The Texts, Political History and Administration Till C. 200 BC: History of Ancient India (Vol-3)

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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

Dilip K. Chakrabarti is Emeritus Professor of South Asian Archaeology at Cambridge University and Dean, Centre for Historical and Civilizational Studies, VIF. He has a large number of research books and articles to his credit.
Makkhan Lal, taught at Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University. He was a Visiting Fellow in Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He was elected member of the Executive Committee of World Archaeological Congress representing South Asia (1986-94) and also Academic Programme Co-ordinator and Treasurer of World Archaeological Congress-3 (1990-94). He is founding Professor-Director of Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management (established by the Government of Delhi) and a Senior Fellow at Vivekananda International Foundation. He has a large number of books and research articles to his credit.

Most authentic historical sources identify Indians as among the first to learn writing. The UNESCO has recognised Vedas as the 'first literary documents in the history of humankind," transcending beyond their identity as scriptures. It seemingly looks inexplicable that the people who had such an old and unbroken tradition of writing have relatively limited records available on the rise and fall of empires, chronicles of kings and kingdoms, military conquests and defeats etc. If history has to be seen and interpreted through the prism of physical and material events, the contention that there is an absence of historiography in India may have some justification. However, if history has to be understood as an elucidator of human societies as they existed in the past, their civilisational growth, intellectual attainments, development of institutions that governed and held them etc. then the argument of 'absence of historiography" would appear frivolous. It needs to be underlined that in the Indian intellectual tradition, all knowledge was a quest for truth and the truth was seen as something that was time and space consistent. Though relevant for their time and age, physical events were seen as transient and thus only peripheral to real knowledge. The writings thus centred around more sophisticated dimensions of human endeavour encompassing among other things the purpose of life, the rules that governed and influenced life, relationship of humans with nature, social dynamics etc.