This book is the first of the three books which come under the series HISTORY UNLEASHED. This book deals with the history of India from its known beginnings to our own times. The second book in the series deals with the history of Europe. The third book explores the history of the world.
This book undertakes to interpret the history of India from the point of view of a logical pattern that explores historical progress on the basis of civilization cycles. We have a number of books that deal with the history of India in the academic domain as well as in the public domain. But most of these works undertake to do the description of various events with reference to chronology. Such kind of historical explorations have left the people of the subcontinent into a confusing realm of intellectual anarchy. The current state of the society in the subcontinent is directly proportional to the chaos in its historical domain.
As against usual chronological descriptions, this book undertakes to elaborate the logical pattern of historical development in a vast geographical region in South Asia that we refer to as India, which consists of all the sub continental territories between the prosperous valleys of the rivers Indus in the west and Irrawaddy in the east and the majestic peaks of the Himalayas in the north and the expansive waters of the Indian Ocean in the south.
The work begins with an introductory essay under the title scriptography which is essentially a statement on the ways and means employed to execute the work. It begins with a brief description of the historiography of India and proceeds to understand the concept of a recurring logical pattern of historical development. It further lays emphasis on the constantly changing perceptions in historical writing and comes to the conclusion that history deals with not only the exploration of facts but also the detection of distorted facts out of which the latter is an extended responsibility of a historian who is overwhelmed by the constantly changing perceptions in the domain of history.
To illustrate this point let us take the following historical perspectives. It would be impossible for the current generation of the subcontinent to believe that anyone could walk freely between Peshawar in Pakistan and Mandalay in Myanmar until 1937 CE, when Burma was separated from India, because the sub-continental society, in spite of its vast differences in population components, cultures and beliefs, stood as a single civilization in the vision of the people who lived those times. Even after that the people of the subcontinent could move easily between Peshawar in Pakistan and Chittagong in Bangladesh until 1947 CE when the narrow-mindedness of our leaders and the intellectual impotence of our ruling classes led to a further cataclysmic partition of the subcontinent into various territorial polities. Today we have created a historical narrative that justifies the destructive division of the sub-continental society even when we are faced with catastrophic and multifarious challenges some of which are obviously the products of a pronounced decline of our civilization. We can proceed further in the hope that just as great ideas and great men in the past brought both unity and advancement to our civilization, it is possible that great ideas and great men in the future can bring a further extension of integrity and progress to make our civilization great once again.
The main contents of the book are divided into nine chapters. Each chapter deals with a specific period of Indian history. Each chapter is furnished with a unique spectrum of consciousness which consists of a list of literary and archaeological monuments belonging to the society or civilization that is being dealt in the chapter. Further, each chapter is provided with a list of reference books for extended reading. It is sincerely hoped that this new book on the history of India will encourage the people of the subcontinent to take a renewed interest in discussing about their past with a greater emphasis on their progress and unity in the future.
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Great work.
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