Epigraphic studies need special training and interpretative skills. Appasamy Murugaiyan, the editor of the present collection of essays, reiterates this by hailing the Indian epigraphic tradition and the contributions of the pioneers to South Indian epigraphy.
The title of the book is inviting and indicates in an immediate sense that there would be something new to look forward to. An initial glance at the contents page, however, lends a picture that we are already familiar with. The book under review is thus marked by a terrain that is all too well-known to students of history.
We have just completed the golden jubilee year of the publication of D.D.Kosambi’s ‘Combined Methods in Indology’ in the Indo-Iranian Journal in 1963. This remarkable essay was in print several decades before the vocabulary of ‘cultural turn’, ‘linguistic turn’, ‘ethno-archaeology’, ‘ethno-Indology’, ‘ethno-history’…
This volume of the People’s History of India deals with not just five hundred years of its history but also an important phase in the making of early India. It was marked by the consolidation of earlier trends in north India and the spread of cities and states in other parts of the country; with all their socio-political implications.
Romila Thapar’s book is a compilation of sixteen essays most carefully chosen, almost like selecting the best of pearls to be strung. A collection of essays on history would definitely open up with issues in historiography and so does the first section incorporating three essays.
This is a book that the world has been waiting for. Romila Thapar has been working on it for quite some time. She would publish an occasional paper on the theme since the middle of the seventies of the last century. Our appetite has been whetted ever since.