A major trend in history writing that began in the late 1960s to early 1970s in Europe and America was the study of cultural history where various aspects of social behaviour and cultural patterns of societies were being studied in their historical context. Multidisciplinary studies became the norm in the study of social sciences and history was not untouched by these developments. The subject matter of history did not merely include aspects of political narratives but also included the study of social, economic, behavioural and environmental aspects. This trend caught up in South Asian academia by the mid-1970s with a proliferation of works on economic and labour history. Over the next few decades systems and institutions of history began to be studied through this multidisciplinary lens, especially with attempts being made to look at the socio-economic basis of events, institutions and systems. A major fillip to such studies was provided by the introduction of Subaltern Studies which sought to bring out the voice of the marginalized and in effect brought out path breaking studies on the popular basis of certain political events or on the histories of the marginalized.
Away from the Subaltern Studies, there remained a group of historians who continued to study historical events in their purely economic and social contexts using theoretical frameworks provided by academia in the West in the 1980s and after. Such studies in India continue to look at various events and systems of history from an economic and social prism.
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