Re: [Marxism] Query from an old friend about India

["Jacob Levich" <jlevich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From a friend:

Probably the best Marxist historian of medieval India is Irfan Habib. He is
now bringing out a series of slim volumes called a People's History of
India, starting with Prehistoric India, then Mohenjodaro-Harappa, Vedic
India, the Gupta civilisation, etc; as far as I know 4 or 5 short,
non-academic volumes in the series have been brought out to date, all
excellent, most of them written/co-written by Habib. The publisher is
Tulika, New Delhi.

The pioneer in Marxist analysis of ancient Indian history was D.D. Kosambi
(a real Renaissance character: a mathematician, who took up numismatics as a
hobby and became an authority in it); although apparently many of his
assertions were later challenged, his stuff was generally groundbreaking.
The two titles which are widely read are The Culture and Civilisation of
Ancient India in Historical Outline and An Introduction to the Study of
Indian History. The latter is more reader-friendly.

A popular quasi-Marxist historian is Romila Thapar, who has written the
first of the two volumes of a popular history of India brought out by
Penguin. (The second volume, incidentally, is unreadable.) I think she has
recently revised it and it has been brought out again by Penguin.


----- Original Message -----

Subject: [Marxism] Query from an old friend about India


I was left with a hunger for a historical
> materialist explanation of village life, economy, and caste system



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