Introduction
Take the term "Hindustan", for example. Today we understand it as "India", the modern . When the term was used in the thirteenth century by meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna. He used the term in a political sense for lands that were a part of the the term never included south India. By contrast, in the early sixteenth century, Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent. As we will see later in the chapter, this was somewhat similar to the way the fourteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau used the word "Hind". While the idea of a geographical and cultural entity like "India" did exist, the term "Hindustan" did not carry the political and national meanings which we associate with it today. Historians today have to be careful about the terms they use because they meant different things in the past. Take, for example, a simple term like "foreigner". It is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval period, a "foreigner" was any stranger who appeared say in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture. (In Hindi the term might be used to describe such a person and in Persian.) A city-dweller, therefore, might have regarded a forest-dweller as a "foreigner", but two peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though they may have had different religious or caste backgrounds.
Historians and their Sources
Historians use different types of sources to learn about the past depending upon the period of their study example, you read about rulers of the Gupta dynasty and Harshavardhana. In this book we will read about the following thousand years, from roughly 700 to 1750. You will notice some continuity in the sources used by historians for the study of this period. They still rely on coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records for information. But there is also considerable discontinuity. The number and variety of textual records increased dramatically during this period. They slowly displaced other types of available information. Through this period, paper gradually became cheaper and more widely available. People used it to write holy texts,chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and for registers of accounts and taxes. Manuscripts were collected by wealthy people, rulers, monasteries and temples. They were placed in libraries and archives. These manuscripts and documents provide a lot of detailed information to. There was no printing press in those days so scribes copied manuscripts by hand. Manuscript copying is somewhat similar. As scribes copied manuscripts, they also introduced small changes - a word here, a sentence there. These small differences grew over centuries of copying until manuscripts of the same text became substantially different from one another. This is a serious problem because we rarely find the original manuscript of the author today. We are totally dependent upon the copies made by later scribes. As a result, historians have to read different manuscript versions of the same text. On occasion authors revised their chronicles at different times. The fourteenth-century chronicler Ziyauddin Bharani wrote his first chronicle in 1356 and another version two years later. The two differ from each other but historians did not know about the existence of the first version until the 1960s. It remained lost in large library collections.
New Social and Political Groups
The study of the thousand years between 700 and 1750 is a huge challenge to historians largely because of the
scale and variety of developments that occurred over the period. At different moments in this period, new technologies made their appearance - like the Persian wheel in irrigation, the spinning wheel in weaving, and firearms in combat. New foods and beverages arrived in the subcontinent - potatoes, corn, chillies, tea and coffee. Remember that all these innovations - new technologies and crops - came along with people, who brought other ideas with them as well. As a result, this was a period of economic, political, social and cultural changes. This was also a period of great mobility. Groups of people travelled long distances in search of
