Ram Sharan Sharma Ancient History In Hindi Pdf Download
Roselee Pando
Sharma combined lifelong commitment to high-quality historical research on ancient India with equal commitment to high-quality teaching and imparting historical knowledge to several generations of students, a large number of whom grew under his care and guidance into serious scholars and researchers in their own right and enriched the profession.[13] Further, he was also engaged for a large part of his life in nurturing and building institutions engaged in the teaching of history and historical research.[13]
The publication of his monograph Indian Feudalism in 1965 caused almost a furore in the academia, generating intense debate and sharp responses both in favour of and against the applicability of the model of "feudalism" to the Indian situation at any point of time.[11] The concept of "feudalism" was initially used by D. D. Kosambi to analyse the developments in the socio-economic sphere in the late ancient and medieval periods of Indian history.[25] Sharma, while differing from Kosambi on certain significant points, added a great deal of depth to the approach with his painstaking research and forceful arguments.[11] The work has been called his magnum opus.[11] Criticism goaded Sharma into reinforcing his thesis by producing another work of fundamental importance, Urban Decay in India (c.300-1000), in which he marshalled an impressive mass of archaeological data to demonstrate the decline of urban centres, a crucial element of his thesis on feudalism.[11] It won him the H.K. Barpujari award instituted by the Indian History Congress.[11] However, the redoubtable professor was unstoppable, and in his Early Medieval Indian Society: A Study in Feudalisation (Orient Longman, 2001), he further rebutted the objections of his critics point by point.[11]
Ifirst met R S Sharma in the mid-1950s at the School of Oriental and African Studies (soas) in London University. I had just started on research for a PhD and he had come to do postdoctoral research. I had completed a BA Hons degree with a specialisation in ancient Indian history. A L Basham had recommended reading the established historians such as R C Majumdar, H C Raychaudhuri, Vincent Smith, and so on. But he mentioned that the app roach of R S Sharma was different and that of D D Kosambi even more so. This was made apparent when we sat in on the first ever conference on south Asian historiography and heard R C Majumder on ancient Indian historical writing followed by R S Sharma on the historiography of ancient Indian social history. The even more memorable occasion was when Basham invited Kosambi to SOAS to give a series of lectures on Hinduism. This introduced us to an altogether new dimension in the study of ancient history and was a demonstration of the intellectual challenge to conventional history. The presence of these two scholars, however brief, created an interesting little niche of new thinking in an institution which 50 years ago was generally conservative in its study of Asia.
When inscriptions began to be read as documents recording social and economic history, another world opened up. For instance, the importance of women donors and what we now know about the status and function of women at various levels of early Indian society. This was data that did not conform to either the negative image of the status of women in the dharmashastras or the high status projected in earlier histories of ancient India. The inscriptions suggested a varying status dependent on occupation, caste and wealth.
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