Introduction

A book originally written when one had just been initiated into the profession, now being revised late in life, has elements of an autobiography.
Returning to a book of almost forty years ago has brought home to me the
substantial changes in the readings of early Indian history, some arising out
of new data and many more from new interpretations of the existing data.
There has been much discussion on these readings and my participation in
these has shaped my own understanding of this period. The attempt here is
to incorporate such readings that I think are valid without writing an entirely
different book. Inevitably, however, there is much that is different in this
book. Many ideas that were merely glanced at in the earlier version have
now been further drawn out. One may not have been aware of it at the time,
but the earlier version was written at a nodal point of change when early
Indian history, which had begun essentially as an interest in Indology, was
gradually becoming part of the human sciences - a change that I hope to
demonstrate in the first chapter on historiography. I have stayed largely
within the framework of the earlier book since I thought it was still viable
and did not require radical alteration. Chapters have been re-oriented so
that some contain more new material, while in others the emphasis is on new
interpretations. The reading of early Indian history has seen considerable
changes in the last four decades and I have sought to capture these in the
narrative that follows.
The new readings emerged from various ongoing assessments. Some were
of colonial interpretations of the Indian past, which also had to contend
with the attitudes to Indian culture that were prevalent in the period just
after Indian independence. In the popular imagination of Europe, India had
been the fabulous land of untold wealth, of mystical happenings and of an
association with ideas that reached beyond mundane experience. From
gold-digging ants to philosophers who lived naked in the forests and meditated on the after-life of the soul, these were all part of the picture of India
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