@article{1479461,
      recid = {1479461},
      author = {Thapar, Romila,  and Thapar, Romila, },
      title = {The Past Before Us : Historical Traditions of Early North  India /},
      pages = {1 online resource (784 p.) :},
      abstract = {The claim, often made, that India-uniquely among  civilizations-lacks historical writing distracts us from a  more pertinent question, according to Romila Thapar: how to  recognize the historical sense of societies whose past is  recorded in ways very different from European conventions.  In The Past Before Us, a distinguished scholar of ancient  India guides us through a panoramic survey of the  historical traditions of North India. Thapar reveals a deep  and sophisticated consciousness of history embedded in the  diverse body of classical Indian literature. The history  recorded in such texts as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata  is less concerned with authenticating persons and events  than with presenting a picture of traditions striving to  retain legitimacy and continuity amid social change.  Spanning an epoch of nearly twenty-five hundred years, from  1000 BCE to 1400 CE, Thapar delineates three distinct  historical traditions: an Itihasa-Purana tradition of  Brahman authors; a tradition composed mainly by Buddhist  and Jaina scholars; and a popular bardic tradition. The  Vedic corpus, the epics, the Buddhist canon and monastic  chronicles, inscriptions, regional accounts, and royal  biographies and dramas are all scrutinized afresh-not as  sources to be mined for factual data but as genres that  disclose how Indians of ancient times represented their own  past to themselves.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1479461},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674726512},
}