Product Description: In 1026, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided the Hindu temple of Somanatha (Somnath in textbooks of the colonial period). The story of the raid has reverberated in Indian history, but largely during the raj. It was first depicted as a trauma for the Hindu population not in India, but in the House of Commons...read more

Product Description: The claim, often made, that India--uniquely among civilizations--lacks historical writing distracts us from a more pertinent question, according to Romila Thapar: how to recognize the historical sense of societies whose past is recorded in ways very different from European conventions...read more

Product Description: This book discusses the period from 1000 BC to the end of the sixth century AD. Divided into five thematic sections, the first section discusses questions like perceptions, historical consciousness, and approaches to the study of ancient Indian history...read more

Contributed articles on historical geography of Delhi, India; supported by pictorial representation and architectural renderings.

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Cultural Pasts collects essays on a range of subjects in early Indian history. Its focus is on historiography and the changing dimensions of social and cultural history. The essays are divided into nine thematic groups: historiography, both current and from earlier periods; social and cultural transactions; archaeology and history; pre-Mauryan and Mauryan India; forms of exchange; the society of the heroes in the epics and the later tradition of venerating the hero; genealogies and origin myths as historical sources; the social context of the renouncer; and the past in the present--the use of the early past in current ideologies. (view table of contents)

This work attempts to explore some of the links between culture, history and gender and between literature and history, through reading variant versions of the narrative of Sakuntala. These include the stories in the "Mahabharata" and the 18th century "Katha" in Braj.

Product Description: Como todas las historias de los pueblos antiguos, la de los hindúes no ha sido fácil de determinar cronológicamente. La importancia de este primer tomo de la Historia de la India de Romila Thapar radica en que, aplicando métodos modernos de análisis, nos ofrece una visión más objetiva de cuándo y cómo se fue conformando este país...read more

Product Description: This volume consists of four of Dr. A-Romila Thapar's published books on seemingly discrete and different aspects of early Indian history that are actually interconnected. They take up historical questions and delve into them from multiple perspectives in order to provide a glimpse of the exploration of new historical territories relating to early India...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: First published in 1961, this classic work is based largely on the edicts of Asoka, whose policies are analyzed against the background of Mauryan civilization during the third and fourth centuries B.C. The present edition has been thoroughly revised with a new afterword and archaeological site map...read more

Product Description: Organized around the themes of tradition, dissent, and ideology, which are in many ways central to Romila Thapar's concerns, this collection of essays covers a time span from the Vedic age to the Nehruvian era of Indian history and ranges across cultural regions from ancient Mesopotamia to Sri Lanka...read more

Contributed articles.

Product Description: In this study, Romila Thapar argues the importance of understanding and positioning various well-established perspectives on the Indian past in order to arrive at an informed understanding of contemporary situations--such as disputes between Hindus and other Indian communities...read more

Product Description: This is an attempt to define Indian society in the crucial period of the mid-first millennium BC and in the seminal area of the Ganges Valley. It examines the major change from a lineage-based society to the establishment of state systems, and takes into account the emergence of a peasant economy and the process of urbanization...read more

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Product Description: Written by a distinguished group of Indian scholars, the essays presented here span a broad range of topics in Indian history, including urbanization, agrarian policy, the colonial state, urban labor and the capitalist class, the national movement, the Left in India, the role of myths in history, and the relationship between history and sociology...read more