The Vedic Age: A People's History of India - 3

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The Vedic Age completes the first set of three monographs in the People's History of India series. It deals with the period c. 1500 bc, during which it sets the Rigveda and the subsequent Vedic corpus. It explores aspects of geography, migrations, technology, economy, society, religion, and philosophy. It draws on these texts to reconstruct the life of the ordinary people, with special attention paid to class as well as gender. In a separate chapter, the major regional cultures as revealed by archaeological evidence are carefully described. Much space is devoted to the coming of iron, for the dawn of the Iron Age - through not the Iron Age itself - lay within the period this volume studies. There are special notes on Historical Geography, the caste system (whose beginnings lay in this period) and the question of Epic Archaeology. A special feature of this monograph is the inclusion of seven substantive extracts from sources, which should give the reader a taste of what these texts are like.

As in the first two monographs, the authors seek to present updated information with clarity of exposition and reasoned analysis. Both the general reader and the student should, therefore, find here much that is interesting and thought-provoking.

About the Author:

Irfan Habib, formerly Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University, is author of The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963), An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1982), Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception (1995) and of Prehistory (2001) and The Indus Civilization (2002) in this series. He has also edited Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (1999), (with J.S.Grewal) Sikh History from Persian Sources (2001), State and Diplomacy under Tipu Sultan: Documents and Essays (2001) and A Shared Heritage: The Growth of Civilizations in India and Iran (2002).

Vijay Kumar Thakur, Professor of History, Patna University, is author of Urbanization in Ancient (1981), Historiography of Indian Feudalism (1989) and Social Dimensions of Technology: Iron in Early India (1983). He has also edited Towns in Pre-Modern India (1994) and (with A. Aounshuman) Peasants in Indian History (1995).