History Writing of Early India: New Discoveries and Approaches.

• Author: ROCHER, LUDO
• Position: Review

History Writing of Early India: New Discoveries and Approaches. By SHANKAR GOYAL. Jodhpur: KUSUMANJALI PRAKASHAN, 1996. Pp. xiii + 168. Rs 280.

The Image of Classical India: Its Changing Colours and Contours. By SHANKAR GOYAL. Jodhpur: KUSUMANJALI PRAKASHAN, 1997. Pp. xvi + 212. Rs 350.

Shankar Goyal, an assistant professor in the Department of History at the Jai Narain Vyas University in Jodhpur, earned his Ph.D. degree from the same institution with a thesis on "Main Trends in Indian Historiography since Independence," under the supervision of Professor Sobhag Mathur. The first volume under review (henceforth 1996) is based on the first three chapters of the dissertation, the second (henceforth 1997) on chapters five and six. One of two earlier volumes by Shankar Goyal, History and Historiography of the Age of Harsha (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Prakashan, 1992), was reviewed by David N. Lorenzen in the JAOS (113 [1993]: 480-81; Lorenzen's and other reviewers' appreciative comments on that book are quoted at 1997, 168-69); the other volume, Aspects of Ancient Indian History and Historiography (New Delhi: Harman Publishing House, 1993) contains a collection of twenty-three unconnected articles on Indian history and historiography.

Now going on forty, Shankar Goyal, the son of Indian historian S. R. Goyal, is becoming one of the most prolific writers on classical Indian history. Within a period of six years he has authored the four volumes mentioned earlier, co-edited several books and monographs with senior Indian scholars, and written more than seventy research papers ("About the Author," facing the title pages of 1996 and 1997).

Both volumes under review survey the "changing approaches" to the study of certain periods of Indian history. The 1996 volume...