Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History - Hardcover

Thapar, Romila

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844670201 ISBN 13: 9781844670208

Publisher: Verso Books, 2005

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

Review:

"Romila Thapar is the most eminent Indian historian."--Eric Hobsbawm (in praise of The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300)

Synopsis:

In 1026, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided the Hindu temple of Somanatha (Somnath in textbooks of the colonial period). The story of the raid has reverberated in Indian history, but largely during the raj. It was first depicted as a trauma for the Hindu population not in India, but in the House of Commons. The triumphalist accounts of the event in Turko-Persian chronicles became the main source for most eighteenth-century historians. It suited everyone and helped the British to divide and rule a multi-millioned subcontinent. In her new book, Romila Thapar, the doyenne of Indian historians, reconstructs what took place by studying other sources, including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings and merchants of the period, court epics and popular narratives that have survived. The result is astounding and undermines the traditional version of what took place. What makes her findings explosive is the fact that the current Hindu nationalist regime in India constantly utilizes a particular version of history

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1844670201
• ISBN 13: 9781844670208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 265