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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

“The current practice of categorization of ‘Early Modern India’ is based on a shift from the old imperialist periodization of ‘Muslim India’-‘British India’ to the more secularist one of ‘Medieval India’-‘Modern India’, which puts Indian history in a universalist chronological structure.” Critically examine.

  • UPSC 2012
  • Social and Cultural Developments

Periodization is never a neutral bookkeeping device — every scheme for dividing India's past silently encodes a theory of what mattered in that past, so the shift from a religion-based to a secular-universalist chronology is itself a historiographical argument, not just a relabeling.

You are reading the opening of the model answer. The full answer is part of the History Optional PYQ Master Pack.

What the full answer covers

  • The Imperialist Periodization: Hindu-Muslim-British
  • Why the Imperialist Scheme Was Rejected
  • The Secularist Turn: Ancient-Medieval-Modern
  • The Problems With Borrowing a Universalist Structure

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