Aspect of the Cultural History of Ancient Bihar

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In the third week of August, 1982, I received a letter from the Director of the K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, kindly inviting me to deliver the first of the recently started annual series of Jayaswal Memorial Lectures to be delivered about the time of the late Dr. Jayaswal's next birth anniversary on the 27th November, 1982. It was indicated to me that the subject of the lectures would be the Polity, Society and Culture of Ancient Bihar. Since I have spent a considerable part of my long life in the study of the early his- tory particularly of Eastern India and have great respect for all our pioneers in the field of historical research, I readily accepted the proposal in spite of my preoccupations and the shortness of the time allowed to me for the preparation of the lectures. My plan was to deal in my three Lectures mainly with the problems of Polity, Social Life and Religious Life respectively.

Soon afterwards, however, I remembered a recent exper- ience of mine and it occurred to me that the subject of cultural history on which I have been requested to deliver the lectures is frought with some amount of danger because we are now unfortunately living in an age when it is not very easy for the historian to speak out the truth freely. Suppose I say that the Vedic Brāhmaņas were beef-eaters or that the Buddha, Mahāvīra and Aśoka were born in communities that were Mongoloid Nonaryans, I would do it merely as a histo- rian without thinking whether I belong to any particular State or socio-religious or communal group; but there may be people who would like to take me to the court of law for blashphemy while some others, under the prevailing circumstances may possibly even consider it better to stone me to death.