NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 Chapter opening — The Big Questions

Book page 59 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

How do we measure historical time?

Answer

We measure historical time with a calendar, an era and a timeline. Every society has had its own way of counting years; the modern world mostly uses one shared system so that people everywhere can put the same event at the same point.

Step 1 — pick a starting point (an era). An era is a distinct period of time. Major events — the birth of an important person, the start of a ruler's reign — have often marked the beginning of a new era. The Gregorian calendar, now used the world over, takes the conventional year of Jesus Christ's birth as its starting point. Alongside it, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Chinese and other calendars are still used in India and elsewhere for festivals and auspicious events.

Step 2 — count forwards and backwards from it.

Years after the starting point → once written AD → now CE (Common Era)
Years before the starting point → once written BC → now BCE (Before Common Era)
India's independence = 1947 AD = AD 1947 = 1947 CE
The Buddha's birth ≈ 560 BCE

Step 3 — remember there is no year zero. The year 1 CE follows immediately after 1 BCE. So the number of years between a BCE date and a CE date is BCE + CE – 1.

Step 4 — use the right sized unit.

Unit	Length	How it is counted	Example from the chapter
Year	1 year	The basic unit of the calendar	1947 CE
Decade	10 years	Any period of ten years	The 1990s
Century	100 years	CE centuries counted from 1 CE; BCE centuries counted back from 1 BCE	21st century CE = 2001–2100 3rd century BCE = 300–201 BCE
Millennium	1,000 years	Same rule, in thousands	3rd millennium CE = 2001–3000 1st millennium BCE = 1000 BCE–1 BCE

Step 5 — draw a timeline. A timeline shows a sequence of dates and events across a period, so you can see the order of events even without reading the numbers. Here is the chapter's own Fig. 4.3 (pages 62–63) redrawn to scale:

The chapter's timeline (Fig. 4.3, pages 62–63) drawn to a true scale: 780 pixels stand for 14,000 years. BCE dates run to the left of the red line, CE dates to the right, and the red line is the join where 1 BCE is followed straight away by 1 CE — with no year zero in between.

Tip: the book's Fig. 4.3 has a dotted portion between 14,000 BCE and 12,000 BCE. That marks a skipped period. If the whole 300,000 years were drawn to scale on the same page, the timeline would have to be almost 3 metres long!

Q2.

How can various sources help us understand history?

Answer

Every object or structure tells a story and is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. One piece alone proves very little; put many together and a picture of the past appears. A source of history is any place, person, text or object from which we gather information about a past event or period.

The figure on page 67 groups them into four families:

Family of sources	What it includes (page 67)	What it can tell a historian	Indian examples
Archaeological sources	Inscriptions — manuscripts, copper plates, coins Structures — monuments, mounds Excavations — human, animal and plant remains; tools and weapons; figurines and ornaments; pottery and toys; habitations and burials	Dates, names and titles of rulers, royal orders, trade, technology, food, crafts, town planning, burial customs	Aśhoka's rock and pillar edicts (3rd century BCE); the Prayagraj (Allahabad) pillar inscription of Samudragupta; the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradāman; Gupta gold coins; Sanchi Stupa; the mounds of Harappa, Rakhigarhi and Dholavira
Literary sources	Indian literature — Vedas and Itihāsas, poems and plays, historical texts, collections of stories, scientific and technological texts Foreign accounts — travelogues, historical chronicles	Beliefs, rituals, law, science, everyday life, how outsiders saw India	The four Vedas; the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata; Tamil Sangam anthologies; Kālidāsa's plays; Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅgiṇī; the Āryabhaṭīya and Charaka Samhitā; the Panchatantra and Jātaka tales; accounts by Megasthenes, Faxian, Xuanzang, Al-Bīrūnī and Ibn Battuta
Oral sources	Folklore; genealogical records	Family and community memory, local legends, songs and sayings that were never written down	Village legends and ballads; the genealogies kept by hereditary bards for pilgrim families
Artistic sources	Paintings, sculptures, panels	Dress, jewellery, musical instruments, boats, weapons, gods and stories people cared about	The rock paintings of Bhimbetka; the Ajanta cave paintings; the carved panels of Sanchi; Chola bronzes

Two more kinds the chapter adds:

Scientific studies — in the last 50 years or so, studies of ancient climates, chemical analysis of excavated material and the genetics of ancient people have supplied fresh insights that supplement the usual sources.
Recent history (the last two or three centuries) also uses newspapers, and for the last few decades electronic media — television, the internet and so on.

Why historians insist on many sources: sometimes the sources confirm each other — the jigsaw pieces match. At other times they contradict each other — the pieces don't match — and the historian has to decide which source to trust more. That careful weighing is how the history of a period is re-created. And it is honest work: in history, quite a few pieces of the puzzle may remain missing for ever.

Did you know? Historians are not the only people who make these sources speak. Archaeologists excavate, epigraphists read ancient inscriptions, anthropologists study societies and cultures, and experts in literature and languages read old texts — all of them feed the same jigsaw.

Q3.

How did early humans live?

Answer

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) have walked the planet for about 300,000 (three lakh) years. For almost all of that time they lived as hunters and gatherers, and only in the last ten thousand years or so did they begin to farm. The chapter tells the story in two stages.

Stage 1 — before farming

They lived in bands or groups to help each other against the many challenges nature threw at them.
They were hunters and gatherers — they hunted animals and collected edible plants and fruits, and were constantly moving in search of shelter and food.
They sheltered in temporary camps, rock shelters and caves.
They spoke languages that are now lost, and they used fire.
They made better and better tools — improved stone axes and blades, arrowheads and other implements.
They painted. Rock paintings survive in hundreds of caves all over the world — some just simple figures or symbols, others detailed scenes with animals and humans.
They made ornaments — stone or shell beads, pendants of animal teeth — and sometimes exchanged them with other groups.
They had beliefs about the natural elements, and possibly some notion of an afterlife.

Stage 2 — after the last Ice Age

Last Ice Age: from over 100,000 (one lakh) years ago → to about 12,000 years ago
Then the climate warmed, ice melted, rivers swelled and drained into the oceans
Living conditions improved → people settled down

In many parts of the world people began cultivating cereals and grains and domesticating animals such as cattle and goats.
With more food available, communities grew in size and number and often settled near rivers — not only for water but because the soil there is more fertile, which makes growing crops easier.
Society grew more complex. Chieftains became responsible for the well-being of the people, and everyone worked collectively for the community's welfare. There was no sense of individual ownership: land was sowed and harvested together.
Hamlets grew into sizeable villages that exchanged food, clothing and tools; networks of communication and exchange grew up between them, and some villages became small towns.
New technologies appeared — pottery, and the use of metal (copper first, iron later) for durable tools, objects of daily use and ornaments.

Why this early progress was never safe: the chapter ends the story with a warning. Humanity faced many challenges, and at some critical moments it could have almost disappeared, as some earlier species did. We will never know the names of those early humans to whose courage and persistence we owe our existence today.

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