Description

This volume of essays focuses on the fresh set of problems that post-Independence historiography has brought to the fore. It covers areas such as the integration of archaeology with narratives of early Indian history; the trajectories of social change and social formation; the historical position of ideology and its shifts; and, importantly, how ways of communicating knowledge of the past is now increasingly under non-academic fundamentalist onslaught. Studying Early India also investigates 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. This new book on the methodological changes that confront the historian of precolonial India will consolidate Professor Chattopadhyaya's reputation as one of the foremost thinkers in his area of ancient and early medieval history.