60 ,< , < ^PC^AL SCIENpCT historians.7 ^ If medieval Indian historians fbcussed their attention on events pertaining directly or indirectly to the court and if they explained the occurrence of these events in terms of human will or nature, {he ruler's will or nature would clearly occupy a critical element in the explanation in view )f his pivotal position. The personal qualities at ^e ruler inevitably became the ^,11-too-important factor in the AYhole framework of^cxplanataon. Indeed, the events that occurred during pi reign were seen as the manifestation of the personality of the ruler,8 Communal and Imperialist Historiography There was, too, an implicit communal undertone In this frame^ work. If the ruler's disposition, his personal qualities, mattered a,ll that much in the making of history, surely the fact that he was a Muslim ruling over a vast mass of Hindus would be a material factor in the whole assessment of history. And, of course, medieval centuries were not the time when the influence oficligion had been eliminated tram the thinking of humankind in any part of the world. It wj-j easy there-. fore for s^rne historians of medieval India to, visualise contemporary history as the history of Muslim rule in Indja.9 Yet the framework of historical explanation in, terms of human will/nature in its essentials contained a strong element of ,ambiva}ence that accommodated, for medieval centuries, a quite astonishingly secular historical thinking such as Abul FazFs along with^ a fairly dogmatic Muslim statement such as Mulla Abdul Qadir Badauni's. Indeed, the whole range of historical works written in medieval India swings in degrees from one to the other thinking, yel never overflowing the hm^nan will/nature syndrome^ , , This then wa^ the ambivalent fyamewoik that British colonial historians had inherited from medieval India. It was, however, the singular mark of colonial historiography thai it sought to eliminate the "element of ambivalence from this framework, boldly explicate its latent communal undertone, and make a linear communal study of India5^ past the dominant, almost the exclusive, trend. Such was the end result of James Mill's perio4isation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods10 which was to become the universally accepted period! -sation for the study of Indian history for \hc next century and a half and continues to be nearly universally accepted in Indian universities today though with a new nomenclature: ancient, medieval and modern periods. An even bolder and more deliberate attempt was made by Elliot and Dowson's eight-volume A Histoiy of India as Told by its Own Historians1^ which was-a translation of excerpts from Persian-language historical works of medieyal India. The selection of ^cerpts left little to the reader's imagination; invariably the translated passages aroused communal passions.. Apparently, Elliot knew what he w^s doing, for the professed purpose of all his intellectual labour was "to teach the