Q1.
Imagine that you are a historian in the 22nd century looking at the lives and status of girls and women in 21st-century society. What are the different aspects you would write about? Exchange your thoughts with your classmates. How similar or different are they?
Answer
The exercise is really about method: which aspects would a future historian even be able to see, and what would they use as evidence? Plan your answer in those two columns.
| Aspect I would write about | Evidence a 22nd-century historian would use |
|---|---|
| Education — how many girls finish school, and which subjects they take | Enrolment and board-exam data, school registers, scholarship schemes |
| Work — which jobs women hold, what they are paid, how much unpaid housework they do | Census and labour surveys, pay records, time-use studies |
| Law and rights — inheritance, marriage age, maternity leave, laws against harassment | Statutes, court judgments, case records |
| Political participation — voting, panchayat seats, women in legislatures | Election Commission records, reserved-seat data |
| Health and safety — nutrition, maternal health, the sex ratio at birth | Health surveys, hospital records — and the sex ratio, which is a number very hard to argue with |
| Mobility and technology — travelling alone, owning a phone, using a bank account | Transport and banking data, phone-ownership surveys |
| Sport, art and public visibility | Match records, film and television, news archives |
| Everyday attitudes — what families expected of a daughter | The hardest to recover: interviews, letters, social media, advertisements, school textbooks |
Sample answer: “Writing in 2150, I would say the 21st century in India was a period of fast change but uneven change. Girls’ school enrolment rose until it nearly matched boys’, and women won Olympic medals and flew fighter aircraft — yet the share of women in paid work stayed low, unpaid housework stayed mostly theirs, and the sex ratio at birth in some districts showed that daughters were still not equally wanted. I would argue that the law moved faster than everyday attitudes, and I would use the gap between the two as the theme of my chapter.”
Why the chapter asks this at all: it has just shown you how much a historian can reconstruct about women in the 13th–17th centuries from inscriptions, a Portuguese chronicle and some wall engravings — and how much stays invisible because it was never recorded. Turning the telescope on your own century teaches the lesson from the other end: what survives about you will be someone’s choice, and it will not be the whole truth. Comparing your list with your classmates’ makes the point again — if ten people in one room choose different aspects, so did the chroniclers.