THE PRESENT VOLUME is the first of a multi-volumed Project on the Sources of the History of India covering the entire Indian sub-continent and all the three periods of history-ancient, medieval and modern. It is intended to fill up a great void in Indian historiography. Although serious researches in Indian history had started from the second half of the nineteenth century and considerable progress had been made during the last hundred years or more, there had been no attempt made so far in collecting the available source material in different Indian and foreign languages and preserved in different parts of the country. Nor had any attempt been made to ascertain the extent to which the available source material had been utilised by historians and the gaps that still remain to be filled up. Our primary objective in undertaking this multi-volumed Project is to help advanced students of history, researchers and teachers in getting to know the wealth of historical source material lying scattered in different parts of the country and in different languages.
In the context of our historical studies during the last one hundred years the time has come to make a comprehensive compilation of the available source material of all kinds archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, written records, etc.-which will help the historians to reconstruct the past, and to ascertain the extent to which this reconstruction had been achieved, the fields that still remain uncovered and the source material still remaining unutilised. It is in the nature of a stock-taking of the progress already made and of the path that still lies ahead. The present Project is a pioneer venture, and it is to be hoped that it will serve its main objective as a path-finder to the present and future generations of historians.
India is a vast country and a land of diversity-ethnological, cultural, religious, regional and linguistic. For a proper study and reconstruction of Indian history a central or all-India approach will be quite useless and superficial. The basic approach should be regional, at least from the point of view of the source material available. Indian society is not mono-lithic in the same sense as many other societies in the world. No doubt India is in the broadest sense one country and Indians have many things in common. But it would be quite un-realistic for a historian to ignore the regional diversities. So far as India is concerned, national history can be recon-structed only through a regional approach and on the basis of regional diversity. This is the approach we have followed in planning the multi-volumed Project of source material for the history of India.
Since our Sixth Annual Conference held at Srinagar (Kashmir) in 1968 we have always followed the practice of having as the second theme of papers and discussion Sources of the History of the particular State in which the Annual Conference was held. On this theme we accepted papers covering all the three periods of Indian history, ancient, medieval and modern. So far we have covered ten different States or regions and we hope to cover the remaining States or regions during the next ten years. We shall then be in a position to complete our Project on the Sources of the History of India. In the present volume we are covering four States-Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Goa. In each of the sub-sequent volumes we propose to cover four or five States. It may, no doubt, take a long time to complete the Project for the whole of India, but this, in our opinion, is the only rational way of presenting the source material in different languages and available in different parts of the country. Our second volume will also appear soon, but the next three volumes will take more time.
In order to make an exhaustive study of the source material available in any region or State and in different languages and also to ensure uniformity of treatment of the subject we had laid down a broad pattern for the writers to follow. The pattern is given below for the information of our readers and to enable them to follow more intelligently each of the papers included in the volume irrespective of the region or period covered.
Hindu (931)
Agriculture (123)
Ancient (1101)
Archaeology (794)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (923)
Biography (727)
Buddhist (547)
Cookery (166)
Emperor & Queen (575)
Islam (246)
Jainism (322)
Literary (887)
Mahatma Gandhi (387)
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