Ancient India (History and Archaeology)

Notwithstanding the remarkable progress in the realm of historical enquiry in our country, ancient India still remains a mysterious domain where the extant source-materials have proved to be inadequate and dubious. This explains why so many topics of ancient India history and culture have raged unending controversies among the historians. The present work mostly revolves around a few such controversial issues which have been objectively studied afresh in the light of the available data, literary and archeological.

The book comprises eight chapters: the Imperial Mauryas: Some Problems’, The Pala kings of Bengal and Bihar’, Side-Lights on the Religious Life of Ancient Orissa’, ‘The Satamana metallic Currency’, ‘Some Disquieting Features of Indian Archeology’, ‘Different Categories of the Brahmin Donees’, ‘Historical Researches in West Bengal’ and professor Dines Chandra Sircar’.

Dilip Kumar Ganguly, born in 1939 at Kirtipasha in Barisal district, Bangladesh, took Master’s degree from Calcutta University, standing first in Class I in order of merit. He joined Visva-Bharati University as a Lecturer in the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archeology in 1963. He obtained his doctorate from the same University in 1970, and the same year he was appointed a Reader in Visva-Bharati University and is at present professor and Head of its Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. He presided over a section of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference in Leiden, Holland, in 1987 and visited the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg and Tubigen in West Germany in 1990 as a Visiting Scientist. Among his important publications are The Historical geography and Dynastic History of Orissa (Calcutta, 1957), Aspects of Ancients Indian Administration (New Delhi, 1984) and The Imperial Guptas and Their Times (New Delhi, 1987).