Reviews for Early India: A Concise History

The average rating for Early India: A Concise History based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-27 00:00:00 James Williams This work wouldn't even be accepted as a wikipedia article. It cites few sources and gives little or no supporting evidence for many of its claims. A frequent phrase that begins a sentence is "According to one source..." What source? When? There is a "bibliography" at the end which merely lists a few hundred books - it is up to the reader to determine what bits of information came from which, and from where. Without being able to trace back the various claims, all claims in the book are dubious at best. Let's pick a paragraph at random from Chapter 3: The Vedic Life on page 60: "What may have added substantially to royal authority was that kingship ceased to be elective. The coronation rituals of the period are reminiscent of the earlier elective nature of the king's office. But one text prescribes formulae for extending kingship for one, two, and three generations, another for ten generations. Thus kingship became hereditary and gained in power. A religious aura was created around the person of the king by invoking various gods at the consecration ceremony to endow him with their respective qualities; in the rituals he was sometimes also represented as a god." I have so many questions. How on earth did you jump to "kingships ceasing to be elective"? From the spells? Where did these spells come from? You say you have two sources, but what are they? What is the relative trustworthiness of these, and from what time periods do we believe they were written? All kingship became hereditary, then? Are there no actual records or primary documents to support this amazing conjecture, or are you just going off of the spells? Do we have any other sources, such as shrine carvings or pottery shards that can shed light on this incredibly important shift in the ruling classes? I'm not going to go on. I am also not going to finish this book - I am not confident in the scholarship of this work.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-05 00:00:00 Gretchen Aubry The text stands true to its title - a concise history of Early India and the author has done all in his might to just stand to that. Jha pulls the 'history' up to present times placing present within the kernel of past - something that historians avoid in all might. The text surely lacks a fluid narrative base and is written in a very factual manner without proper citing of sources, hence hanging the facts in mid-air. Jha often engages in citing 'an inscription', 'a Puranic text' without going into the tardiness of stating which inscription and which Purana! Moreover, biases of the author against religious politics that finds its base in the past reflect clearly throughout the text. How far this text can be clumped into intellectual history is far more difficult to say for the author tries to place past and present on simultaneous tables without even for once trying to look at both from different lenses. The society and polities might often grow in certain directions and there is continuity but one cannot let go of discontinuities and it is essential as well as mandatory to analyse both in a historical narrative.