How important are dates?

Answer 1

There was a time when historians were

fascinated with dates. There were heated

debates about the dates on which rulers

were crowned or battles were fought.

In the common-sense notion, history was

synonymous with dates. You may have

heard people say, “I find history boring

because it is all about memorising

dates.” Is such a conception true?

History is certainly about changes

that occur over time. It is about finding

out how things were in the past and

how things have changed. As soon as

we compare the past with the present

we refer to time, we talk of “before” and

“after”.

Living in the world we do not always

ask historical questions about what we

see around us. We take things for granted,

as if what we see has always been in the

world we inhabit. But most of us have our

moments of wonder, when we are curious, and we ask

questions that actually are historical. Watching

someone sip a cup of tea at a roadside tea stall you

may wonder – when did people begin to drink tea or

coffee? Looking out of the window of a train you may

ask yourself – when were railways built and how did

people travel long distances before the age of railways?

Reading the newspaper in the morning you may be

curious to know how people got to hear about things

before newspapers began to be printed.

All such historical questions refer us back to notions

of time. But time does not have to be always precisely

dated in terms of a particular year or a month.

Sometimes it is actually incorrect to fix precise dates

to processes that happen over a period of time. People

in India did not begin drinking tea one fine day; they

developed a taste for it over time. There can be no one

clear date for a process such as this. Similarly, we

cannot fix one single date on which British rule was

established, or the national movement started, or

changes took place within the economy and society. All

these things happened over a stretch of time. We can

only refer to a span of time, an approximate period over

which particular changes became visible.

Why, then, do we continue to associate history

with a string of dates? This association has a reason.

There was a time when history was an account of

battles and big events. It was about rulers and their

policies. Historians wrote about the year a king was

crowned, the year he married, the year he had a child,

the year he fought a particular war, the year he died,

and the year the next ruler succeeded to the throne.

For events such as these, specific dates can be

determined, and in histories such as these, debates

about dates continue to be important.

As you have seen in the history textbooks of the past

two years, historians now write about a host of other

issues, and other questions. They look at how people

earned their livelihood, what they produced and ate,

how cities developed and markets came up, how

kingdoms were formed and new ideas spread, and how

cultures and society changed

Answer 2

Dates are very important as we are unable to know about are past .