use of archives in social research

7/27/2019 Use of Archives in Social Research

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Published in a volume on social research method ed. N Jayaram of TISS

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USE OF ARCHIVES IN SOCIAL RESEARCH

by

M Rajivlochan**

** Rajivlochan teaches at the Department of History of Panjab University, Chandigarh

A resource, not a method

Our personal locationsone of us being a government officer and the other a teacher activist and an

active teacherparticipating in administration and management of higher education brought us

face to face with issues that routinely begged investigations into the past simply because a fair and

healthy bureaucratic administration, whether in the university or in the government, frequently

required that decisions be based on past precedence and past precedence was frequently sought

out by sifting through documentary evidence from times gone by. In that kind of a situation one

quickly became sensitive to the proposition which practising historians have been making for some

time now about institutional memories being very selective, malleable and partial towards those in

positions of power (Guha, 1983) (Foucault, 1969). Anything different from the already existing

power structures required detailed investigations into past records and a commitment to finding the

truth. Often the results were surprisingly divergent from what was currently believed to be normal

and commonsensical. Investigations into the past, especially looking at the written records, without

necessarily privileging them, seemed to provide an added perspective into the many contesting

truths from contemporary times. This was using the practise of history for a more mundane,

everyday purpose: to cross check the occurrence in the past of observations regarding contemporary

phenomenon; to use the skills of a historian to look into documents from the past for illuminating

questions of a more contemporary provenance. It goes without saying that we were already in

favour of cross checking positive observations, beliefs and presumptions of a non-documentary type

from contemporary times, against data that had been kept in the form of written records and

preserved over time. Minimally such an investigation allowed for a view of things as they might have


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of some design. In the end, the putting together of the jigsaw is not merely a matter of finding the

extant pieces but also of imagining the contours of the picture that has to be put together. A certain

imaginative familiarity with the picture that has to be reconstructed helps, but one also has to be

careful to find corroborative positive evidence that might suggest the validity of the imagination.

Often that positive evidence is missing. Historians end up filling the gaps entirely on the basis of

what they imagine might have been corresponding social responses in the past.i

In the specific case of the widely reported and studied subject of farmers suicide, we found that

subjecting information from contemporary times to an archival investigation brought completely

new insights which suggested a reconstruction of causality much different from what had come to

be popularly accepted.

Essentially any subject which is reported on contains a great deal of information and opinion, much

like the static in a radio transmission. A subject that draws a lot of emotional responses from

observers also tends to have much more static, often in the form of propaganda to support a

particular line of reasoning. We continued to hold that there was a difference between propaganda

and fact and that it was possible to discern between the two. The static often obscures the message

being transmitted and unless some way can be found to block the static, it is all too likely that the

resulting inferences might be inconsequential if not inaccurate. The past is a tool which could be

used to block the static as it were by identifying continuities and discontinuities, and make the

message clearer.

In this particular case, we were investigating farmers distress in the Vidharba region of

Maharashtra. Most newspaper reports, as also many academic studies, suggested that the spate of

suicides in farmer households had recent origins and had much to do with rising indebtedness in

farmer households and the indifference of a callous government to the plight of the farmer. Using


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this as our take off point, we went into the field and conducted interviews with nearly 40% of the

affected households in the area which was then considered the epicentre of farmers suicides, so to

speak. The interviews confirmed the presence of indebtedness but what was puzzling was the fact

that many of the debts reported were fairly old in nature, some debts being as old as fifteen years.

Of all the cases investigated, only in two cases, had any punitive action been initiated by the banks

concerned. Further most of the households did report some catastrophic expenditure or the other

but this expenditure had a variety of different reasons, ranging from chronic illness, marriages, and

childrens education to crop failure or excessive expenditure on farm inputs. Interestingly, we found

what might have been an oversight in many of the contemporary reports: a large portion of the

debts were not so much to institutions but to relatives and bigger farmers. This detail had been left

uncommented by various contemporary observers.

The repositories of first information on suicides in India were the records of the local police station,

the police thana. We turned to these records that had been ignored almost entirely till now. Here

we found that the percentage of suicides of farmers and farm labourers over the years did report a

slight increase and this increase was visible from the early 1990s onwards. The thana records also

told us that actually housewives were committing suicides in higher numbers (about 30%) as

compared to farmers. We unpacked the matter a little further and then we found that the farmer in

Vidharba was chronically indebted. There was nothing to indicate an increase in the extent of

indebtedness after the year 2000, when the phenomenon was supposed to have registered a sharp

increase. Most interestingly we found that once the phenomenon of farmer suicides in the cotton

belt gained public attention, farm suicides as a per cent of the whole shot from zero to 90% in

sugarcane rich districts like Ahmednagar which were geographically very far from Vidharba.

Evidently the reportage of the matter in the cotton areas was influencing the reporting of suicides in

other districts too. An entirely new data set seemed to be under creation. But this fact was visible


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only when compared to old data sets, testing details across time, looking for continuities and

changes.

So why then should the farmer who had historically been in debt, give up hope and resort to suicide

only now, at the current fin-de sicle? The final clues came from the discovery that while the

suicides were accruing across the spectrum, whether it was the large famer, small or middle farmer,

much of the farm population was new to the profession of agriculture andor to the technology

intensive methods of agriculture now popular. Our investigation concluded that farmers distress

had far more to do with the simultaneous collapse of social support structures and of the

governments withdrawal from all agrarian support services, leaving the farmer at the mercy of

various middlemen and the market. Deprived of social and institutional support, this was the

farmers response to the increased social pressures created by an expanding economy and the

shrinking role of agriculture in the economy. All this, however, had been almost entirely missed out

by various social scientists who had ventured forth before us to explain the phenomenon of farmers

suicide. The simple fact that occurred to us was this: it would do well to social scientists involved in

investigating contemporary times to be able to use archives to cross check and bolster up their

conclusions.

The use of archives for social research

The use of archives in social research is not a method of research; it is merely the use of yet

another resource for getting an understanding. Historians specialize in using archives. They use them

to inspect social, institutional and personal memories. Those memories then are often re-crafted to

form an understanding of something that is bothering contemporary society. Sometimes an inquiry


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into the archives is also to find an insight into the society in days gone by. Whatever may be the

motive for accessing the archives, using archives is about accessing memories-- of places, people,

things, institutions, social formations etc. -- from a time gone by. Memories, especially those held

contemporaneously have a funny way of seeming to have considerable permanence even when they

are completely transmutable over time. For one who is involved in social research therefore,

examining the archives could also be a device to bench mark the subject under study through time.

Often benchmarking through time has provided interesting insights. One important example from

India is that study by A M Shah wherein he demonstrated the historicity of the joint family in India

(Shah, 1968). Shah informed a nation that was lamenting the demise of the joint family system that

this was not the dominant mode for family structure even in the past. Many years later, in a more

global setting, study on the invention of tradition showed up the absence of antiquity of many

cultural artefacts that had been presumed to be part of some long-standing tradition (Ranger &

Hobsbawm, 1983). Minimally the use of archives might prevent the researcher from reinventing the

wheel, so to say.

Historical research is not always based on the use of archives

However, having a historical approach to social research is a different thing often exemplified in the

writings of those who do historical sociology. Doing historical sociology is not the same as doing

research using archives. Some social researchers who have adopted a historical approach have also

made extensive use of archives. Marx did, as did Durkheim. Marxs Capital was substantially based

on government documents. The reports of the Factory Inspectors, Health Inspectors, Childrens

Employment Commission, official reports on various trades were some of the documents from

official archives that were used by him extensively and systematically to reconstruct the condition of

labour. Durkheims study of suicide too was based on an analysis of official records spread over a

long period. Webers study of the protestant work ethic was based on historical material rather than


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a systematic examination of the archives. As was Moore Jr.s historical explanation of the social

origins of dictatorship and democracy (Moore Jr., 1966). Moore Jr. examined historical material

without delving into a systematic examination of the archives. Closer to home, Satish Saberwals use

of the historical canvas to paint the institutional logic underlying Indian society was based on the use

of diverse insights derived from historians instead of being based on archival research (Saberwal,

1987) (Saberwal, 1995) (Saberwal, 2007). Similarly Sudhir Kakars study of the inner world of the

Indian child was historical insofar as he based it on an investigation of diverse brahmanical sources

but it was not based on archival research (Kakar, 1978). Ronki Rams studies of dalit groups (Ram,

2008) as also that of Paramjit Judge on social rebels make use of historical data to explain their

observations from contemporary times (Judge P. S., 1992) (Judge & Bal, 1996)

The use of archives by historians

Historians routinely use archives. But, there is no particular formal training that they receive in the

use of archives, unless one were to call the writing of a small seminar essay using one source from

the archives as formal training. Even for accessing archives and research material they mostly

depend on an informal network (Duff, Craig, & Cherry, 2004). There is no particular methodology

course that one can think of that has the title the use of archives in history. Instead, the focus is

more on sensitizing the student to ways of evaluating information; identifying historical fact and

the various ways of achieving objectivity. Mostly, by way of formal training to a new comer in the

use of archives is to make a list of various archives that have been used in the past by the more

established historians. A brief description of the archiving strategies of various repositories is about

the best that is done to introduce the new researcher into the use of archives. Beyond that

historians learn how to use archives by actually going through them, writing reports on questions of

varied complexity and trying to show up elements of continuity and change in the matter under

examination. Historians, unlike sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists, are also rather wary


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of reflecting on the practice of history unless it is to identify lacunae in evaluating and interpreting

factsa practice which many of us have seen in India devolves into political mud-slinging.

Much of what they learn in the use of archives is by going through the archives to find answers to

their research questions, evaluating the reliability of their source, balancing out different bits of

information from diverse sources to establish a modicum of veracity and then crafting the

information together to present a coherent answer to their research question. Perhaps the closest

parallel that one can have about the historians archival research is with the lawyer trying to build up

a case. Except that the historian is in the role of the investigator, the lawyer and the judge. A good

historian usually is one who acts the role of many lawyers rather than representing only one side.

Insofar as there is formal training for this it consists of learning from the useages of other historians,

getting a feel of the more easily available archives, culling data therefrom and putting it together to

reconstruct the past. That reconstruction often involves searching the archives for answers to a

specific question regarding the past. Thus Bipan Chandras celebrated work, a modified version of his

PhD thesis, revolved around the simple (but unarticulated) question: why did Indians of various

beliefs and opinions, even without any particular singular design, end up believing that the Raj was

deleterious to India (Chandra, 1968)? His rather elegant answer was that they all realized

irrespective of their location vis--vis the Raj, that the Raj was harmful for the economy of India.

Similarly S. Gopals study of British policy in India pulled together strands from the latter half of the

19th

century to demonstrate that the one singular strand in British policy in India was to search for

allies who could help the Raj in governing India (Gopal, 1965). Both Bipan Chandra and Gopal used

very different kinds of archives to prove their points. Gopal used information coming from the

interchanges between those who were working for the government to layout the manner in which

the personnel of the Raj went about identifying new allies and discarding old ones. Bipan Chandra

went about examining the newspapers, pamphlets and other popular writings of a wide variety of

Indian leaders to identify the common thread running through the utterances of Indian leaders of


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various hues. Gopals inquiry was spread over a period of fifty years while Bipan Chandras much

more voluminous research focussed on a period of just two decades. Neither confined their

investigations merely to the records available in official sources. Both went about finding new

sources from the past to search for their answers. To that extent both moved quite far beyond what

might be traditionally be considered archives.

When Bipan Chandra and Gopal embarked on their respective researches there already were many

views on the questions that they were trying to examine. The question raised by Bipan Chandra had

been part of public wonderment for a long time. To put it rather simplistically, the interaction

between Indians and the Raj had been rather complex. In 1947, the new nation had come into

existence and the militarily dominant imperial government had transmogrified into a national

government (Tan, 2005). Within recallable memory it was known that many times Indians

cooperated with the Raj. But just as often it seemed that Indians were opposed to the Raj. Between

the two extremes of cooperation and conflict there were numerous gradations that changed over

time. Sometimes they recruited the authority of the state to pursue their own private ends; at

others they were used by the imperial government to serve the ends of governance. All this was

commonplace knowledge. But none of it was able to explain the emergence of a reasonably united

national movement against imperialism. The elegance of Bipan Chandras research lay in his being

able to demonstrate that even those who cooperated with the Raj were in many ways aware of the

harm that the Raj caused to Indians in general. Also, that those who opposed the Raj were well

aware of the deep rooted antinomies, especially in the economic sphere, between the Raj and

Indians and the harm that these caused to India and Indians. Often it was a result of the resultant

ameliorative impulse that they criticized the Raj, sought to bring together the public to oppose it. By

implication, Bipan Chandra showed, there was simply no possibility of Indians remaining unopposed

to the imperial government for too long.


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Gopals study too examined an issue over which there was already a considerable body of public

opinion. It had been quite well-known, popularly, that many Indians worked hand in glove with the

imperial government and that it might not have been possible for the government to function

without the cooperation of Indians. The elegance of Gopals research lay in his being able to

demonstrate that even the imperial government made considerable effort to range about in search

of allies. It almost seemed as if the functionaries of the government knew that the logic of their

existence was such that a conflict was inevitable between them and Indians. So not only did they try

to cultivate allies, they were on a perpetual look out for fresh allies since the existing ones, it was

presumed, were always on the verge of deserting the government. It would be too facile to say that

both these historians were merely making the obvious more obvious. For, from the point of views of

the historical actors, there was nothing obvious about either nationalism or being able to achieve

independence from the imperial government. If anything, regarding the imperial government there

was an illusion of permanence, till the very end of its life (Hutchins, 1967). But more importantly

both historians, Gopal and Bipan Chandra, through a systematic investigation of archives spread

over a period of time, were able to show how things really were and show t hat it was not as if all

extant explanations of the issues that they investigated were equally correct or that the truth lay

somewhere in between.

If there is a need to go to the archives for social research it is perhaps also because it often shows up

that what is deemed obvious is often not so or had not been so till recently and just as often the

truth does not amount to being the average of contemporaneously held diverse views.

What are archives?

Etymologically, the word archive is derived from the old Greek word for the chief magistrate, the

archaeon, and referred to the collection of documents in his charge. In contemporary popular


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useage, which has been with us for over two hundred years, the word archive refers to both: the

repository of documents as also to the documents themselves. Traditionally an archive was a

collection of documents as also the name for the repository of documents. Archived documents

have had a strong connection with power. State authorities were the first ones who maintained

archives. The Roman church maintained records of various sorts. They too were called archives. With

the emergence of the nation-state, there was a need to maintain records over a very very long

duration. It is at this juncture in the 17th

century that we encounter the word archive in the English

language. By the nineteenth century every nation state worth its salt was maintaining an archive of

official documents. By the mid-19

th

century, with the professionalization of historical research there

was also an effort to systematise the historians researches. With the injunction, coming from the

German historian Leopold von Ranke, that the appropriate task of the historian was to write source

based history, the importance of archives in maintaining national memories became even more

evident for it was in the archives that historians found records that were the closest in time to the

events and actions that they were examining.

In the most preliminary sense archives are institutionalized memories. An archive used to be a

collection of records in the hands of the authorities. But many other social players too began to

retain old records and make them available to those interested in examining the times gone by.

Anyone with any pretensions to having memories extending beyond a few years could create a

collection of records that would extend the life of those memories. That collection of records often

comprises the archive. The records usually were in the form of written documents, sometimes

published and sometimes in manuscript form. But as newer techniques of record keeping evolved

other media too, like films, photographs, audio recordings, came to be part of archives. Often they

are un-catalogued, without any descriptive index and merely represent a collection of haphazard

information. In earlier times, with written records, many historians devoted considerable time

preparing and printing descriptive catalogues of the records for use by other historians. This was


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especially true of administrative histories and histories written for the nation-state. With the

emergence of newer sub-disciplines of history, like labour history, that fruitfully used non-

documentary records and with the emergence of non-documentary ways of keeping records in the

form of films, photographs and sound collections, there has been a movement towards expanding

the ambit of archives to include these other sources too. The advent of information technology

made the task of accessing archives through digital catalogues so much the easier.

The national archives follow a more formal policy of document collection and correspondingly

collect documents that may or may not be of direct use for the researcher. But it is important to be

familiar with the archival policies being followed by the archives to enable efficiency in the

consultation of archives. Yet the variety of data being archived is so vast and varied that even now

historians usually depend on informal networks comprising mostly of other researchers and

archivists to find a suitable collection of data for inspection.

Consulting archives requires for researchers to follow multiple strategies. In the case of many

archives not everything that is catalogued is available for consultation for everybody. Some

researchers might be provided more privileged access. This would be true of both public archives

and archives held privately. Very soon researchers learn that accessing archives is a privilege and not

a right. Sometimes an office might hold old records but not necessarily in any systematic order and

frequently no one in the office might even know what is being held within the office. Our search into

the thana records simply meant wading through old files, kept year-wise, held in bundles made of

red cloth, to cull out the information that was of use to us. In such circumstances it is helpful if the

researcher has a prior knowledge of the manner in which various offices do their routine work. For,

that might also have been the manner of generating and retaining information in the past as well.


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Currently the kinds of records that are available in digital form include documents pertaining to the

working of the state. In India, parliamentary debates, legal proceedings and judgements, census

records, budget documents and various policy documents are some of the more easily available on

the internet for anyone to use though often they are not easy to mine. A few private players have

even begun to systematise the digitally available data and make it available to the researcher for a

price. This is especially true about huge data-sets pertaining to the economy and health in India.

Many archives have taken the initiative to digitise their holdings. Some of the digitised public records

have been made available in a most user friendly manner as is the case with the Hansard in UK and

the census records in both UK and the USA. The National Archives of UK at

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.ukhas made available, gratis, one of the most comprehensive and

useable archive for any researcher.

In keeping with the growth of information technology, many of the records that are being generated

are available only in a digital form and not on paper. That might have a profound impact on

institutional memories that have been with us for many centuries given the transience of the digital

format. At the same time, the digital format also allows for a quicker, deeper and more thorough

search of the archival holdings. That in turn might make it easier for non-professional historians to

search for data from a time gone by.

Some of the records even when available in the repository may not be available for consultation. In

the most important repository of records for contemporary Indian history, for example, the private

papers of a number of political leaders are not available for general use even when they have been

made available to some preferred scholars. Other records are not made available if they pertain to

the security of the state. The Henderson Brooks Report on the military debacle of 1962 is for

example, not available for consultation. Also not available are the numerous reports on communal
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/


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riots and corruption in high places. However, as many a historian has discovered, official secrecy

merely means that one has difficulty in accessing the original document. Non-official versions of

what might be in the document are often available publicly should one make an effort to locate

them.

The project to create a digital library of books, Digital Library of India (Science, 2010) at

http://www.dli.ernet.in/ has created a vast archive of books from a by-gone era that provide an

interesting insight into the thought processes of those times.

Similarly the archiving of resources by various newspapers and publishing houses has opened a new

door for anyone caring to peep into the past. Some of this is available with the concerned

newspapers, some from private service providers who have invested in digitising the papers; some is

available gratis while others require a fee. One of the most interesting uses of newspaper archives

was seen in the researches by Jagdep Chima who based his reconstruction of Punjab politics

substantially on the digitally available past issues of The Tribune published from Chandigarh (Chima,

2012). That particular newspaper archives are still available for free.

What otherwise would have taken a researcher many years to do in a traditional library, pouring

over microfilms and old manuscripts, is now possible almost instantaneously at a click of the mouse.

The Google Books project (Google, Inside Search Google, 2013), even when restricted to published

records, has made freely available a large number of records from historical times. The records of

the East India Company, travelogues, government publications and much more that is of importance

to any researcher is available athttp://books.google.com.
http://www.dli.ernet.in/http://www.dli.ernet.in/http://books.google.com/http://books.google.com/http://books.google.com/http://books.google.com/http://www.dli.ernet.in/


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In conclusion: Why work with archives?

There are many questions in social research that could benefit from a historical understanding.

However, for whatever reason, professional historians have not addressed themselves to those

questions. In the absence of any inputs from professional historians there is little option left for the

social researchers but to conduct the historical research from scratch, as it were. And that, to follow

the historians preferred way of doing things, would be through an investigation into the archives.

Today one can take for granted that there are a number of benefits to be had from conducting

research that is sensitive to historical changes and continuities. Not all research questions are

amenable to historical research. But wherever it is possible social research would gain considerably

by looking into the historical aspects of the questions under consideration. During our research into

the causes of farmers suicide, for example, we noticed that the over-emphasis on certain popular

causes like indebtedness was suspect, especially for establishing a hierarchy of causes. Indebtedness

of a higher order and more wide-spread was to be found across many decades. Many observers had

commented on the prevalence of indebtedness even in the 19th

century. Some had also noticed, in

the cotton belt, the propensity of farmers towards suicide even in the absence of indebtedness.

Similarly price fluctuations of crops were a common feature since many decades past so even while

they might have contributed to the distress of the farmers in contemporary times they could not

possibly be deemed as responsible for distress of such a high order as to drive the farmers to suicide.

There also was this issue highlighted by thana level records spread over many decades, that the rate

of suicide among farmers was not much different from many other population groups. Thana level

records suggested that housewives seemed to be more prone to suicide than farmers. The point

simply was that examining the causes of the distress of farmers through time seemed to provide a

more rounded picture of their troubles and possible solutions than simplistically pinning the blame

on indebtedness, modern agricultural practices and the influence of a capitalist economy on


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agriculture. It also suggested that a meaningful search for causation might require looking beyond

the more popular causes and therefrom it might be possible to create frameworks that actually

worked for the benefit of the distressed farmers.

Similarly, during an engagement with school textbooks, middle school social science textbooks for

Rajasthan state and Punjab, we noticed the problems with many of the pedagogic strategies being

suggested by professional experts. Many of these suggestions had even been translated into policy

documents recommended to and by state authorities. However, focused group discussions with

school teachers suggested that the currently recommended pedagogic strategies might as quickly

fall by the way side as had similar suggestions in the past. It was not as if pedagogical practice for

middle schools had not, over time, changed for the better, it was just that the change was seldom a

function of the policy inputs being provided. A quick look into the archival past showed that the

problems of pedagogy had been under discussion ever since the modern system of education was

put into place in the aftermath of Macaulays infamous minute of 1935 (Rajivlochan, 2008). Since

then, virtually every decade and a half a Commission had been appointed to look into the problems

of education. Problems of pedagogy frequently occupied a considerable portion of most of these

Commissions. Many Commissions also made an effort to obtain feedback from the field. The

problems they identified seemed to have an amazing continuity as did their suggested solutions.

Perhaps an inquiry across time into the persistence of the problems and their underlying causes

might have yielded a more meaningful way of responding to them and broken that unfortunate

continuity.


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References

Chandra, B. (1968). Rise and growth of economic nationalism in India. New Delhi: People's Publishing

House.

Chima, J. S. (2012). The Sikh Separatist Insurgency in India: political leadership and ethnonationalist

movements. New Delhi: Sage.Duff, W., Craig, B., & Cherry, J. (2004, Spring). Historians' Use of Archival Sources: Promises and

Pitfalls of the Digital Age. The Public Historian, 26(2), 7-22.

Evans, R. J. (1997). In defence of history. London: Granta Books.

Fischer, D. H. (1971). Historians' fallacies-- toward a logic of historical thought. London: Routledge

Kegan and paul.

Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Google. (2013). Google books blog. Retrieved 02 11, 2013, from http://booksearch.blogspot.in/

Google. (2013). Inside Search Google. Retrieved Feb 11, 2013, from http://insidesearch.blogspot.in/

Gopal, S. (1965). British Policy in India 1858-1905. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guha, R. (1983). Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press.Hutchins, F. G. (1967). The illusion of permanence: British imperialism in India. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Jha, S. (2012). The sub-alternity of the Santal Hool (1855-56) - Revisited. In Unpublished.

Judge, P. S. (1992). Insurrection to agitation: the Naxalite Movement in Punjab. Bombay: Popular

Prakashan.

Judge, P. S., & Bal, G. (1996). Strategies of social change in India. New Delhi: M D Publications.

Kakar, S. (1978).A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press.

Meeta, & Rajivlochan. (2006). Farmers' suicide: facts and possible policy intervention. Pune: Yashada.

Moore Jr., B. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of

the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.Rajivlochan. (2008, July). Reforming education for India, from England. Seminar, 587.

Ram, R. (2008). Mangoo Ram, Ad Dharm & the Dalit Movement in Punjab. Jalandhar: Critical Quest.

Ranger, T. O., & Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Saberwal, S. (1987). India, the roots of crisis. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Saberwal, S. (1995). Wages of segmentation: Comparative historical studies on Europe and India.

Hyderabad: Orient Longman.

Saberwal, S. (2007). Spirals of Contention: Why India was Partitioned in 1947. New Delhi: Routledge.

Science, I. I. (2010). Digital Library of India. Bangalore. Retrieved from http://www.dli.ernet.in/

Shah, A. M. (1968, January 06). Changes in the Indian Family-An Examination of Some Assumptions.

Economic and Political Weekly, III(1 - 2).Tan, T. Y. (2005). The garrison state: military, government and society in colonial Punjab, 1849-1947.

New Delhi: Sage.

Acknowledgement: The authors gratefully acknowledge discussions with Professors Paramjit S Judge

and Ronki Ram as also Professor Jayaram and the participants at the Social Research seminar at the

IIAS.


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iBut as some more careful historians have warned, the past is an alien territory. Often times behavioural

responses from the past may not be in line with our contemporary experiences. There is always a possibilitythat the necessary fillers provided by the historians imagination say more about how that imagination worked

rather than about what might have happened in the past. One recent example of historical imagination going

awry has been provided by Surendra Nath Jhas close examination of Ranajit Guhas seminal text on peasant

insurgency (Jha, 2012)

use of archives in social research

Documents