Harsha is decidedly the most-well-documented monarch of ancient India. Since the nineteenth century he has attracted the attention of modern scholars and has been the subject of numerous monographs and hundreds of research papers. The present work, however, is different, not another ordinary text-book on him. Firstly, it gives a detailed and critical account of the history of history-writing on Harsha. In other words, it delineates and critically examines various phases and trends through which the historiography of the age of Harsha has passed. Secondly, it is concerned not merely with ‘what’ and ‘when’ questions of the history of age of Harsha, it raises ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions as well regarding the political events of the period. This approach has been adopted only by a few scholars so far. Thirdly, it seeks to look upon the culture of the period not only as an aggregate of the data found in the works of Bana and other contemporary writers, but as the cultural situation which marked the end of the ‘classicism’ of the Gupta age and the beginning of the early ‘medievalism’. When looked with the help of these two peepholes – the classical culture of the Gupta period and the medieval culture of the Rajput age – the works of Bana and his contemporaries appear to yield new meaning and light. We are sure, therefore, that this monograph will attract the attention of the scholarly world which it so eminently deserves.
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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