Explain the factors that should be kept in mind by the historians while handling textual traditions.
These are following factors should be kept in mind by the historians while handling testual traditions.
(i) Different types of men and women for different purposes visited India during our period of studies in India. Unfortunately we find very least description left by women travellers or writers. Most of the text material is provided by male travellers and authors. Naturally taste, attitude and outlook of writers belonging to both gender is generally different.
(ii) The accounts that survive are often varied in terms of their subject matter. Some deal with affairs of the court, while others are mainly focused on religious issues, or architectural features and monuments.
(iii) In a few cases, travellers did not go to distant lands. For example, in the Mughal Empire administrators sometimes travelled within the empire and recorded their observations. Some of them were interested in looking at popular customs and the folklore and traditions of their own land.
(iv) We shall see how our knowledge of the past can be enriched through a consideration of descriptions of social life provided by travellers who visited the subcontinent, focusing on the accounts of three men : Al-Biruni who came from Uzbekistan (eleventh century), Ibn Battuta who came from Morocco, in north-western Africa (fourteenth century) and the Frenchman Francois Bernier (seventeenth century).
(v) As these authors came from vastly different social and cultural environments, they were often more attentive to everyday activities and practices which were taken for granted by indigenous writers, for whom these were routine matters, not worthy of being recorded. It is this difference in perspective that makes the accounts of travellers interesting.
