“An authority on thousands of years of India’s past, Thapar has a rare and special perspective on the country it was and the country it is becoming.” —Financial Times

Winner of the Kluge Prize Romila Thapar presents a sweeping survey of the historical traditions of North India, revealing a deep consciousness of history embedded in classical Indian literature.

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.

"Romila Thapar is one of India’s foremost historians and has made an immense contribution in the field of early Indian history…At a time when we find popular myths or manufactured tales about the past being peddled as history, Thapar has stressed the duty of historians to stick with the evidence." - Jacobin

"An authority on thousands of years of India’s past, Thapar has a rare and special perspective on the country it was and the country it is becoming." - Financial Times

"The breathtaking sweep of Thapar's historiographic gaze will likely remain unmatched for decades to come, and The Past before Us will surely have a considerable future as a classic in the field." - American Historical Review

"Romila Thapar [is] arguably India’s greatest living historian…The Past Before Us sums up a lifetime’s work on the nature of historical knowledge…[and] is unlikely to be surpassed in the near future." - South Asian History and Culture

"Groundbreaking…[Thapar] has shown, through her analysis of some important ancient Indian texts, how untenable it is to believe that India, in its two millennia of ancient history, had no sense of historical writing." - The Historian

"Ancient Indian civilization was perceived as lacking historical consciousness. To this ‘now dog-eared argument,’ Thapar, one of the most prominent Indian historians living today, delivers a strong counterargument. Yet the book is not written polemically; rather, it is a careful and judicious account based on Thapar’s erudition in Indian history and years of research on the subject…Reading this book would be an educative experience for many, not only for scholars of India." - Choice