Studying Early India - Archaeology, Texts, and Historical Issues
Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya
Price
695
ISBN
9788178241432
Language
English
Pages
294
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2005
Territorial Rights
World
Imprint
Permanent Black

This book comprises a set of interrrelated essays on some of the key issues which continue to excite historians and scholars of early India. It shows the profound impact of colonialism on the study of India's early past, the new methods and premises introduced into India by colonial studies, and the variety of departures from traditional, pre-colonial modes of history-writing. It goes on to show that post-Independence historiography has brough a fresh set of problems to the fore: such as the integration of archaeology with narratives of early Indian history; of the trajectories of social change and social formation; of the historical position of ideology and its shifts; and of the ways of communicating knowledge of a past which is now increasingly under non-academic fundamentalist onslaughts. With its diverse parts connected by strong threads of interest in the changing nature of history-writing on early India, this new book on the methodological changes that confront the historian of pre-colonial India will consolidate Professor Chattopadhyaya's reputation as one of the foremost thinkers in his area of ancient and early medieval history.

Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya was educated at Calcutta and Cambridge. He has taught at Burdwan University and at Viswabharati, and for the longest tenure at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he is currently Professor of History. His books include Coins and Currency Systems in South India (1977), The Making of Early Medieval India (1994) and Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (1998). He has edted several volumes, including most recently the collected essays of D.D.Kosambi, titled Combined Methods in Indology and Other Essays (2002).