Our Past 2

Historians have to be careful about the terms they use because they meant different things in Ncert our past. Take, for example, a simple term like “foreigner”. It is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval period a “foreigner” was any stranger who appeared say in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture. (In Hindi the term pardesi might be used to describe such a person and in Persian, ajnabi.) A city-dweller, therefore, might have regarded a forest-dweller as a “foreigner”, but two peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though they may have had different religious or caste backgrounds.