Welcome to ARPIT in History.
The MHRD (now Ministry of Education), Government of India has launched the online Annual Refresher Programme in Teaching (ARPIT) – a major and unique initiative of online professional development of faculty in higher education using the MOOCs platform SWAYAM.
ARPIT in History has been designed to provide broad historical information on a variety of themes so that faculty in higher education who would sign up for the course could get maximum benefit from it. The variety of modules offered in this course have been categorized on the basis of India’s historical chronology.
During the next 40 episodes, we shall together take a trip to our past, India’s past, and will try to map the contours of India’s cultural landscapes from the very early days, when the dawn of human civilization began to make its impressions on this earth. We shall together dive into a very rich pool of India’s cultural geography, its intellectual milieu, and study the interwoven threads of India’s social fabric.
What is history, is a question all of us are often tempted to ask, but none of us are either confident to answer it satisfactorily or are satisfied with the answers proffered by the experts in the field. However, there are many ways through which we can study our past, learn from it, rejoice it, even get repelled by it. Through the material remains, like the inscriptions, temples and other architectures, coins, fabrics, and, indeed, through the rich literatures produced over several millennia, and official records, also known as archives, we try to trace our past, and live it, too. This is one possible answer to the question which was raised above, only a moment ago.
We have decided in this programme to focus on Cultural and Social history of India. We shall endeavour to travel through a large expanse of time and incorporate ancient, medieval and modern history of India. The periodisation of Indian history has never been a very comforting process, nor indeed has it been fully worked out to meet the movement of history in time. So, we will make an attempt to discuss the nuances of cultural and social aspects of Indian history.
During the course of this programme, we shall make available to the participants, apart from our audio-visual material, enough literature from which to read and augment the knowledge of Cultural and Social history of India. There will be references, images, and archival records that will supplement and support the literature and the videos. Our endeavour will be to make this programme as interactive as possible. And I invite to join us on this exciting journey of interpreting India’s past, and leaning from it.
The course consists of recorded modules, and each module has a video, text, references, and online quizzes. We hope you will enjoy it and benefit from it. Thank you.
