Literary Sources of Ancient India

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The problem with Indian history, especially with the ancient, has been the deficiency of literary sources. There were hardly any scholars then who dealt with history as an academic discipline. Though ancient India has a rich heritage of religious texts and literature, it lacks historical works. In comparison, the scholars of Greece and Rome of those times had systematically documented their period. This unfortunate poverty of ancient historical literature of one of the oldest and richest civilisations, however, has been made up for by information gleaned from religious and secular literature, and from archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics. The ancient Indian literature were mostly religious in nature and contains no definite date for events and kings eg. the Puranas and the epics. Vedic literature has no trace of political history but has a reliable glimpses of culture and civilisation of the age. The epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Jaina and Buddhist religious texts supply us with some important historical material with doses of religious messages. It is only from the beginning of the Medieval period that Muslim scholars started writing histories to document the triumph of Islam. For the Modern period, there is no dearth of historical works. Official records are available aplenty. Memoirs, biographies and travel accounts of Englishmen brush the 18th and 19th centuries with different perspective. Newspapers reflected opinions and provided chronology of events. Some of the important literary sources are as follows The Brahmanical literature consists of the Vedas, the Epics, the Puranas, the Vedangas and the Dharmasutras. These texts convey the religious beliefs and practices of the brahmins, and as a source for history, they provide information on the society in the northern and north-western India in the during the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. The Vedas

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