Political History of Ancient India.

• Author: ROCHER, LUDO
• Position: Review

Political History of Ancient India: From the Accession of Parikshit to the Extinction of the Gupta Dynasty. By HEMCHANDRA RAYCHAUDHURI. New edition [eighth] with a commentary by B. N. MUKHERJEE. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xxxv + 849. $39.95.

Hemchandra Raychaudhuri's (1892-1957) Political History of Ancient India was published in 1923, one year after the first volume of The Cambridge History of India. The author himself revised his work up to the fifth edition (1950). The sixth edition (1953), for which he only wrote a brief preface, was reprinted posthumously (1970) with a foreword by D. C. Sircar. A. L. Basham, writing about Raychaudhuri's Political History in 1961, said that "in so many respects it is the most important work of ancient Indian history written in the last forty years, for since its first publication in 1923 it has gone into six editions, and has been used as a standard text-book in all the colleges and universities of India, largely replacing Smith's Early History. Thus it has affected the historical thinking of a whole generation of Indians" (in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C. H. Philips, p. 284).

When in 1992, Oxford University Press requested B. N. Mukherjee again to revise Raychaudhuri's book, he "decided against tampering with the text itself, which had already acquired the status of a classic. Moreover, we thought that the readers should have the right to know the last views of the author on the subjects...