Published in a volume on social research method ed.

N Jayaram of TISS
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

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

been recorded in times gone by. One often discovered, as Fischer had been at great pains to show, that extant perceptions from contemporary timesespecially their claims regarding continuity and change vis--vis the past-- were not necessarily borne out by records from the past (Fischer, 1971). The records might have an entirely different story to tell. We were aware that professional historians had for long been sensitive to the use and misuse of phrases like because, therefore, thus we see, small wonder that, it is not surprising that or their analogues. It was entirely possible that historians did not have a monopoly over the misuse of such phrases. Journalists could do so too, as also could sociologistsespecially when they were faced with paucity of information-- to come to strong conclusions about issues over which they might have felt strongly. If anything, ever since the condemnation of historians for being the handmaiden of the powers-that-be, there had been a healthy trend among historians to expose the fundamental structures of inequality in society. But no such crisis had yet visited the other social science disciplines in India.

So it was when we began our study into the phenomenon of farmers distress that was manifesting itself in suicides since the 1990s (Meeta & Rajivlochan, 2006). Our experience was more of trying to understand better, at a rather small level, one version of reality, many of the details of which were already available in a more positive sense. This was, however, different from the kind of study that historians normally undertake when they wander in times far gone with very sparse positive evidence, wherein a picture of the past is created only on the basis of past records. That kind of archival research, more common amongst practising professional historians, puts a heavy demand on the historians imagination because much of the positive evidence for the reconstruction of the past is missing. Given all that was missing, if one relied solely on inductive investigation, one would get very thin results indeed. The reconstruction of the past in those circumstances, often based entirely on archives is often akin to assembling a jigsaw, pieces of which have been stored all over the house in different boxessome of which have been destroyed perhaps at random, perhaps out

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

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

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

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 that 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-19th 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 nondocumentary 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.uk has 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

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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 at http://books.google.com .

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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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But 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 possibility that 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)

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