The Competition World

"One of the most interesting aspects of the study of history is knowing the history of history writing itself. It gives you an idea how history changes by the changing interpretation." Indian Tradition of History Writing How same data and the same evidence get completely different meaning in the hands of different scholars. In this chapter, we are going to learn precisely this aspect of ancient Indian history. We shall study when and how the writing of ancient Indian history began and how it progressed, traversing different paths over a long period of time. Many foreign scholars opined that Indians had no sense of history writing and whatever was written in the name of history is nothing more than a story without any sense. This appears to be a very harsh judgment. To say that Indians had no consciousness about their own history and no sense of writing history is simply incorrect. The knowledge of history was given a very high place in ancient India. It was accorded s...

KNOWING about one's past is natural to all of us. We are always curious to know as to who were our ancestors i.e. grandfather, great-grandfather and so on; from where did they come, how they lived etc. This is known as the quest for knowing the history of an individual family, which can differ vastly within a single society. But when the study is extended beyond the individual families, to the society, it takes a completely different shape. Then we talk about the entire society and the whole nation. This quest about knowing the past is known as history.  Through the study of history of a society or nation we have come to know about the past of that society or nation. We came to know how that society or the nation has developed over a long period of time. Some of these aspects are: how they started agriculture, when they began the use of metal and how spinning, weaving, metalworking developed. With all these economic aspects, also came a whole lot of other things like the...