Introduction: Tracing Changes Through a Thousand Years

This is Chapter 1 of Our Pasts – II, the Class 7 history book. Last year’s book (Class 6) ended with the Guptas and Harshavardhana; this one picks up from roughly 700 and runs to about 1750, when European trading companies were becoming powerful. The rest of the book fills in the outline: kings and kingdoms such as the Cholas (Chapter 2), the Delhi Sultans (Chapter 3), the Mughals (Chapter 4), tribes and nomads (Chapter 5), bhakti and Sufi paths (Chapter 6), regional cultures (Chapter 7) and the eighteenth-century states (Chapter 8). This chapter gives you the tools: reading a source in its context, being careful with words, handling manuscripts, and thinking about how the past is divided into periods.

• Links within the series: hess201 (Class 8, ‘How, When and Where’) asks the same question about periods for the colonial age and explains James Mill’s ‘Hindu–Muslim–British’ scheme in detail; iest105 (Class 9, State and Society up to 1000 CE) covers the centuries just before and at the start of this book.
• Senior pages to pair with: lehs201 (Class 12, travellers such as al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta and Bernier — how outsiders’ accounts are read), lehs202 (bhakti and Sufi traditions, c. 8th–18th century), lehs203 (Vijayanagara), lehs204 (peasants, zamindars and the Mughal state, with the Ain-i Akbari), kefa108 (Indo-Islamic architecture) and lesy103 (caste and jati as institutions). This page gives the Class 7 foundation; the details live there.
• UPSC: medieval Indian history and culture are tested in Prelims and GS1. This introduction is mostly about method, but its terms do appear: the nastaliq script (1996), the irrigation wheel called araghatta (2016, 2025), Amir Khusrau (1981) and the meaning of bhakti (1984); Mains asked how Persian literary sources reflect the spirit of the age (2020).

• Context: al-Idrisi’s map (1154) puts south India at the top and Sri Lanka above it; de l’Isle’s map (1720s) is detailed on the coasts — each reflects its own knowledge and science of map-making.
• Words change: ‘Hindustan’ — the Delhi Sultan’s lands for Minhaj-i-Siraj (13th c.), the subcontinent’s land and culture for Babur (16th c.); a medieval ‘foreigner’ (pardesi, ajnabi) was any stranger to a village.
• Sources: coins, inscriptions, architecture continue; written records multiply as paper grows cheaper; hand-copied manuscripts change with each copy — Barani (1356 and two years later); nastaliq easy, shikaste hard.
• New things and new groups: Persian wheel, spinning wheel, firearms; potatoes, corn, chillies, tea, coffee; Rajputs (8th–14th c.), Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Ahoms, Kayasthas; forests cleared; jatis with jati panchayats.
• Region and empire: Balban’s prashasti claims (1266–87); Muhammad Tughluq’s 24 provinces (Map 3); Amir Khusrau’s regional languages (1318); pan-regional empires — Cholas, Khaljis, Tughluqs, Mughals.
• Religion and periods: new deities, royal temples, Brahmanas, bhakti; Islam — Quran, ulama, Shia and Sunni, Hanafi and Shafi’i; the British ‘Hindu–Muslim–British’ scheme and the label ‘medieval’ questioned.

The chapter opens with two maps of the same area. Map 1 was made in 1154 CE by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi; the part shown is a detail of the subcontinent from his larger map of the world. It looks strange to us: south India is where we would expect north India, and Sri Lanka is the island at the top. Place-names are in Arabic, with some familiar ones such as Kanauj in Uttar Pradesh, written ‘Qanauj’. Map 2 was made in the 1720s by a French cartographer, Guillaume de l’Isle, nearly 600 years later. By then information about the subcontinent had changed a great deal. It looks familiar, and the coasts are surprisingly detailed — it was used by European sailors and merchants on their voyages.

Why the difference? Partly because knowledge had changed, and partly because the science of cartography was different in the two periods. NCERT draws the lesson that runs through the whole book: when historians read documents, maps and texts from the past, they have to be sensitive to the different historical backgrounds — the contexts — in which the information was produced.

If the context of information changes, so do language and meaning. Historical records survive in many languages that have changed over time: medieval Persian is different from modern Persian, not just in grammar and vocabulary but in what words mean. NCERT’s example is ‘Hindustan’. Today we take it to mean ‘India’, the modern nation-state. When Minhaj-i-Siraj, a thirteenth-century chronicler who wrote in Persian, used it, he meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna: a political term for the lands of the Delhi Sultan. Its area shifted with the extent of the Sultanate, but it never included south India. By contrast, in the early sixteenth century Babur used ‘Hindustan’ for the geography, the fauna and the culture of the people of the whole subcontinent — rather like the fourteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau’s use of ‘Hind’. The idea of India as a geographical and cultural entity did exist, NCERT says, but ‘Hindustan’ did not carry the political and national meanings we give it today.

The same care applies to a simple word like ‘foreigner’. Today it means someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval period a ‘foreigner’ was any stranger who appeared in a village — someone not part of that society or culture. In Hindi such a person might be called pardesi, in Persian ajnabi. So a city-dweller might have regarded a forest-dweller as a ‘foreigner’, but two peasants of the same village were not foreigners to each other, even if their religion or caste differed.

Historians choose sources according to the period and the question. For 700–1750 there is continuity: they still rely on coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records. There is also discontinuity: the number and variety of textual records increased dramatically and slowly displaced other kinds of information. Through the period paper became cheaper and more widely available. People used it for holy texts, chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and registers of accounts and taxes. Manuscripts were collected by the wealthy, rulers, monasteries and temples, and kept in libraries and archives. They give historians a great deal of detail — but they are difficult to use.

There was no printing press, so scribes copied manuscripts by hand, introducing small changes — a word here, a sentence there. Over centuries these differences grew until manuscripts of ‘the same’ text became substantially different. Since we rarely find the author’s original, historians depend on later copies and must compare different manuscript versions to guess what the author first wrote. Authors also revised their own works: the fourteenth-century chronicler Ziyauddin Barani wrote his chronicle first in 1356 and another version two years later. The two differ, but historians did not know of the first version until the 1960s — it lay unnoticed in large library collections.

The thousand years between 700 and 1750 are hard to study because of the sheer scale and variety of what happened. New technologies appeared at different moments: the Persian wheel in irrigation, the spinning wheel in weaving, and firearms in combat. New foods and beverages arrived: potatoes, corn, chillies, tea and coffee. These innovations came with people, who brought other ideas with them, so this was a time of economic, political, social and cultural change (more in Chapter 5).

This was also a period of great mobility. Groups travelled long distances in search of opportunity; the subcontinent held immense wealth and the chance to carve out a fortune. One group that became important were the Rajputs, a name derived from ‘Rajaputra’, the son of a ruler. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries the term came to be applied more generally to a group of warriors who claimed Kshatriya caste status — not just rulers and chieftains, but also soldiers and commanders who served in the armies of different monarchs all over the subcontinent. Their poets and bards attributed to them a chivalric code: extreme valour and a great sense of loyalty. Other groups — the Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Ahoms and Kayasthas (a caste of scribes and secretaries) — also used the opportunities of the age to become politically important.

Throughout the period forests were gradually cleared and agriculture extended — faster and more completely in some areas than others. Changes in their habitat forced many forest-dwellers to migrate; others began tilling the land and became peasants. These new peasant groups were gradually influenced by regional markets, chieftains, priests, monasteries and temples. They became part of large, complex societies and had to pay taxes and offer goods and services to local lords. As a result, significant economic and social differences appeared among peasants: some held more productive land, some also kept cattle, some combined artisanal work with farming in the lean season.

As society became more differentiated, people were grouped into jatis or sub-castes and ranked by their backgrounds and occupations. Ranks were not fixed permanently: they varied with the power, influence and resources of a jati’s members, and the status of the same jati could differ from area to area. Jatis framed their own rules to manage their members’ conduct, enforced by an assembly of elders — in some areas called the jati panchayat. But jatis also had to follow the rules of their villages; several villages were governed by a chieftain; and together these were only one small unit of a state.

Large states such as those of the Cholas (Chapter 2), the Tughluqs (Chapter 3) and the Mughals (Chapter 4) took in many regions. A Sanskrit prashasti praising the Delhi Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban (1266–1287) claimed that he ruled a vast empire from Bengal (Gauda) in the east to Ghazni (Gajjana) in Afghanistan in the west, including all of south India (Dravida), and that the people of Gauda, Andhra, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat fled before his armies. Historians regard these as exaggerated claims — and at the same time try to understand why rulers kept claiming control over different parts of the subcontinent.

By 700 many regions already had distinct geographical dimensions and their own language and cultural characteristics (Chapter 7), and were associated with specific ruling dynasties; there was considerable conflict between these states. Occasionally dynasties such as the Cholas, Khaljis, Tughluqs and Mughals built an empire that was pan-regional — spanning diverse regions — though not all were equally stable or successful. When the Mughal Empire declined in the eighteenth century, regional states re-emerged (Chapter 8). But years of imperial rule had changed the regions: they were left with legacies of the big and small states that had ruled them, seen in many distinct and shared traditions in governance, management of the economy, elite cultures and language. Through these thousand years the regions did not grow in isolation; they felt pan-regional forces of integration without ever quite losing their distinctiveness.

These thousand years saw major developments in religious traditions. Belief in the divine was sometimes deeply personal but more usually collective, and collective belief — religion — was often closely tied to the social and economic organisation of local communities; as their social worlds changed, so did their beliefs. Important changes occurred in what we call Hinduism today: the worship of new deities, the construction of temples by royalty, and the growing importance of Brahmanas, the priests, as dominant groups in society. Their knowledge of Sanskrit texts earned them respect, and their position was consolidated by the support of their patrons — new rulers searching for prestige. One of the major developments was bhakti: the idea of a loving, personal deity whom devotees could reach without the aid of priests or elaborate rituals (Chapter 6; lehs202).

New religions also appeared. Merchants and migrants first brought the teachings of the holy Quran to India in the seventh century. Muslims regard the Quran as their holy book and accept the sovereignty of the one God, Allah, whose love, mercy and bounty embrace all who believe in Him, without regard to social background. Many rulers were patrons of Islam and of the ulama — learned theologians and jurists. Like Hinduism, Islam was interpreted in a variety of ways. The Shia Muslims believed that the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, was the legitimate leader of the Muslim community; the Sunni Muslims accepted the authority of the early leaders (Khalifas) of the community and of the succeeding Khalifas. There were other important differences between the schools of law — mainly Hanafi and Shafi’i in India — and in theology and mystic traditions.

Historians do not see time only as hours, days or years on a clock or calendar. Time also reflects changes in social and economic organisation, and the persistence and transformation of ideas and beliefs. Dividing the past into large segments — periods — with shared characteristics makes it easier to study. In the middle of the nineteenth century, NCERT says, British historians divided Indian history into three periods: ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘British’. The division assumed that the religion of rulers was the only important historical change and that there were no other significant developments in the economy, society or culture; it also ignored the subcontinent’s rich diversity. Few historians follow it today; most look to economic and social factors to characterise different moments of the past.

Last year’s history covered hunter-gatherers, early farmers, towns and villages, and early empires and kingdoms. This year’s is often called ‘medieval’: the spread of peasant societies, the rise of regional and imperial states — sometimes at the cost of pastoral and forest people — the development of Hinduism and Islam as major religions, and the arrival of European trading companies. But the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries were very different from the eighth or the eleventh, so treating the whole period as one unit has problems. And ‘medieval’ is often contrasted with ‘modern’, which carries a sense of material progress and intellectual advancement — as if the medieval period had no change at all. It did: societies were transformed often, and several regions grew prosperous enough to attract the European trading companies.

The chapter’s question boxes and Activities, in page order.

‘Let’s recall’ (1–5), ‘Let’s understand’ (6–8), ‘Let’s discuss’ (9–10) and ‘Let’s do’ (11–12), pages 14–15.

Numbers

One-liners

• Historians must read every source in its context.
• Al-Idrisi’s map puts south India at the top; de l’Isle’s map is detailed on the coasts.
• ‘Hindustan’: the Sultan’s lands (Minhaj), the subcontinent (Babur), the nation-state (today).
• A medieval ‘foreigner’ was any stranger to a village (pardesi, ajnabi).
• Sources continue; written records multiply as paper grows cheaper.
• Hand-copied manuscripts change with each copy; historians compare versions.
• Nastaliq is cursive and easy; shikaste is dense and difficult.
• Persian wheel, spinning wheel and firearms; potatoes, corn, chillies, tea, coffee.
• Rajputs, Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Ahoms and Kayasthas rose to importance.
• Jatis had their own rules and panchayats, but also followed village rules.
• Balban’s prashasti claims are read as exaggerated.
• Pan-regional empires: Cholas, Khaljis, Tughluqs, Mughals.
• Bhakti: a loving, personal deity reached without priests or rituals.
• Shia: Ali; Sunni: the Khalifas; Hanafi and Shafi’i: schools of law.
• Dividing history by rulers’ religion ignores economy, society and culture.

Traps to avoid

• Sri Lanka at the top of al-Idrisi’s map reflects map-making conventions (south up), not ignorance.
• For Minhaj-i-Siraj, ‘Hindustan’ never included south India.
• A medieval ‘foreigner’ was a stranger to the community — not someone of another religion or caste.
• Inscriptions did not stop after 700: Exercise 2(a) is false.
• Nastaliq = easy, cursive; shikaste = dense, difficult — not the other way round.
• Barani is the fourteenth-century chronicler; Minhaj-i-Siraj is thirteenth-century.
• Kayasthas were scribes and secretaries, not a warrior group.
• A jati’s rank was not fixed; it varied with power and from area to area.
• Map 3’s source is Egyptian (Umari’s Masalik al-Absar), not an Indian chronicle.
• Hanafi and Shafi’i are schools of law, not the Shia–Sunni split.
• NCERT says ‘mid-nineteenth century’ for the British three-period scheme; Mill’s History is 1817.
• Babur wrote his memoirs in Turki, not Persian (Beyond NCERT).

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Terms from this chapter that UPSC has asked: nastaliq — a Persian script used in medieval India (1996); araghatta — a waterwheel for irrigation (2016) with earthen pots tied to its spokes (2025), the device behind the chapter’s ‘Persian wheel’; bhakti — devotion to God (1984); Amir Khusrau — poet, not ‘a great historian’ (1981).
• Answer-key note: the 1981 Khusrau key, ‘(c) he was a great historian’ is the statement that is ‘not true’, is disputed — Khusrau also wrote verse and prose histories of Alauddin Khalji’s and the Tughluqs’ campaigns, and option (d) ‘Hindi and Urdu’ uses ‘Urdu’ for a language Khusrau called Hindawi. Keep the key (he is remembered as a poet), but do not write that he wrote no history.
• Learn the names cleanly: al-Idrisi (1154), Minhaj-i-Siraj (13th c., Tabaqat-i Nasiri), Amir Khusrau (1318 languages), Barani (14th c., two versions), Umari (Egyptian, Map 3), Babur (Turki memoirs). Questions on Balban’s titles, Barani’s political ideas or the introduction of chillies and tobacco are taught in the chapters on the Sultanate, the Mughals and trade, not here.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Persian literary sources (GS1 2020, ‘reflect the spirit of the age’): use this chapter’s method — chronicles (Minhaj, Barani), memoirs (Babur’s, written in Turki and translated into Persian), poetry (Amir Khusrau) — and its cautions: words like ‘Hindustan’ meant different things; manuscripts survive in differing copies; court writers praised patrons. A balanced answer says they reflect the court’s spirit more than the peasant’s, and must be read with inscriptions, coins and Sanskrit and regional texts.
• Method for any medieval answer: name the source and its context, attribute claims (the prashasti’s ‘conquests’), and avoid labelling periods by the religion of rulers. ‘Region and empire’ (integration without loss of distinctiveness) is a ready frame for questions on regional cultures, languages and eighteenth-century states; pair with lehs201 (travellers), lehs202 (bhakti and Sufi) and lehs204 (agrarian society).

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.