Meera, a college student in Kolkata, is preparing a project on what the rule of the English East India Company meant for rural India. She plans to begin with powerful landholders who paid a fixed yearly sum to the Company. Next she will study two communities: one of hunters and shifting cultivators who gathered forest produce, and another of settled peasants who came later and cleared the forests for farming. Along the way she wants to see how new laws changed the lives of ordinary people, and her guide has given her a reading list of sources to work through.
Besides the sources themselves, what else about these sources will Meera come to know from her reading?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → The problems historians face in interpreting them
Option (1) The methods officials used to collect them — Incorrect. How officials gathered the records is not the point raised. The focus is on what historians must do when they read them.
Option (2) The problems historians face in interpreting them — Correct. Official sources such as revenue records and surveys carry the views of those who made them, so the reader learns the problems historians face in interpreting them.
Option (3) The ways they were kept in the Company's archives — Incorrect. How the records were kept in archives is a separate matter from reading them.
Option (4) The languages in which they were first written — Incorrect. The language of the records is not the point raised. The concern is how far historians can rely on what they say.
NCERT (2026-27): “Colonialism and the THEME Countryside NINE Exploring Official Archiv … “You will also come to know about the sources that tell us about these histories, and the problems historians face in interpreting them. You will read about revenue records and surveys, journals and accounts left by surveyors Fig. 9.1” |