of important articles from the last thirty years which treat
the ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about and wrote their histories. Six of these articles have been
translated into English for the first time. Avoiding issues such as sources and reliability which were the concern of earlier
scholarship, the contributors focus much more on how the ancients themselves engaged with their past: the relationship
between myth and history; the role of memory and oral tradition as they shaped both Greek and Roman notions of the
past; the role of the historian in giving form and meaning to his history; and the different notions of historical truth and
falsehood. A specially written introduction places the essays in the larger context of earlier and more recent trends in the
study of Greek and Roman historiography. The writing of history in ancient Greece, an activity which occurred over a
period of one thousand years (500 BCE-500 CE), is a subject of great interest to modern scholars for a number of reasons.
First, the very term history derives from the Greek word histori (inquiry) which Herodotus uses to describe his
work, and the subject of historical inquiry decided upon by Herodotus and his successor Thucydides-description and
explanation of political and military events in the past-remained standard for many centuries. Though the fundamental
differences between the activity, methodology, and expectations of the ancient Greek historians and ourselves has been
increasingly highlighted in recent years, we are still in many ways the inheritors of their achievement. Secondly, the
writings of the Greek historians represent one of the basic sources of our knowledge of what happened in the ancient
world. As with any historical document, then, it is important for scholars to examine the nature of this evidence and the
circumstances of its production. Finally, Greek historians aimed both to relate the past and to produce works of literary
merit. While some have been reluctant to admit this fact, it is no longer a controversial claim, and scholars have largely
moved past arguments over whether Greek historians were writing history or fiction and begun to apply techniques of
literary analysis to their works. Of course, this recognition has raised questions about whether some notions central to
modern historical writing-truth, accuracy, proper use of sources-operated in the same way in ancient Greek historiography. As with any field of study, the shape of scholarship has been determined by the available evidence. We can examine
the texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon in their entirety; for other authors we have substantial amounts of
continuous narrative (Polybius, Dionysius, Arrian, and others). The last three decades have seen increasing work on the
hundreds of Greek historians whose works are known only in fragmentary form, through the quotations, paraphrases, and
references in later, extant authors; and more attention has been given to the methodological difficulties posed by the
nature of this evidence. The loss of so much historical writing contributes to the ongoing debates over the origins of
Greek historiography, its development through the centuries, its essential nature and methodology, and its relationship to
other forms of literary production.
There have been differences in the nature and quality as well as quantity of historical literature in the different ages
and among different peoples. The differences have reflected changes in social life and beliefs. The spirit of Greek and
Roman was different from that which inspired the Christian historians of the Middle Ages. In Greco-Roman historiography, certain factors played the most important role.
Three types of factors in pre-classical times played vital role that may be said to contain historical information. The
compositions were ballad and epics, annals, commemorating rules and the Hebrew scripture. A primitive societys knowledge of past was through tales and such tales became the tradition and turned into local ballads. Though such oral
tradition did not have authentic proofs. Later on, some of the ballads came to be organized into an epic. The ballad and the

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epic served a great deal with stimulating an interest in the past as narrative technique. Other kind of historical composition in pre-classical times was annals for the rules of great empires. The information recorded on the walls of palaces and
temples give us information of various activities of monarch.
Q. 5. Discuss the Indo-Persian historiography during the Sultanate period.
Ans. Indo-Persian culture refers to those Persian aspects that have been integrated into or absorbed into the culture
of South Asia, and in particular, into North India, modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Persian influence was first introduced to the South Asia by Muslim rulers, especially with the Delhi Sultanate from
the 13th century, and in the 16th to 19th century the Mughal Empire. There are, however, scattered traces of pre-Islamic
Persian influence in the South Asia.
Persian was the official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the
cultured language of poetry and literature. Many of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised
Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic languages as their mother tongues. The Mughals were also from Persianized
Central Asia, but spoke Chagatai Turkic as their first language at the beginning, before eventually adopting Persian.
Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and
Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and
social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The influence of these languages on Indian apabhramshas led to
avernacular that is the ancestor of todays Urdu, Hindi, and Hindustani.
The wealth of the subcontinent, and the proliferation of power centres there, led to the production of a vast corpus of
Indo-Persian administrative, historical, religious, and poetical literature that can only be hinted at in this article. Still, it is
worth noting that manuscripts written in Persian can be found throughout India in a variety of public and private institutions, including mosques and other religious institutions and private libraries. As an example of the wealth of Persian
texts, the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Madras, well south of the centres of Indo-Muslim power, currently
possesses 1,390 Persian manuscripts. Persian holdings are also especially rich in the libraries of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal.
An important historian of the early Delhi Sultanate is Juzj a ni, otherwise known as Menh j al-Ser j, whose work
tabaq t-e n seri is, unfortunately, confused in its organization and opaque in its style. Juzj ni, a refugee from the
Mongols who fled from Ghur in 1227, later became a q
i of the Delhi Sultans. Understandably anti-Mongol, Juzj ni
wrote extensively of the Delhi rulers in the first half of the thirteenth century. While his history was widely used by later
Indo-Persian authors, including Es mi (q.v.), the Tabaq t-e n seri, like many other works of Sultanate-era historians
described by Peter Hardy (see bibliography), may be valuable more for the attitudes it expresses than for the facts or
interpretations it gives.
The impossibility of narrowly defining Indo-Persian historiography simply as prose narrative is reflected by the fact
that two of the three most important writers who produced works with historical content under the Delhi sultans were
poets. These three writers were: Ziak-al-Din Barani, Amir osrow Dehlavi, and AAbd-al-Malek Es mi (qq.v.). All three
were direct heirs of Perso-Islamic religious, historical, and literary traditions; even more particularly, they were legatees
of the cultural and political traditions of the Ghaznavid empire. Barani is the only one of the three whom modern scholars
would identify as an historian. A member of the Delhi inner court circles, he wrote two important works, the T rik-e
firuz hi (1357) and the undated Fat w
-ye jah nd ri. Barani, who characterized history as the twin brother of
Hadith (q.v.) scholarship, explicitly describes the T rik-e firuz hi as an annalistic history, which served a greater moral
purpose as a work of political ethics, a particularized, narrative form of a mirror for princes.
Section-B
Q. 6. Write a note on the post-War Marxist historiography in the West.
Ans. Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief
tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical
outcomes.
Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and
themethodology of history from below. The chief problematic aspect of Marxist historiography has been an argument on
the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and
objectivefactors in creating outcomes.
Marxist history is generally deterministic, in that it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as
classlesshuman society. Marxist historiography, that is, the writing of Marxist history in line with the given historiographical principles, is generally seen as a tool. Its aim is to bring those oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to

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arm them with tactics and strategies from history: it is both a historical and a liberatory project.
These historians, who were generally Progressives in politics, emphasized the importance of class conflict and the
power of economic interests in their studies, revealing the influence of Karl Marx (1818-83). Marx and Friedrich Engels
(1820-95) worked together in almost total isolation, and when Marx died it would have been difficult for a casual observer not to conclude that his ideas would disappear with him. By 1900, however, Marxism constituted the greatest
challenge to the idealist tradition.
Despite the influence of philosophy, sociology, and economics, Marxs thought was profoundly historical. Hegel had
taught him that history was constant change, produced by oppositions, reconciliations, and more oppositions. Acknowledging (in a way) this debt, Marx remarked that he found Hegel standing on his head and turned him right side up again.
By this he meant that Hegel had mistaken the real motor of history: it was not the conflict of ideas but the conflict of social
classes. Marx admitted, however, that this was not his own discovery; the bourgeois historians, such as Vico, had
anticipated him. What Marx brought to the idea of class struggle was a conception of how it had developed and how it
must eventually turn out.
Marxs understanding of class struggle was influenced by the work of the English economist David Ricardo (17721823), who had developed a model of how perfect markets work in a capitalist mode of production. Ricardo had made
the conflicting interests of landlords, employers, and workers the centre of his picture of the economy. He argued that,
because of Malthusian population dynamics, the wages of workers would always be held at or near subsistence levels.
Marx extended the analysis by taking into account increases in population and in the productive powers of the economy.
He correctly predicted-at a time when there were very few companies that employed more than 50 workers-that the size
of capitalist enterprises would inexorably increase until giant corporations dominated the economy. Equally correctly, he
predicted that the proportion of the labour force engaged in agriculture (over half in parts of Europe) and the number of
small business owners would sharply decline, so that proletarians-those who had nothing to sell but their labour-would
become the overwhelming majority of the population. Marx was less certain about the political consequences of these
changes; by the end of his life he thought that capitalism might be brought to an end without violent revolution in some
countries (the United States among them), and he saw that not all societies would pass through exactly the same sequence
of changes. But he never lost his confidence that the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which
enormous quantities of wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, would inevitably be replaced by socialism.
Q. 10. Write short notes in about 250 words each on any two of the following:
(a) Main concepts of postmodernism
Ans. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement
from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of
which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.
The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled modernism. This
movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms
can be found in the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music,
literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should
mean. In the period of high modernism, from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped
radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust,
Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism. Modernism is the 800-pound
gorilla in the room for virtually every form of Western discourse. Finding its roots in the 16th Century Enlightenment,
modernism is the belief in the essential capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of rational thought.
This belief, actualized in various forms, has been the dominant influence on Western literature, art, politics, and science
for nearly 400 years. A conflicting epistemological position has arisen in latter half of the 20th Century: Postmodernism
is characterized by the critical questioning, and often outright rejection, of ethnocentric rationalism championed by
Modernism. The term, postmodern, can be misleading, as the post- prefix implies that it is a perspective, or era, which
follows or replaces modernism. One has ended and another begins. However, this is not an accurate assessment of the
perspective. Postmodernism can only be conceived as a relationship to the opposing possibility, in a dialectical relationship with Modernism.
(c) Marxist history-writing on Indian nationalism
Ans. Interestingly, since the 1960s Indian historiography (as also the Indian Historical Congress) came to be dominated by writers using Marxist methodologies, with D.D. Kosambis Introduction to the Study of Indian History Showing
the way. This group of scholars found several propositions of the nationalist historians problematic. The shift in focus to

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the glories of ancient India was seen as a right-wing Hindu revivalist stance. With their material base, Marxist methodologies can at best be used to deconstruct religious positions, and so any glorification of religious culture could not be
acceptable to Marxist historians. The dialectics of class struggle also could not privilege the class cooperation posited by
the nationalists as an essential ingredient of the nationalist movement. Thus R S Sharmas work on the shudras helped to
expose the seamy exploitative undersides of ancient Indian civilization and the idea of the Gupta Golden Age was also
undermined. Marxism though of western origin, has had influential presence both in politics and academia of India. In
independent India, communist leaders were not as successful in influncing people as the communist and leftist academics. The reason was a combination of factors. First, the very first Prime Minister of the new Indian republic was an
admirer of socialism and soviet model of planning for economic development. Secondly, Indo-Soviet close strategic
relationship since the mid-fifties of the last century gave Marxist and fellow travelers in the academia undue influence
and clout. The policy was to appoint progressives in high positions of policy making academic institutions and scorn
reactionaries howsoever reputed scholars they might be. This Marxist influence and encounter divided the academic
world and their continued domination and partisanship through the long regime of the Congress Party destroyed the
environment for true academic excellence in the humanities and academics.
The Marxist writers, especially the historians, endeavoured to fit available facts, personae, characters, events and
descriptions into a preconceived frame. On this basis, it was claimed that the analysis or propositions presented by them
is scientific and basically different from others. Yet we did not get any glimpse of the life of the common people in the
writings of any Marxist historian. Instead it is the traditional Marxist jargons superimposed over the known facts of
history. Leave alone the ancient or mediaeval history, even a contemporary period or subject treated by the Marxist
historians does not include the picture of peoples life even in a town or a village, nothing to say of the whole country.
Besides, they also systematically ran down and denigrated those scholars who did not agree to their interpretations of
history or events in the name of liberalism, secularism, being progressive etc.

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