COMMUNALISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY '59 kept within the legitimate bounds. Understandably the emperors^ actions drew a major share of contemporary histormns^ attention, both critical and appreciative, in inedieval India. D Historians in medieval Indid. als6 Understood historical dausation informs of human volition or, at best, human •nature or disposition. This understanding too had, in a manner, been conditioned by the historians9 own daily experience. By virtue'of their position in the court they were often participants in, or witnesses to, some'ofthe events that formed part of their narrative; their experience ivas that rebellions occurred when so-and-so had, of his^will, dqqided to rebel;'thaty a king was deposed when a group of nobles decided amongJ themselves to terminate his reign; that an emperor engaged himself in extensive conquestfs owing to his virile nature; that anothdr' etnperor followed a policy of treating all his subjects alike, irrespective^ of the distinctions of creed, for so enlightened was his disposition. Wilful decision, conditioned by the nature of each human being involved in the evbnts with which the historians were concerned, formed the basic cause of the occurrence of those events/ as oar historians saw it. Zia ud din Barani, author bf two of the most outstanding works of history around the? middle of the fourteenth century, ^ raised this understanding to the level of fine theory. Every man's nature, according to Barani, comprised contradictory qualities and the events in which a man was involved were a manifestation 6f those (Spalities. A balanced mixture of those contradictory qualities resulted in success, whereas an unbal^flced mixture led inevitably to failure in life.4 - fl ' } Understandably, if the historians^ own experience taught them lesions in historical causation in their context, it was easy for them to explain similar events in the distant or near past in the same terms. The explanation of historical causation in tterms of human volition also implied the treatment of each historical event as a single, individual, independent event Unrelated1 to the ^ other extents! 'described in their works.5 For in the '^bsem^of a Structural analysis, the only other^ framework of historical ^explanation, within which all events together constitute an integrated pattern and thereby lost their individual identities, "was th6 one in which divine will intervened to cause the occurrence of events. Medi'eVel European historians' framework was indeed the prototype of such an explanation. Clerics as those historians were, their whole outlook on lifd ^nd letters was influenced by the theological doctrine in which all that" happened in the past and the present and was t6 happen in the future was predetermined by god's will; which in turn implied that the events of the p^-st, the present and the future formed a tightly knit whole as the manifestation of god's wisdom, for surely no event could occur at random unless it had been assigned its due place in god's all-embracing plan.6 But such wa§ not the understanding of niedievel Iiidla's courtier-historians, even when some of them happened to be theologians ialong with being courtiers and