Part of an encyclopaedic project on the history of an important region in the eastern part of the subcontinent, the volumes under consideration focus on the ancient and early medieval periods. The first and longer volume is more heterogenous, while the second is more sharply focused.
Among the many voices of history in early India, women were marginal and their voices were almost unheard. Fortunately with the continuous efforts of a few historians (Sukumari Bhattacharji, Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Roy, Vijaya Ramaswami and others), largely since the 1980s.
2019
What could be a better testimony to the perennial appeal of India’s epics than the fresh retellings and translations being published at fairly regular intervals? Each generation appears to need its own version in language that it can relate to. Now Uberoi’s 1996.
The work under review is the thirty-first volume in the People’s History of India textbook series edited by its author Irfan Habib himself. The publisher’s intention behind this series is the promotion of ‘scientific method in History, and resisting communal.