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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 diversi-fied 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 Ṛgveda, 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.
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1 online resource (564 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753037
The Bakhshālī Manuscript : An Ancient Indian Mathematical Treatise /
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The Bakhshālī Manuscript is an old birch-bark manuscript which treats mathematics in Sanskrit. It was unearthed by a farmer in AD 1881 at the small village of Bakhshālī, about eighty kilometers north-east of Peshawar, one of the important trading centers of the ancient Gandhāra district (now Pakistan). It was studied by eminent Indologists and historians of mathematics of the time, yet a number of mathematical rules and examples in it were either left undeciphered or misunderstood due to the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, the irregularities of the language, and the fact that the study of the history of Indian mathematics was in an early stage. The dating of the manuscript as well as of the work in it has also been long a matter of controversy. The dates estimated range from the early centuries of the Christian era to the twelfth century. The situation has been much improved, however, by quite a few studies on Indian mathematics that appeared after those pioneering works, and by the publication of two Sanskrit works, Bhāskara's commentary on the Aryabhaṭīya and Srīdhara's Paṭīgaṇita with an old commentary, which have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Indian mathematics of the seventh and eighth centuries. This book offers a fresh translation of the manuscript, the first English translation of the whole text based on a systematic study of linguistic peculiarities, and a mathematical commentary based on a comparative study of the Bakhshālī work and other Sanskrit mathematical texts, including the two mentioned above. The Introduction attempts to locate the Bakhshālī work properly within the history of Indian mathematics.
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004646643