Author: Romila Thapar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 454
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0-19-566832-4
Description
This classic omnibus edition of four significant works by a leading South Asian historian highlights and discusses seemingly discrete and different aspect of early Indian history, but which are in fact interconnected.
In Interpreting Early India, the focus is historiography, and the discussion in this book moves beyond history to provide a glimpse of explorations of new historical territories relating to early India. Time, it is argued in time as a Metaphor of History, is an essential component of a historical perspective, and in India both linear and cyclic time were known. The third work in the volume, Cultural Transactions, suggests alternative ways of assessing early Indian tradition. Using more recent concepts of culture and tradition, it distances itself from the static notion of fixed traditions and exclusive high cultures. Finally, From Lineage to State discusses the history of north India from about 1000 to 400 B C. Moving away from conventional treatments of this period, it attempts to locate the processes of state formation and social configuration.
This omnibus edition is not only a necessary read for all students and scholars of early India in particular, and Indian history in general, but also a veritable collector’s item.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
ROMILA THAPAR was born in India in 1931 and comes from a Punjabi family, spending her early years in various parts of India. She took her first degree from Punjab University and her doctorate from London University. She was appointed to a Readership at Delhi University and subsequently to the Chair in Ancient Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she is now Emeritus Professor in History. Romila Thapar is also an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania as well as the Collège de France in Paris.
In 1983 she was elected General President of the Indian History Congress and in 1999 a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Among her publications are Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, From Lineage to State, History and Beyond, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories and Cultural Pasts: Essays on Indian History as well the children’s book Indian Tales.
Contents
BOOK ONE
INTERPRETING EARLY INDIA
PREFACE
ABBREVIATIONS
Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History
Durkheim and Weber on theories of Society and Race Relating to Pre-colonial India
Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the modern Search for a Hindu Identity
The Contribution of DD Kosambi to Indology
Early India-an Overview
Society and Historical Consciousness-The Itihasa-purana Tradition
INDEX
BOOK TWO
TIMES AS A METAPHOR OF HISTORY: Early India
The Argument
Time-Reckoning
Cosmological Time
The Authors
Time and the Decline of Dharma
Myth and History
Historical Time
Eschatology
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
BOOK THREE
CULTURAL TRANSACTION AND EARLY INDIA
PREFACE
Tradition
Patronage
BOOK FOUR
FROM LINEAGE TO STATE
PREFACE
ABBEVIATIONS
Preliminaries
Lineage Society
Transition to State
Ideology and the State
Ergo
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX