NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions, activities and projects

Book page 74 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

As a project, write the history of your family (or village if you live in one), using sources of history at your disposal. Ask your teacher to guide you.

Answer

This is a project, so the content must be yours. What follows is a working method and a model opening you can adapt.

Step 1 — decide the question. “The history of my family” is too big. Choose something answerable: Where did my family live four generations ago, and why did it move? Or, for a village: How old is my village, and what has changed in it in the last hundred years?

Step 2 — list your sources before you start writing.

Type	For a family history	For a village history
Oral	Interviews with the oldest members of the family	Elders, the village priest, the barber, the schoolteacher, folk songs and legends about the village's founding
Written	Certificates, ID cards, land papers, letters, diaries, school registers	Panchayat records, land revenue records, school and temple records, the census, old newspapers
Material	Old utensils, jewellery, tools, coins, the old house	Old wells, stepwells, temples, mosques, a fort or gateway, milestones, memorial stones, mounds
Visual	Photographs, portraits	Old photographs, survey maps, paintings

Step 3 — interview properly. Fix a time. Take a notebook and, with permission, a recorder. Ask open questions (“What did the village look like when you were ten?”) rather than yes/no ones. Write down the date of the interview and the person's name — that is your citation.

Step 4 — cross-check. Where two sources disagree, say so in your report instead of quietly choosing one.

Step 5 — write it up with (1) a short introduction saying what you set out to find, (2) the story in chronological order with a timeline, (3) photographs or sketches of your material sources, (4) a list of every source used, and (5) one honest paragraph on what you could not find out.

Sample opening: “My family's oldest remembered ancestor is Shri Bhola Ram, who my great-grandmother says was born ‘around the time of the big famine’. The village revenue record shows a Bhola Ram holding land in 1897. If these are the same man, our family has lived in this village for at least five generations. Sources: interview with Smt. Sita Devi (12 July 2026); village land record, 1897; a photograph dated 1954.”

Why the teacher's guidance is asked for: a school project like this touches other people's memories and, sometimes, painful ones. A teacher can help you frame questions respectfully, get permission before recording, and decide what belongs in a report meant to be read aloud in class.

Q2.

Can we compare historians to detectives? Give reasons for your answers.

Answer

Yes — the comparison is a good one, and the chapter almost makes it itself when it calls each source “a piece in a jigsaw puzzle”. But the comparison also breaks down at two important points, and a full answer says both.

Where the two are alike:

A detective …	A historian …
Starts from a question — who did it?	Starts from a question — what happened here, and why?
Collects evidence: fingerprints, objects, documents, witnesses	Collects sources: inscriptions, coins, monuments, texts, folklore
Prefers many pieces of evidence to one	Gathers information from as many sources as they can find
Checks whether witnesses agree, and asks who might be lying or mistaken	Checks whether sources confirm or contradict each other, and decides which source to trust more
Uses science — forensics, chemistry, DNA	Uses science — ancient climate studies, chemical analysis of excavated material, genetics
Reconstructs a sequence of events from incomplete traces	Re-creates the history of the period being studied, knowing that pieces are missing

Where the comparison breaks down:

A detective can question living witnesses; a historian cannot. Nobody can be called back to explain an inscription. The sources are all that will ever exist.
A detective usually reaches one final answer; a historian often cannot. History rarely closes a case. New excavations, new readings and new scientific methods can reopen a question at any time — and the chapter is honest that “quite a few pieces of the puzzle may remain missing”.
A detective looks for a culprit; a historian looks for an explanation. The aim is not to convict anyone but to understand how people lived and why things changed.

Reasoned answer in one line:
Yes, because both work from incomplete evidence to a reasoned reconstruction, cross-checking every source —
but a historian's “case” is never finally closed, and there is no one left to question.

Q3.

A few exercises with dates: (i) Place these dates chronologically on the timeline: 323 CE, 323 BCE, 100 CE, 100 BCE, 1900 BCE, 1090 CE, 2024 CE. (ii) If King Chandragupta was born in 320 CE, which century did he belong to? And how many years was that after the Buddha's birth? (iii) Rani of Jhansi was born in 1828. Which century did she belong to? How many years was that before India's Independence? (iv) Turn ‘12,000 years ago’ into a date.

Answer

(i) The seven dates in chronological order. Remember that among BCE dates the bigger number is the earlier one, and that BCE always comes before CE.

1900 BCE → 323 BCE → 100 BCE → 100 CE → 323 CE → 1090 CE → 2024 CE

The seven dates placed on one line drawn to scale (1900 BCE at the left, 2024 CE at the right). The four middle dates are crowded together because 323 BCE and 323 CE are only 645 years apart, while 1900 BCE to 323 BCE is 1,577 years.

The trap in this question: 323 BCE and 323 CE look like the same number, but one is more than three centuries before the changeover and the other more than three centuries after it — 323 + 323 – 1 = 645 years apart. The same trap sits in 100 BCE and 100 CE, which are 100 + 100 – 1 = 199 years apart.

(ii) King Chandragupta, born 320 CE.

Century: centuries CE are counted from 1 CE.
1st century = 1–100 • 2nd = 101–200 • 3rd = 201–300 • 4th = 301–400
320 lies between 301 and 400 → he belonged to the 4th century CE

Years after the Buddha's birth (560 BCE): one date is BCE and one is CE, so add and subtract 1.
= 560 + 320 – 1
= 880 – 1
= 879 years after the Buddha's birth

Note on the two editions: the Hindi edition of this book prints this date as 320 BCE (320 सा.सं.पू.) instead of 320 CE. Both readings make historical sense — Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya empire around 321 BCE, while Chandragupta I founded Gupta rule around 320 CE. If your teacher uses the BCE version, the answers become: 4th century BCE (400–301 BCE), and 560 – 320 = 240 years after the Buddha's birth (both dates BCE, so simply subtract).

(iii) Rani of Jhansi, born 1828 CE.

Century: 19th century CE = 1801 – 1900
1828 lies in that range → she belonged to the 19th century CE

Years before India's Independence (1947 CE): both dates are CE, so simply subtract.
= 1947 – 1828
= 119 years before Independence

Did you know? Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi was born in 1828 and died fighting in 1858, during India's first great uprising against British rule. She was 29 when the uprising began in 1857 — 1857 – 1828 = 29.

(iv) Turning ‘12,000 years ago’ into a date.

Let the date be Y BCE. Using the chapter's rule:
Y + (present year) – 1 = 12,000

Taking the book's own present year, 2024 CE:
Y = 12,000 – 2024 + 1 = 12,000 – 2023 = 9977 BCE

Taking 2026 CE instead:
Y = 12,000 – 2026 + 1 = 9975 BCE

Since “12,000 years ago” is itself a round figure, the sensible answer is about 10,000 BCE.

Check it: from 9977 BCE to 1 BCE is 9,976 years; from 1 BCE to 2024 CE is 2,024 years; 9,976 + 2,024 = 12,000 ✓

A small inconsistency in the book worth noticing: on page 71 the text says the last Ice Age ended “around 12,000 years ago”, which is about 10,000 BCE. But Fig. 4.3 on page 63 marks “End of last ice age” at 12,000 BCE — which is 12,000 + 2024 – 1 ≈ 14,000 years ago. The two differ by roughly two thousand years. Both are within the range scientists give for the end of the last glacial period, so neither is wrong as a rough figure — but it is a good reminder to check whether a date is written “years ago” or “BCE”. They are not the same thing.

Q4.

Plan a visit to a nearby museum: the visit should be prepared with some prior research on the kind of exhibits the museum holds. Keep notes during the visit. Write a brief report afterwards, highlighting what was unexpected / interesting / fun about the visit and the exhibits.

Answer

The chapter opens with a photograph of the National Museum, New Delhi, and says that such museums preserve statues, coins and ornaments that help us understand our history. This activity turns that caption into a day's work. Do it in three parts.

Part 1 — before the visit (the research)

Find out which museums are near you. Most state capitals have a State Museum; many districts have an Archaeological Survey of India site museum, a university museum, a railway or textile museum, or a memorial house.
Look up the museum's galleries and pick two to study properly. Trying to see everything is the commonest mistake.
Check opening days, timings, ticket price, whether photography is allowed, and whether a school group needs to book.
Write down three questions you want answered — for example: “Which is the oldest object here, and how do they know its age?”

Part 2 — during the visit (the notes)

Column in your notebook	What to write
Object	Name and gallery — copy it exactly from the label
Material	Stone, terracotta, bronze, gold, palm leaf, cloth …
Date and place	As given on the label, e.g. “Sarnath, 3rd century BCE”
What it shows	Your own two-line description, in your own words
Which family of sources	Archaeological / literary / oral / artistic (page 67)
My question	One thing the label did not tell you

Also sketch one object. Drawing forces you to look far harder than photographing does.

Part 3 — after the visit (the report) — about one page, in four short sections: where and when you went; what you saw (your two chosen galleries); what was unexpected, interesting or fun; and what you still want to find out.

Sample paragraph: “The most unexpected thing was how small the Harappan seals are — I had seen them enlarged in the textbook and imagined them the size of a hand, but they are about the size of a postage stamp. The most fun part was the gallery of musical instruments, where a recording played each one. My unanswered question is how the museum decides which objects to display and which stay in storage — the guide said less than a tenth is on show.”

Why a museum visit belongs in this chapter: everything you have read about here — coins, inscriptions, sculptures, tools, pottery, manuscripts — sits in cases a bus ride away. Seeing one real object with its label does more for the idea of a “source of history” than a page of description.

Q5.

Invite to your school an archaeologist or a historian and ask them to speak on the history of your region and why it's important to know it.

Answer

This is an organising task as much as a history task. Here is how a class can carry it off.

Step 1 — find the right person. Try, in this order:

The history or archaeology department of the nearest college or university.
The Archaeological Survey of India circle office or a nearby protected monument or site museum.
The State Department of Archaeology and Museums, or the curator of the local museum.
A local historian, writer or teacher who has published on the district — the town library or the district gazetteer will name them.

Step 2 — invite them properly. A short letter from the class, signed by the teacher, giving the date, time, the class's level, how long you would like them to speak (30–40 minutes is plenty), and the topic in one line: “the history of our region and why it matters to know it.”

Step 3 — prepare questions in advance. Each student brings one. Good ones to have ready:

Question	Why it is a good question
Which is the oldest known site in our district, and how was it found?	Ties the chapter's idea of excavation to a real local place
What sources do you use for our region — inscriptions, coins, oral traditions?	Uses the four families from page 67 directly
Has anything discovered recently changed what people believed about our area?	Shows that history is revised when new evidence appears
What happens to an object after it is dug up?	Brings out conservation, museums and record-keeping
What can students do to protect local heritage?	Turns the visit into action

Step 4 — afterwards. Write a class report, send a thank-you letter, and put up a display board of what you learned about your own region's past.

Why “why it's important to know it” is part of the question: local history is the one part of the past you can walk to. Knowing that the mound at the edge of your town is an unexcavated site, or that the stepwell behind the bus stand is four hundred years old, changes how you and your neighbours treat them. Heritage that nobody knows about is the heritage that gets bulldozed.

If no expert is available: the activity still works with a knowledgeable local elder, a temple or mosque caretaker who knows the building's history, or a retired teacher. Record the talk, note the speaker's name and the date, and you have created an oral source of your own.

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