Vijay P. Tambanda (Ed.), Kannada Vishwavidyanilaya Charitre, 8 Vols.
Prasaranga: Kannada Univ., Hampi, 2010
“Useful Volumes”
During the colonial period, histories of India were written by British historians like James Mill, Vincent Smith, and such others as part of the Imperial agenda of England. As a reaction to such histories, during the 20th century, there were many ‘Nationalist’ histories of India written by Indians, the most influential among them being the ones by Jadunath Sarkar and R. C. Mujumdar. Towards the latter part of the last century, there arose many scholars like Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, and R. S. Sharma, who owed allegiance to Marxist ideology. And then there were ‘Subaltern Histories,’ focusing on the those classes and communities that hadn’t found a place in ‘Elite histories.’ What these different histories tell us is that the narrative called History is the ‘construct’ of an ideology, influential and powerful at a particular period of time, which may tell us about what may have happened in the past.
