The Mauryas Revisited.

• Author: Conlon, Frank F.

Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912), a Bihar-born Maharashtrian who spent most of his life in Bengal, excelled as a teacher and writer in both Marathi and Bengali. An active public worker, his blending of rural roots and urban experience, of the language and cultures of two regions and of patriotic skepticism regarding the fruits of colonial rule, made him emblematic of the transformations of Indian society produced by the nationalist movement. In his memory the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences inaugurated a lecture series on Indian history in which leading Indian historians introduce recent research or revisit and revise established subjects.

In his survey of eighteenth century India, Satish Chandra questions the, by now discredited, convention that it was a time of decay and decline. Rather, in an examination of ambitious regional powers pressing forward on all sides, he perceives two in two distinct strands of economic and political development, one within the Mughal successor states where Mughal institutions survived in a transformed condition, and the other in the newly established Maratha, Jat, Afghan and Sikh dominations, where they did not.

As the zone of longest British intrusion, Bengal received the greatest array of influences and attentions from its colonial masters. In turn, as Tapan Raychaudhuri points out, Bengalis developed a fascination for and a sophisticated perception of the...