Interpretations of Ancient Indian History

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4495918
AutoresRomila Thapar (autor de correspondencia)
Año1968
Volumen7
Número3
Páginas318
Fecha de publicación1968-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2504471
OpenAlexW2333287478
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15

Despite the stereotypes of unchanging and her unhistorical religions and peoples, the historical writing on ancient India goes back for more than two centuries and exhibits an instructive series of changes in interpretation. The historical writings produced by European scholars, beginning in the eighteenth century, were formulated in terms of the ideological attitudes then dominant in Europe, and naturally these were significantly different from the indigenous tradition of ancient India. European ideologies entailed a set of attitudes toward India which were for the most part highly critical, though there were also some sympathetic historians. These ideologies continued to be influential even after Indian scholars began to write, since they often wrote in reply to earlier interpretations and were therefore still molded by them. It has been only in recent years that the influence of ideologies on the interpretation of Indian history has been recognized; perhaps now for the first time a history of the changing interpretations of ancient India can be written. India was by no means a country unknown to Europe. In the post-Renaissance period knowledge of and familiarity with things Indian grew with the visits of merchants, ambassadors, and missionaries from various parts of Europe to the Indian sub-continent. The accounts written by some of these visitors such as those of Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador of James I to the Mughal court of the emperor Jahangir,' or Frangois Bernier who visited India in 1668 and was associated with the court of Louis XIV2 became the basic European source of information on India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these accounts were fairly reliable; others were a mixture of observation and a large amount of fantasy. The first serious study of India and its past began in the late eighteenth century with the work of scholars who have since been described as the Orientalists or Indologists.3 This study arose principally because the East

Ancient history · Epistemology · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts