People's History Of India  1 | Prehistory

India Has A Large And Diverse Economic And Social Database Which, Although It Compares Well With The Information Available In Other Developing Countries, Is Characterised By A Number Of Inadequacies. To Address These And Related Problems Of Access Current And Historical Information, The Indian Council Of Social Science Research Organised A Seminar On The Current Status Of Socio-Economic Data` At The Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi In 1997. This Volume Brings Together The Papers Presented At The Seminar.

A People's History of India 2: The Indus Civilisation 

The Indus Civilisation by Irfan Habib forms Volume 2 of the People's History of India series. It continues the story from the point reached in the preceding volume, Prehistory, and goes on to describe in depth the Indus Civilization. In addition, other contemporary and later cultures down to about 1500 BC are surveyed, and there is a discussion on how the major language families of India have emerged.

A People's History of India 3: The Vedic Age  

The Vedic Age completes the first set of three monographs in the People's History of India series. It deals with the period c. 1500 to c. 700 bc, during which it sets the Rigveda and the subsequent Vedic corpus. It explores aspects of geography, migrations, technology, economy, society, religion, and philosophy. It draws on these texts to reconstruct the life of the ordinary people, with special attention paid to class as well as gender. In a separate chapter, the major regional cultures as revealed by archaeological evidence are carefully described. Much space is devoted to the coming of iron, for the dawn of the Iron Age - though not the Iron Age itself - lay within the period this volume studies. There are special notes on historical geography, the caste system (whose beginnings lay in this period) and the question of epic archaeology. A special feature of this monograph is the inclusion of seven substantive extracts from different sources, which should give the reader a taste of what these texts are like.