Cultural Pasts is a collection of papers and lectures on a range of subjects pertaining to early Indian history, written over the last thirty years and published in various journals. Their collective publication makes them now more accessible. The focus of much of the contents is on historiography and on the changing dimensions of social and cultural history. The essays have been grouped thematically so as to give direction to the focus. The nine thematic groups are: historiography, which includes essays on modern writing on early India as well as historical perceptions of the past in earlier periods; social and cultural transactions; archaeology and history; pre-Mauryan and Mauryan India; forms of exchange; the society of the heroes in the epics and the later tradition of venerating the hero; genealogies and origin myths as historical sources; the social context of the renouncer; and the past in the present—the use made of the early past in the ideologies of the present.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Romila Thapar
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 College 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.
There are no reviews yet.