The Texts, Political History and Administration Till C. 200 BC

History of Ancient India

Book: 3

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It is important to reassess, formulate and develop India’s civilizational and cultural imperatives in an increasingly globalised world. The nation’s perception of its ancient history plays a major role in this. The present series on the history of ancient India was conceived with this in mind. The aim is to put forward a nationalistic, factual and objective history of the ancient Indian past in eleven volumes. The cobwebs of certain ideas that we have lived with in the past are critically examined and in many cases found wanting and discarded.

The present volume, third in the series, has to begin with the Aryan problem on which scholars have written for close to three centuries. Much of what has been written still clings like mill-stones to our necks, and we have argued why and how we should get rid of the general obsession with this notion. We have denied that the entire corpus of the Vedic literature is anything but an interconnected corpus of Indian texts and has to be viewed thus historically. A scholarly review of the Buddhist and Jaina literature features next with the issues such as the dates of the Buddha and Mahavira. Orthodox political history is introduced with the Mahajanapadas contemporary with the life of the Buddha and Mahavira and the subsequent emergence of Magadha as the leading political power of the country. The beginning and end of the Mauryan power along with the earlier political episodes of the Achaemenid and Greek invasions bring the political history part of the volume to conclusion. Following this, there are chapters on the urbanism, inscriptions and coins of the period and notes on 21 major archaeological sites.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dilip K Chakrabarti

Dilip K. Chakrabarty is University lecturer in south Asian archaeology at Cambridge University. His recent publications include Archaeological Geography of the Ganga Plain: the Lower and the Middle Ganga (Delhi 2001) and The Archaeology of European Expansion in India: Gujarat, c. 16th-18th Centuries (in Press). His current field-research programmes include a historical geographical study of the upper Ganga plain and a similar study of the routes which linked the Ganga plain with the Deccan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Makkhan Lal

Prof. Makkhan Lal, an archaeologist and historian of world repute, has taught in Banaras Hindu University and aligarh Muslim University. He was the first Chartes Wallace Fellow in Cambridge University and Senior Fellow at Clare Hall. Presently he is the Founder Director of Delhi institute of Heritage Research and Management. Prof. Lal has written nine books and over 110 research papers.

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Bibliographic information

Title
The Texts, Political History and Administration Till C. 200 BC
History of Ancient India
Author
Edition
1st. ed.
Publisher
ISBN
9788173054822
Length
xxvi+708p., Illustrations; B/W 220; Index; 22cm x 28cm.
Subjects