History, Archaeology and Ideology- Essays on Intellectual and Social History of Early India

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In a country as vast and varied as India and that too with an extraordinary long and continuous history spanning over several millennia, historical processes of its development just cannot be unilinear. Since such diversified processes are being presented in this monograph in a broad material background, it becomes imperative that the simultaneous presence of varied production processes in different parts of the subcontinent is recognised and underlined. In fact, modes of production and productive forces as factors behind historical transformations through the centuries have been stressed in most of the contributions here. Be it the issue of social formations and their dynamism, or of the analysis of the so-called feminist' writings; comprehending the ground realities of the lowest orders of the social fabric, or of providing fresh insights for delineating the developmental stages of Indian arts; construction of the apparatus of knowledge systems in early India, or of establishing the true identity of common Indian human being; the central focus has always been on the ordinary toiling people of the country. Even archaeologists have been exhorted to make them the real subjects of enquiry and data retrieval in their diggings and excavation reports. Long tradition of questioning going back to the Rgveda, social bases of knowledge systems, construction of 'heritage' and its sustenance in the face of challenges of 'development', ideological confrontations with neo-colonialist strains and incessant concern about communalisation of writings on Indian history and archaeology are other themes that have been highlighted here. Sixteen essays of this anthology cover almost the whole gamut of five millennia of Indian history.

Krishna Mohan Shrimali (b. 1947) retired as Professor of History, University of Delhi after serving it for more than four decades (1968-2012). He has authored ten and edited four substantive monographs. Some of these include History of Panchala (two volumes); The Agrarian Structure in Central India and the Northern Deccan, The Iron Age and the Religious Revolution, c.700-c350 BC and The Religious Enterprise: Studies in Early Indian Religions (2 vols.). He has presided over several Regional History Congress in India, as well as the Indian History Congress. His forthcoming monographs are Land, Agriculture and Money in Central India and Beyond, and Learning History from Historians.

I have had the privilege of studying, researching, and teaching of nearly all courses related to different aspects of early Indian history during my forty-five year-old career at the University of Delhi. Since such courses, particularly at the postgraduate level, were text/source-oriented, there were immense opportunities of acquainting students with literature in classical languages, and other non-literary texts, such as material cum archaeological remains, epigraphs, numismatic and artistic artefacts of human creativity. During the span of such an academic career, the understanding about the necessity, and perhaps also the inevitability, of presenting the totality of social, economic and political developmental process of common people in a broader material framework became too obvious to me. This monograph is a product of such a realisation. Today, in India, its extraordinary cultural diversity is being seriously challenged and its cultural identity is being sought to be manufactured in an exclusively single component of religion, i.e. 'monolithic Hinduism'. This reminds us of D.D. Kosambi's exposition of 'the complete historical process'. Writing about it in 1965, he called it uniquely Indian process to be explained by the logic of India's societal development and in terms of Indian cultural elements, 'culture being understood in the sense of the ethnographer, to describe the essential way of life of the whole people'. Such a conception of culture has no space for two separate and compartmentalized components, convention- ally formulated as religion and culture. Rather, like all other aspects of common people's life, religion too is an integral element of culture. "The complete historical process' was not solely dependent on economic determinism, as is generally understood in what Eric Hobsbawm termed as 'vulgar-Marxism'. The common human is the central figure in all essays of this anthology. In a country as vast and varied as India and that too with an extraordinary long and continuous history spanning over several millennia, the developmental processes just cannot be unilinear. Since such diversified processes are being presented in a broad material background, it becomes imperative that the simultaneous presence of varied production processes in different parts of the subcontinent are recognized and under- lined. In fact, modes of production and productive forces as factors behind historical transformations through the centuries have been stressed in most of the contributions here. Be it the issue of social formations and their dynamism, or of the analysis of the so-called 'feminist' writings; comprehending the ground realities of the lowest orders of the social fabric, or of providing fresh insights for delineating the developmental stages of Indian arts; construction of the apparatus of knowledge systems in early India, or of establishing the true identity of common Indian human being; the central focus has always been on the ordinary toiling people of the country. Even archaeologists have been exhorted to make them the real subjects of enquiry and data retrieval in their diggings and excavation reports. Long tradition of questioning going back to the Rigveda, social bases of knowledge systems, construction of 'heritage' and its sustenance in the face of challenges of 'development', ideological confrontations with neo-colonialist strains and incessant concern about communalisation of writings on Indian history and archaeology are other themes that have been highlighted here.