Sources of modern Indian history

Modern Indian history is reconstructed from a far wider range of sources than earlier periods, because the colonial state itself produced an enormous paper archive. Official records, newspapers, private papers, oral testimony and visual material must be read together, and each kind of source carries its own bias. A district collector report on revenue, for example, tells us what the state wanted to record, not necessarily what peasants experienced. The skill examined here is source criticism: who produced a source, for whom, and what it leaves out.