The need for following the correct and standard research methodology is increasingly felt when more and more research works and learned monographs are coming out on history dealing with social, economic, cultural and other varied aspects of life, and thus the writing of a critical, unbiased and authentic history is the need of the hour. It has been well said in this book that the life breath of history is interpretation, which also gives a definite viewpoint to a work of history. It lays that objectivity, if carried to an extreme, results in dry and lifeless cataloguing of events and subjectivity, if carried to an extreme, results in a highly biased work often divorced from reality, and that an ideal work would be one that combines subjectivity with objectivity in due proportion without upholding the one at the cost of the other.
The present book deals with the different processes involved in writing a good and authentic historical work. Right from the heuristic or the search for reliable and credible historical sources such as archaeological, epigraphical, numismatical, literary, and archival, it brings into relief the important features of analytical operations aimed at ascertaining the credibility of sources by way of external and internal criticism, synthetic operations aimed at finding out a connected, meaningful and, if possible, enlightening account of facts and forces, interpreting them properly, and finally the exposition, in a powerful and impressive style, of the fruits of all this research and thinking. The book further shows how interpretation itself is properly done by means of various processes such as generalisation, the argument from statistics, analogy, hypothesis and the like. |
