Recent Historiography of ancient India is the doctoral dissertation of Dr. Shankar Goyal, one of the leading authorities on ancient Indian historiography. It is a pioneer work which seeks to delineate the development of historiography of the political history of ancient India in the modern period, specially in the post-1947 decades. Divided into thirteen chapters it discusses the approaches of modern historians to the pre-Maurya and Maurya dynasties, the post-Maurya dynasties of the Sungas and Kanvas, the ruling houses of the Indo-Greeks, Sakas, Pahlavas and Kushanas, the post-Maurya dynasties of the Satavahanas, Vakatakas and other, the Imperial Guptas, Maukharis, Later Guptas and North India upto Yasovarman of Kanauj and the post-Vakataka dynasties of the Deccan and the Far South including the Chalukyas of Vatapi and the Pallavas of Kanchi. Dr. Goyal has very successfully delineated the changing pattern of the approaches of modern scholars of various schools – imperialist, Nationalist, Marxist, etc. – varying from chronological reconstruction to socio-economic concerns, as well as their attitudes towards various types of sources – literary, epigraphical, numismatic and archaeological. Such a comprehensive treatment of the problems of the historiography of ancient Indian political history, with emphasis on the works of historians who wrote in the era of Independence, makes this volume a pioneer, comprehensive and up-to-date work on the subject. It will indeed be difficult to replace it in the near future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shankar Goyal
Dr. Shankar Goyal (b. 1959), the young and ebullient author of the present monograph, is emerging very rapidly as one of the recognized authorities on the historiography of ancient India. He has already produced three monographs dealing with some aspects of ancient Indian history writing viz. History and Historiography of the Age of Harsha (Jodhpur, 1992), Aspects of Ancient Indian History and Historiography (New Delhi, 1993) and History Writing of Early India (Jodhpur, 1996). He has co-edited a number of works with such eminent scholars as Professors G.C. Pande, B. Ch. Chhabra and Jagannath Agrawal which are directly or indirectly concerned with this discipline, including Political History in a Changing World (Jodhpur, 1992), Reappraising Gupta History (New Delhi, 1992) and S.R. Goyal: His Multidimensional Historiography (New Delhi, 1992). He has also-co-edited several other monographs with Shri M.C. Joshi and Dr. Sobhag Maghur which include King Chandra and the Meharauli Pillar (Meerut, 1989), Spectrum of Nehru’s Thought (New Delhi, 1994) and Rajasthan Bharati, in two volumes (Jodhpur, 1995) and authored more than seventy research articles. His research output in a period of less than six years has been stupendous, and its originality and quality superb, as is evident from the reviews of his works appearing in national and international journals. Dr. Shankar Goyal did his graduation from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, post-graduation from the Deccan College, Pune, and Doctrate on Main Trends in Indian Historiography Since Independence from the University of Jodhpur, Jodhpur, where he is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History.
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