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Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past (Second Edition)

Author:Dilip K. Chakrabarti
ISBN:9789376540204
Binding:Hardcover
Year:2027
Pages:328
Size:15 x 23 cm
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About the Book
First published in 1997, Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past is Dilip K. Chakrabarti’s sustained examination of the intellectual and political assumptions that have shaped the study of ancient India. At its centre is a critique of the historical association of race, language and culture and of the ways in which these categories entered Western Indology and continued to influence both Western and Indian interpretations of the past.

Moving across archaeology, anthropology, historiography and ancient history, Chakrabarti examines racial classification, the Aryan question, the Indus Civilization, the chronology of early historic India, foreign influences on Indian civilization and interpretations of the Mauryan Empire. He also questions the extent to which ancient textual traditions, detached from secure chronological and geographical contexts, can provide a detailed historical reconstruction.

In place of inherited racial, linguistic and textual frameworks, Chakrabarti argues for an approach grounded in archaeology, historical geography, material evidence and detailed investigation of the relationship between human communities and the Indian landscape.

This substantially expanded second edition includes a major new preface that carries the argument from the eighteenth-century formation of Indology into contemporary scholarship and adds an important reassessment of the Indus Civilization and its place within the development of Indian culture. Provocative and wide-ranging, Colonial Indology asks a fundamental question: who constructs the past, through what categories and evidence, and within what structures of intellectual authority?
About the Author
Dilip K. Chakrabarti

Dilip K. Chakrabarti is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. One of India’s foremost archaeologists and historians of the ancient past, his research encompasses Indian archaeology, ancient history, historical geography and the history of archaeological thought.

He has authored more than thirty books, including A History of Indian Archaeology from the Beginning to 1947, The External Trade of the Indus Civilization, Archaeology of Eastern India: Chhotanagpur Plateau and West Bengal, The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities, India: An Archaeological History: Palaeolithic Beginnings to Early Historic Foundations, and The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology. His extensive archaeological fieldwork has covered large parts of the Indian subcontinent. In 2019, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri for his contribution to archaeology.
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