Early Indian notions of History

         

              Short History                                    07/08/2022

Early Indian notions of History

 

      Notion of history is the way and methods in which history is perceived studied, recorded and passed on through the ages in a particular culture. Naturally the understanding of history varied all over the world. Indian nation of History differs from the European nation of History.

       The European notion of history stemmed from the Roman and Greek notions. The Romans believed that history should be preserved by the process of maintaining written records. Chroniclers were expected to record an unbiased and truthful version of the events, relying on their own observations or eyewitnesses. However they were free to give their own views on the matters after the facts were recorded, and usually did. The Medieval Europeans followed this notion of history - as long as it didn't interfere with religion, knowledge was after all regulated by the church through the Middle Ages (except Italy after the Renaissance) and the church didn't need the people or, more importantly, the royalty doubting their portrayal of the superiority of Christ.

In other words, the Europeans studied History by fitting it into a cause and effect theme. To study causality, knowledge of how, why, when an event happened and the events leading up to it are important. This is why the European notion places so much importance on written records of events. There is little room for anything other than the facts in it.

When Europeans first encountered the early Indian notions of history, they dismissed Indians as not having a sense of history. The reason for this is that there were few sources of 'real' historical writing from ancient India. Although it is true that there is a lack of attempts to chronicle facts in ancient India; this cannot be taken to mean that Indians did not have a sense of history. The sense was very much there, it was just different from the European sense. It cannot be denied that ancient Indians did not produce many outstanding historians.  But it is totally true that there existed a vast amount of historical writing of various kinds. Prof. Warder has remarked  that Indian historiography possessed continuity from Vedic antiquity to modern times , but also he points out that  “ what he has brought to light is probably a very limited selection from the extent of historical writing in Indian languages, an unknown but possibly large number of texts remaining hidden in manuscript form”. Dr. R.C. Majumdar, professor Surendra  Nath Banerjee expresses their views against the opinion that Indian history was introduced by the foreigners. The Vedas , the Purana, the Great Epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , Buddhist and Jain literature also provide good knowledge of Ancient Indian history.

Thus it is clear that ancient Indians were history conscious in broader outlook. Though they were not conscious only in text book sense of term history, yet they produced vast literature which has historical importance.  It can be said that they were Philosophers of History in true sense of the term and their accounts provide a lot of information on ancient Culture and Society .