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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 How Do We Learn About the Past? — THINK ABOUT IT

Book page 60 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
What is the earliest memory you can recollect? Do you remember how old you were at that time? Those memories together are a part of your past, maybe going five or six years back.
Answer

This is a personal question, so the answer has to be your own. What matters is how you dig the memory out — which is exactly what a historian does with a much older past.

How to find your earliest memory honestly:

  • Think of a single sharp picture, not a whole story — a smell, a room, a face, a fall, a festival.
  • Fix its date using something outside yourself: which house you lived in, which school, who else is in the memory, a younger brother or sister who was or was not born yet.
  • Check it against a source — ask a parent, or look at a photograph. Sometimes you will find that what you "remember" is really a story you were told, or a photo you have seen many times.
Sample answer: “My earliest memory is of standing on a chair to reach a plate of laddoos at my cousin's naming ceremony. I remember the yellow curtain and my grandmother laughing. I thought I was very small; when I asked my mother, she said I was three and a half — the ceremony was in 2016. So my own remembered past goes back about six years.”
Why the book begins here: your earliest memory is your personal “source of history”, and it behaves just like a historical source. It is incomplete (you remember the curtain, not the date), it can be mistaken, and it becomes reliable only when you cross-check it with other evidence — a photograph, an elder's account. That is the whole method of history, tried out on a past five years long instead of five thousand.
Q2.
How do you think understanding the past will help us understand the present world?
Answer

Because nothing in the present begins in the present. The chapter opens with E.H. Carr's line that history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past … We can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.”

Four concrete ways the past explains the present:

  • It explains where things came from. The wheat and rice on your plate, the pot in the kitchen, the copper and iron in your tools — all begin in the story this chapter tells, when people first started farming, making pottery and working metal.
  • It explains why places are where they are. Early communities settled near rivers for water and fertile soil. That is why so many of India's oldest and biggest cities still sit on riverbanks.
  • It explains our customs and languages. Festivals, calendars, food habits, the names of our towns and the words we speak all carry the marks of earlier centuries.
  • It helps us judge the future. The chapter says early humanity “could have almost disappeared”. Knowing how societies survived droughts, floods and climate change tells us something useful about facing climate change now.
Why this matters for a citizen, not just a student: people argue about the present using claims about the past — about who lived where, who built what, who was wronged. Someone who has learned to ask “what is the source for that, and can it be cross-checked?” is much harder to mislead. History is training in careful thinking, not just a list of dates.
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