Author: Romila Thapar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 1156
ISBN/UPC (if available): 019 5664876
Description
This Collection of papers and lectures on early Indian history by one of India’s foremost historian focuses on historiography and the changing dimensions of social and cultural history.
The essays have been grouped thematically in nine sections: historiography; social and cultural transactions; archaeology and history; pre-Mauryan and Mauryan India; forms of exchange; the society of heroes in the epics and the later tradition of venerating heroes; genealogies and origin myths; the social context of the renouncer; and the present in the past, which looks at how current ideologies make use of the early past.
The collective publication of these important pieces-written over the last forty years and published in various journals-makes them newly accessible to Professor Thapar’s many readers. This volume will be indispensable to students and scholars of early Indian history.
REVIEWS
These writings are significant not only for their widely appealing critique of communal interpretations of history, but also for their epistemological integrity…Written in elegant and powerful prose, the essays…are eminently readable.
-Rajan Gurukkal, The Book Reviews
This collection of…51 essays spanning over four decades (1955-1997) represents and enormously vast and rich canvas…These essays have created new conceptual vocabulary for the writing and study of early Indian history.
-Krishna Mohan Shrimali, Outlook
Contents
List of Illustrations
Historiography
Social and Cultural Transactions
Archaeology and History
Pre-Mauryan and Mauryan India
Forms of Exchange
Of Heroes and History
Genealogies and Origin Myths as Historical Sources
The Renouncer in a Social Context
The Present in the Past
Index