Elliot and Dowson Put India's Own Chroniclers Into One Continuous Record

South Asian medieval history studies the Indian subcontinent under the Delhi Sultanate and the regional Muslim and Hindu kingdoms that preceded Mughal rule, working from the period's own chronicle literature rather than from later colonial or nationalist summary. The field's foundational documentary project was The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, compiled by Henry Miers Elliot and completed after his death by John Dowson, whose first volume appeared in 1867, translating extracts from dozens of Persian and Arabic chronicles into a single continuous English language record covering the medieval Muslim period for the first time.

Religious change in medieval South Asia, temple destruction and construction, forced and voluntary conversion, and the coexistence of Hindu, Muslim, Jain and emerging Sikh communities, is described very differently by different medieval chroniclers writing for different patrons, and Elliot and Dowson's compilation is what lets a modern reader compare those accounts against each other rather than accepting any single later narrative. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a claim about medieval Indian religious history rests on a specific chronicle's account, checking what that chronicle actually says against the wider documentary record.