On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Ancient India

Suchintan Das

History 101
Dr. Naina Dayal
October 1, 2018
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On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Ancient India1

The writing of the history of ancient India began during the colonial period with a
great degree of unfamiliarity. This was because of what those attempting to write such a
history called the absence of a sense of historical consciousness in the pre-existing texts
which sought to represent India’s ancient past.2 The same had been concluded by Al-Biruni
when he visited India in the 11th Century.3 This continuity in inferences can be attributed to
an ignorance of the existence of a fairly large number of sources which have a more explicit
historical flavour, and to the idiosyncrasies of the forms of written ‘histories’ which were
relatively more accessible.4 The non-recognition of the ancient Indian ‘historical’ traditions
due to the absence of a well-structured narratology,5 which was presumed to be sine qua non
for writing History in Graeco-Roman Europe, and continued to be so in the post-
Enlightenment period.6 This was instrumental in activating the discourse of ‘myth’7 and
‘history’8, and enabling their interplay to become paradigmatic to any study of ancient India.
This not only determined which sources were worth studying for writing a history of ancient
India but also the strategies to be deployed while studying such sources, so as to read the
facts apart from fiction. Such a positivistic undertone (overtone in many cases) continued to
reverberate through the historiography of ancient India until a few decades ago. This creates a
strong case for investigating the other underlying historiographic continuities in periodization
and in the numerous axiomatic assumptions with regard to ancient India throughout the
colonial as well as postcolonial periods of history-writing.

1
Ancient India refers to what is geographically identified as the present-day Indian Subcontinent, even though
whether such a vast and heterogenous landmass can be labelled under one broad term, particularly in
temporal contexts when it could hardly be said to be inclusive of areas to the east of Bengal or to the south of
Vindhyas, needs to be questioned.
2
Probably the most extreme denial of an Indian History came from MacDonell when he remarked “early India
wrote no history because it never made any”. A.A. Macdonell, History of Sanskrit Literature, 11.
3
R. Thapar, The Past Before Us, 16-17.
4
Ibid, 16-17.
5
R. Guha, “The Small Voice of History” in Subaltern Studies (Vol. IX), ed. S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty, 12.
6
R. Thapar, op. cit., 19.
7
Mill viewed myths, particularly the mythical notions of time in ancient Indian texts as one of the boastful
claims to antiquity by a pretentious oriental nation. J. Mill, History of British India (Vol. I), 91-92. Thapar has
brilliantly elucidated the nuances involved in the notion of time in Ancient India. R. Thapar, Time as a
Metaphor of History.
8
‘Historical Information’ as perceived by Kosambi. D.D. Kosambi An Introduction to the Study of Indian History,
xv.
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The most notorious continuity in the historiography of ancient India remains its
periodization, which was set in stone in James Mill’s History of British India. This tripartite
dogmatization of Indian history into the Hindu, Muslim, and British periods, based on the
predominance of the corresponding set of rulers,9 was taken up not just by the colonial10 but
also by the nationalist historians.11 Although the nomenclature of periodization was changed
to Ancient, Medieval, and Modern in postcolonial history-writing (emulating the prevalent
nomenclature used in periodizing European history), the underlying logic of the trifurcation
remained more or less the same. That periodization was a necessary intellectual construct and
not a stand-alone fact (borne out by repetitive pedagogic usage12) having an objective
existence outside the discourse of history-writing, was a much later realization.13 Although
the writing of regional histories indicated the fluidity and variations required of any
periodization of the history of the subcontinent, the basic framework continued to be used
uninterrogated, save for in a handful of works.14 Mill’s arduously long-drawn ‘Hindu Period’
ignored the transitions that took place in the history of the subcontinent, and greatly
reinforced the cultural assumption that the ancient Indian society was predominantly static in
nature, which became axiomatic to the historical scholarship that followed. The very basis of
this all-pervasive periodization led to the history of ancient India being written with a top
down and macro-historical approach, focusing on the accuracy of genealogical history of the
rulers and on the evolution of broad themes15 over a long period of time. The adoption of this
periodization from European history also meant that the juxtaposition of the Indian past with
that of Europe would never really stop in the writings of these historians, even if only to keep
the questions seeking similarity or difference going.

9
S. Sarkar, “General Presidential Address”, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Vol. 31), 1.
10
V.A. Smith used the ‘Muhammadan Conquest’ as the delimiter of the Early Indian History (Unlike Thapar, he
uses ‘early’ to allude to the earliest times and not as a critique of the term ‘ancient’) as is evident from the title
of his book. V.A. Smith, The Early History of India: From 600BC to the Muhammadan Conquest Including the
Invasion of Alexander the Great.
11
R.C. Majumdar, Jadunath Sircar and others divided Dacca University’s History of Bengal Project into three
volumes --- Hindu, Pre-Mughal, and Mughal Periods. R.C. Majumdar (ed.), History of Bengal (Vol. 1), vii. A.S.
Altekar investigated the status of women in the ‘Hindu Civilization’, which he extrapolated to be continuing
from the ancient times to the present day. A.S. Altekar, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilisation: From
Prehistoric Times to the Present Day.
12
Mill’s History of British India became a textbook at the Haileybury College where the British ICS Officers were
trained. R. Thapar, Cultural Pasts, 6.
13
Case in point being Thapar’s proposed elaborate periodization of ancient Indian history. R. Thapar, The
Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 31-32.
14
For example, see Nihar Ranjan Ray’s Bangalir Itihas: Adiparva.
15
For example, see A.S. Altekar’s Education in Ancient India, having such an enormous scope of study.
 3

While British Utilitarians like Mill accentuated the differences by contemptuously

viewing India as the regressive ‘other’ of Europe, Orientalists16 like Max Muller emphasized
the commonalities of origin by patronizingly viewing India as the utopian ‘other’.17
Notwithstanding the differences in these views, what continued was the process of imagining
India as essentially a European intellectual construct in one way or the other. Europe
remained the point of reference for studying Indian History, no matter how erroneous the
parallels drawn were.18 The colonial histories continued to be written based on the continental
theories about the nature of Indian society and its origins. While in his attempt to trace
commonalities in the origins between India and Europe, Muller conceived the ‘Aryans’ as a
race (in tune with the social Darwinism of the day) and not just as a linguistic group. The
theory of an Aryan Invasion19 of India as extrapolated from this was taken up even by the
nationalist historians writing during the colonial period, and the ensuing political debate over
the supposed dichotomy between the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Dravidian’ (analogous to the Aryan
and the Semitic in Europe) races as to who was indigenous and who the alien, continues to
inform the historiography of ancient India even today.20 The Utilitarian idea of Oriental
Despotism, the Marxian21 concept of the Asiatic mode of production and Wittfogel’s theory
of amalgamating both in order to explain the ‘unchanging’ nature of the Indian society (again
in contrast with European society) were all intellectual exercises in the ‘othering’ of the
‘Orient’.22 This went hand in hand with the ‘spiritualization’ of Indian culture as opposed to
the materialistic ethic of Europe.23 Aspects of these hypotheses were later questioned by the
Nationalist historians. However, this was done without departing from the established
paradigm of thinking about the history of ancient India.

16
William Jones, H. T. Colebrooke, H. H. Wilson, James Prinsep were prominent British Orientalists among
others.
17
“The Orient is not just adjacent to Europe… [it is] its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most
recurring images of the other. E. Said, Orientalism, 1.
18
Max Weber identified Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras as Priests, Knights, Free commoners, and
serfs respectively, i.e. in terms of what he perceived to be the closest European equivalents. M. Weber, The
Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, 5.
19
The trope of India being the land of conquests, for the Aryans, the Mohammedans, and the British was
something which persisted in almost all European writings on the History of India, for example, in Karl Marx’s
Notes on Indian History.
20
See R. Thapar, “The Historiography of the Concept of ‘Aryan’” in R. Thapar, ed., India: Historical Beginnings
and the Concept of the Aryan, for an erudite exposition of this topic.
21
It is curious to note that neither Marx nor Muller nor Mill had ever visited India, even though their
assumptions had shaped the historiography of ancient India to a great extent.
22
See R. Thapar, Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 6-8, for a discussion of these
theories.
23
The existence of a materialistic tradition in ancient Indian philosophy in D.P. Chattopadhyay’s Lokayata: A
Study in Ancient Indian Materialism would later debunk this generalization.
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The Nationalist response24 was essentially a competitive act. The past that was
imagined by the Nationalist historians was also a homogenous representation, which
questioned the Utilitarian interpretations, but not the assumptions. It was largely, in effect, a
continuation of the Orientalist project that was internalized by the early Nationalist
historians.25 While the readings of the orientalists were informed by romanticism, those of the
Nationalists were imbued with a sense of nostalgic revivalism. This led to the conception of
the ‘Golden’ and ‘Dark’ Ages in Indian history, the former being the past that the Nationalists
sought to embrace and the latter being the one they desired to escape.26 This took little time to
acquire communal overtones.27 Europe remained the point of reference for Nationalist
comparisons.28 Such a competitive perception of the past prefigured the imagination of
ancient India as a Greater Indian Empire,29 which had its colonies30 like Europe too. The
primary motivation of Nationalist history writing in the colonial period was the
quest for a national identity. Although an analogous motivation31 had caused the proliferation
of a number of regional histories,32 such writings continued to adhere to the nationalist
construct of the connectedness of the regions to the wider Indian history and focused less on
the potential historical autonomy of such regional identities.33 The nationalist rejoinder to the
colonial construct of ancient Indian history was largely an act of mirroring and was therefore
limited by such paradigmatic emulation.

24
This was spearheaded by R.L Mitra, R.G. Bhandarkar, K.P. Jayaswal, R.C. Dutt, A.S. Altekar, H.C. Raychaudhuri,
R.K. Mookherjee, R.C. Majumdar, and K.A.N. Sastri among others.
25
See R. Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 15-19.
26
See B.N. Mukherjee, Shamrajyer Baaki Itihas (Susobhan Chandra Sarkar Memorial Lecture, 1997), for a
brilliant critique of the ‘Golden’ - ‘Dark’ Ages Model, assuming such a paradigm to be given.
27
R. Thapar, op. cit., 21.
28
For example, Samudragupta, was continued to be described as the ‘Indian Napoleon’, which had been
coined by Smith. V. A. Smith, op. cit., 283.
29
The Calcutta based Greater India Society comprising R.C. Majumdar, S.K. Chatterjee, P.K. Bagchi, P. Bose, K.
Nag and others conceptualised this idea.
30
See R.C. Majumdar, Kambuja-Desa or An Ancient Hindu Colony in Cambodia.
31
An interesting way of looking at such motivations can begin with questions like, ‘Why did a professional
archaeologist and historian like Rakhaldas Banerjee write a historical novel like Sasanka?’ Mayurika
Chakravorty makes a thought-provoking argument about how the hunger for such a genre had to be satiated
at a time of emerging national consciousness and “how narrativizing history and historicizing narratives were
simultaneous processes in the making of a nascent ‘national’ identity” in “‘Skeletons of History’: Fact and
Fiction in Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay’s Sasanka”.
32
The attempts of writing regional histories exposed the fallibility of Mill’s periodization since the very idea of
a singular uniform scheme of periodizing the history for the whole of subcontinent was found to be chimeric.
33
Rakhaldas Banerjee wrote in his preface to Bangalar Itihas, Vol.I, “The history of the land of Bengal is but a
small part in the history of India… [With this in mind] at the end of each chapter an appendix summarizes the
story of the larger phase in Indian history to which this period in Bengal’s history is inextricably connected”.
See T. Guha Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India,
332. In fact, K.A.N. Sastri considered that History began in South India as in the North, with the beginning of its
‘Aryanization’. K.A.N. Sastri, A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijaynagar, 65.
 5

The shift came with the Marxist departure34 led by D.D. Kosambi in the 1950s. His
contribution to the writing of Indian history inspired a whole generation of Indian historians35
to rethink the Indian past and contest36 the previous interpretations in more ways than ever
before. Kosambi asked new questions and deployed new interdisciplinary methods37 in the
study of ancient India. He critiqued Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production Theory and engaged
in a creative modification of Marxist models38 so as to explain the social formations in
ancient India as a dialectical process. Kosambi started the trend of analysing the existing
sources on ancient India to mine social and economic data and shifted the focus away from
dynastic histories obsessed with chronologies.39 Nonetheless, even this paradigm shift
ushered in by such a great polymath had its limitations, which could otherwise be read as
continuities from the earlier historiographic strands. Firstly, Kosambi too subscribed to the
dubious theory of the Aryan invasion at the commencement of the Vedic period, so much so
that he went on to even identify such an invasion with ‘destruction, [and] conquest’.40
Secondly, even Kosambi maintained that ‘there [remained] only one Indian chronicle worth
the name, the Rajatarangini by Kalhana and was rather dismissive of the indigenous
traditions of history-writing for being overinformed (and obscured to some extent) by layers
of myths.41 Kosambi’s preoccupation about sifting the kernels of history from the chaff of
myth42 remained central to his ideas and was firmly rooted in a positivistic (albeit somewhat
different from nineteenth century positivism) view of history. This was strangely reminiscent
of the positivist stance taken in the writing of history by scholars in the colonial period. The
Kosambian shift in paradigm, howsoever impactful, could not possibly have been sustained
without the erudite follow-up works by the next generation of historians of ancient India,
especially the contribution of Ram Sharan Sharma and Romila Thapar, which buttressed the
case that Kosambi had started to make.

34
‘Departure’ from the old and ‘Arrival’ at the new, for “truth is a point of arrival, not a point of departure.” C.
Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Translated by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi), 6.
35
The most notable ones being Ram Sharan Sharma, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra among others.
36
Competition happens within the paradigm while Contestation seeks to break free from it.
37
For example, he extensively used statistical methods to interpret numismatic data and attempted to
understand India’s ancient past through ethnographic models---which he called ‘living prehistory’ in his An
Introduction to the Study of Indian History.
38
The most famous of this being his critical application of the Feudal Mode of Production to explain transitions
in Indian history, which was further developed by R.S. Sharma in Indian Feudalism, later.
39
R. Thapar, op.cit., 23.
40
D.D. Kosambi, op. cit.,86.
41
Ibid., 2. However, Romila Thapar, writes, “Although Kosambi did not directly argue for the existence of
historical traditions, his analysis of early Indian society made the recognition such traditions a probability.”
(emphasis mine). R. Thapar, The Past Before Us, 43.
42
Something which he consciously attempted in his quite remarkable book, Myth and Reality: Studies in the
Formation of Indian Culture.
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Thapar’s interpretations of early43 Indian history have been much more nuanced and
self-conscious than those of the previous historians.44 She has written extensively on a
diverse range of themes, from viewing renunciation as the creation of a counter-culture to
tracing the various narratives of Somanatha, and almost everything in between.45 Within this
enormous corpus of work that she has done over decades in the domain of early Indian
history, two paradigmatic breakthroughs stand out. Firstly, she has critically examined the
problems associated with the ‘Theory of Aryan Invasion’ as it had been espoused in myriad
ways for different reasons by the Orientalists, Nationalists, Arya Samajists, Theosophists,
Dalits, and the Communalists, instead of taking the same for granted.46 This has also paved
the way for critiquing the political abuses of such problematic theories about the past in
present times. Secondly, Thapar has completely deflated the assumption that early Indians did
not have any sense of linear time and consequently lacked a sense of historical consciousness,
as was supposed to be ‘evident’ from the dearth of ‘historical texts’ belonging to that period
of time. Her formulations about the embedded, emerging, alternative, and externalized
historical traditions in early India have also significantly altered the conceptions regarding
what constituted a ‘historical text’ and what did not.47 Notwithstanding this, when Thapar
argues for the existence of a sense of history in Early India, she is engaged in the act of
responding to the assumptions made by Mill, i.e. answering the question asked from within
the paradigm set by him.48 Exorcising Mill’s Ghost has therefore been far more difficult than
could be envisaged earlier.49

43
‘Ancient’ and ‘Early’ have been treated as interchangeable terms in this essay. However, ‘Ancient’ has been
used consistently till our attempt to discuss the historiographical contribution of Thapar and has been
substituted by ‘Early’ thereafter.
44
Lecture by Neeladri Bhattacharya on ‘Critical Turn in the Writing of History’ delivered at Ambedkar
University, Delhi, on 19th September, 2018.
45
See R. Thapar, Cultural Pasts.
46
While the theory was popularised in India by the Orientalists like Max Muller, Jyotiba Phule, representing
the Dalit point of view, argued for an indigenous status for the adivasis as opposed to the alien status of the
Aryan invaders. Nationalists like Tilak claimed antique Aryan supremacy and so did Arya-Samaj Proponent,
Dayanand Saraswati, whose views on upper-caste exclusivity based on Aryan origins ran opposite to those of
Phule. The theosophists, whose earlier views coincided with those of the Arya Samajists later argued for the
indigeneity and racial superiority of the Aryans, something that would later be taken up by Savarkar and
Golwalkar with added emphasis on religious identity in response to the Dalit views. See R. Thapar, “The
Historiography of the Concept of the ‘Aryan’” in R. Thapar, ed., India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of
the Aryan, 6-20.
47
See R. Thapar, The Past Before Us and R. Thapar, Time as a Metaphor of History for more elaborate
discussion on these issues.
48
A possible question that could be asked from outside the paradigm could be ‘How widespread was such a
sense of history or the absence of it in early Indian society?’
49
R. Thapar, The Historian and Her Craft (Vol. I), xlviii.
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Another major paradigmatic change that has occurred since the 1980s has been the
preoccupation with the gendering of early Indian history. Several scholars have attempted to
give up the ‘add women and stir formula’50 and to recover the voices of women51 from the
past. The recognition of women as a non-homogenous category has led to the issues of caste
and wealth to be seen as enmeshed in gender relations.52 Moreover, mechanisms of sexual
governance and the ensuing power-relations as historical determinants are also being looked
at in radically different ways than ever before. Social formations in transitional moments of
history are therefore being acknowledged to have been constituted as much by the
reproductive forces as the productive ones, which had led to the emergence of a ‘claste’
society in India.53 The depiction of the emergence of households54 and states as deeply
gendered phenomena55 and the shift away from discussing the ‘changing status’ of women
throughout the ages to locating women’s agency and consciousness within the mainstream (or
rather the male-stream56) of history has been a step towards demarginalization. Such a change
was accompanied by an inevitable increase in histories from below since societal
subordination in one form or the other was a shared experience for women and Dalits.57

History-writing in Early India has come a long way, imagining the bard58and the
barbarian,59 perceiving the household60 and the forest,61 and rethinking dissent62 and
intolerance63 over time. These are indicators of significant shifts from earlier paradigm(s).
The unfamiliarity with which history writing began in the colonial period had given rise to
many assumptions which were either accepted or rejected in later interpretations and
reinterpretations. Nonetheless, the questioning of these assumptions continues to be central to
any discussion of the historiography of early India. This cannot any more be attributed only
to positivist inquiries seeking to validate the ‘true’ (or rather ‘accurate’) representation of

50
This is something which Kumkum Roy has been able to do. U. Chakravarti, “Of Meta-Narratives and ‘Master’
Paradigms: Sexuality and the Reification of Women in Early India”, 4.
51
This has entailed looking beyond just Brahmanical texts for sources of history, for example the Therigatha.
52
See U. Chakravarti, “Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm: Towards a New Understanding of Gender Relations in
Early Indian History”.
53
U. Chakravarti, op. cit., 5-6.
54
Spaces where cultural meanings are created, reinforced and contested. K. Roy (ed.), Looking Within and
Looking Without: Exploring Households in the Subcontinent Through Time,1.
55
U. Chakravarti, op. cit., 4.
56
This can also be read as ‘heteronormative’.
57
See A. Parasher-Sen, ed., Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India. Also see B. R. Mani,
Debrahmanising History.
58
See R. Thapar, op. cit., 579-586.
59
See R. Thapar, Cultural Pasts, 235-260 and A. Parasher-Sen, “Of Tribes, Hunters, and Barbarians” in India’s
Environmental History, ed. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan,129-134.
60
See K. Roy (ed.), op. cit.
61
R. Thapar, “Perceiving the Forest” in M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan ed., op. cit., 105-123.
62
See R. Thapar, Cultural Pasts, 213-232.
63
D.N. Jha, “Brahmanical Intolerance in Early India” in Social Scientist, Vol. 44, No. 5/6, 3-10.
 8

early Indian past. Moreover, questions like how ‘colonial’ the colonial constructs of the
Indian past were needs to be asked and the agency of the ‘native informants’ in the creation
of such a ‘colonial’ body of knowledge, needs to be located. The complicity of historians in
the various levels of identity-formation,64 be that of a secular and tolerant nation or that of a
syncretic, pluralistic community, also requires to be contextually comprehended.65 The
paradigms of narratives have to be rethought not just in the academia, but also in the works of
public history.66 The writing of history is as much a political act as it is an academic one. It
therefore becomes essential to historicize the historian while ‘elaborating’67 her work.
Tracing the underlying continuities in historiography and the reasons for their sustained
existence, therefore, becomes a good place to start.

Word count: 2146

64
As Eric Hobsbawm said, “For history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist
ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction.” E. Hobsbawm, On History, 5.
65
See R. Thapar, Historian and Her Craft (Vol. 1),337-339.
66
The domain of public history in India has always been immersed in political controversies. Yet, quite
astonishingly, it has remained rather slow in accommodating subsequent changes that have taken place in
academic historiography. A prominent example of this remains the Harappan Gallery of the National Museum
at New Delhi, which, in spite of undergoing all the infrastructural upgradation, seems to be curated in the
same way as it used to be more than a decade back, obsessed with representing any conjectural link that could
be drawn between the Harappan Civilization and the Vedic Religion System through unsubstantiated labelling
of the artefacts.
67
I am using this term in the sense of ‘working with’ as used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her Keynote
Address at the Bicentenary Celebrations of Presidency University on 16 th January, 2017.
 9

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