The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India
Professor Romila Thapar
New Delhi; Orient Blackswan, 2013
Professor Romila Thapar, India's most outstanding historian has contributed more than six decades for the reconstruction and understanding of the early past of India in general and the Gangetic valley in particular. Since the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment reconfigured Historiography as a story of progress and the saw sharp differences in the cultural and therefore moral level of "civilization" between the Western and the non-Western world, historians and philosophers have dismissed India as a land extra territorial to history, The early pioneers like Sir William Jones, Colebroke, Hastings and McKenzie did not find historical literature in India comparable with the Annals and Chronicles that existed in the West. Hegel even went to the extent of saying that India has only a past and does not exist in a historical space. Ideas of a timeless land vegetating in the teeth of time as Marx put it circulated in Europe and even Marx was not immune to the seductive charms of an ahistorical India. His notion of Oriental Despotism essentialised the existing theories about the past of India. It is indeed a formidable task to take on the task of subjecting the weight of two centuries of literary and historiographical representations and attempt a serious rehabilitation of India as a historical subject, and this is the achievement of Professor Romila Thapar.
Speculations about the aims, methods and purpose for representing the past in a narrative form constitute the fabric of Historiography and except for the Kashmir text, Rajatarangini, the River of Kings, India has not produced any work which enable us to seek answers about the nature of historical past. The absence of a systematic records of the past became the evidence on which speculative theories about a static Indian society came to be mounted. Since there was no change in India, there was no need to understand the past was the logic of the orientalist approach to the past and Romila Thapar effectively challenges this view. While admitting that India did not have the mimetic and chronicle inspired tradition, Professor Thapar locates Indian historiographical concepts in three distinct arenas: the Bardic, the Puranic and the Shrmanic. The earliest historical works embodied in the Rg Veda and other texts speak of gift giving and battle as the main themes for memorializing the past and with the advent of the state with its dynastic armature we notice a transition to the vamsavali or the royal genealogies. Alternatively, there was also the Buddhist or the Shramaic tradition which dealt with the exemplary life of a Buddhist king/monk or the organization of the sangha. The changing attitudes and perceptions toward the past reflected as Thapar points out different claims made on the past to legitimize the present, either contemporary forms of political dominance or social privilege. In charting out the fascinating twists and turns of these complementary and at times conflicting modes of representing the past, Thapar draws attention to the advent of royal inscriptions as a specific genre of historical writing in early India.
The work undertaken by Profesor Romila Thapar is an important intervention in reshaping the Historiography of early India. More than seventy five years back Pargiter in his Ancient Indian Historical Tradition tried to separate the historical from the mythical in the conventional sources available to him. But given the vast swathes of time covered by the Puranic lists of the Kings of the Kali age and the absence of any true chronological marker, Pargiter was able to achieve little by way of suggesting an approach to the study of early India. Professor Thapar has revisited that territory and has suggested methods and techniques for historisizing the literary texts in conjunction with dated inscriptions of the period. The early historians were troubled by what they thought was the cyclical view of time, and the absence of a linear conception of historical time. Thapar has shown that with the emergence of kingdoms and states in India time keeping and the calendar became an integral element of the royal elan and mystique. It is not an accident that the early Indian kingdoms were very particular about measuring time and using the planetary motion to draw up reliable calendars. In fact during the Chola period as the researches of Swamikannu Pillai has shown thge astronomers were seldom wrong when it came to predicting eclipses and other celestial events. The super nova explosion of 1054 recorded by Chinese astronomers may also find some echo in Indian hiostorical sources.
Professor Romila Thapar at Pondicherry University on January 17th 2014
The Past Before Us will remain a classic work for a long time.
Professor Romila Thapar
New Delhi; Orient Blackswan, 2013
Professor Romila Thapar, India's most outstanding historian has contributed more than six decades for the reconstruction and understanding of the early past of India in general and the Gangetic valley in particular. Since the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment reconfigured Historiography as a story of progress and the saw sharp differences in the cultural and therefore moral level of "civilization" between the Western and the non-Western world, historians and philosophers have dismissed India as a land extra territorial to history, The early pioneers like Sir William Jones, Colebroke, Hastings and McKenzie did not find historical literature in India comparable with the Annals and Chronicles that existed in the West. Hegel even went to the extent of saying that India has only a past and does not exist in a historical space. Ideas of a timeless land vegetating in the teeth of time as Marx put it circulated in Europe and even Marx was not immune to the seductive charms of an ahistorical India. His notion of Oriental Despotism essentialised the existing theories about the past of India. It is indeed a formidable task to take on the task of subjecting the weight of two centuries of literary and historiographical representations and attempt a serious rehabilitation of India as a historical subject, and this is the achievement of Professor Romila Thapar.
Speculations about the aims, methods and purpose for representing the past in a narrative form constitute the fabric of Historiography and except for the Kashmir text, Rajatarangini, the River of Kings, India has not produced any work which enable us to seek answers about the nature of historical past. The absence of a systematic records of the past became the evidence on which speculative theories about a static Indian society came to be mounted. Since there was no change in India, there was no need to understand the past was the logic of the orientalist approach to the past and Romila Thapar effectively challenges this view. While admitting that India did not have the mimetic and chronicle inspired tradition, Professor Thapar locates Indian historiographical concepts in three distinct arenas: the Bardic, the Puranic and the Shrmanic. The earliest historical works embodied in the Rg Veda and other texts speak of gift giving and battle as the main themes for memorializing the past and with the advent of the state with its dynastic armature we notice a transition to the vamsavali or the royal genealogies. Alternatively, there was also the Buddhist or the Shramaic tradition which dealt with the exemplary life of a Buddhist king/monk or the organization of the sangha. The changing attitudes and perceptions toward the past reflected as Thapar points out different claims made on the past to legitimize the present, either contemporary forms of political dominance or social privilege. In charting out the fascinating twists and turns of these complementary and at times conflicting modes of representing the past, Thapar draws attention to the advent of royal inscriptions as a specific genre of historical writing in early India.
The work undertaken by Profesor Romila Thapar is an important intervention in reshaping the Historiography of early India. More than seventy five years back Pargiter in his Ancient Indian Historical Tradition tried to separate the historical from the mythical in the conventional sources available to him. But given the vast swathes of time covered by the Puranic lists of the Kings of the Kali age and the absence of any true chronological marker, Pargiter was able to achieve little by way of suggesting an approach to the study of early India. Professor Thapar has revisited that territory and has suggested methods and techniques for historisizing the literary texts in conjunction with dated inscriptions of the period. The early historians were troubled by what they thought was the cyclical view of time, and the absence of a linear conception of historical time. Thapar has shown that with the emergence of kingdoms and states in India time keeping and the calendar became an integral element of the royal elan and mystique. It is not an accident that the early Indian kingdoms were very particular about measuring time and using the planetary motion to draw up reliable calendars. In fact during the Chola period as the researches of Swamikannu Pillai has shown thge astronomers were seldom wrong when it came to predicting eclipses and other celestial events. The super nova explosion of 1054 recorded by Chinese astronomers may also find some echo in Indian hiostorical sources.Professor Romila Thapar at Pondicherry University on January 17th 2014
The Past Before Us will remain a classic work for a long time.
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