Lineage and Kingship

In speaking about her initial work on the Mauryan king Ashoka, Romila Thapar discusses the juxtaposition between the ethical and the political in Indian history. In exploring the meaning of Buddhism for those times she argues for a notion of dissent being implicit in such philosophies that later came to be grouped together as the Shramana dharma in opposition to the Brahmana dharma . The aim of renouncers was to propagate and adopt an alternate kind of society more attuned to the well-being of all humans. She explains how she has used archaeological data and how she has also read and used some social anthropology. This has changed some of the new perspectives on early Indian society from those that were prevalent a few decades ago.

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