This is an old revision of this page, as edited by BADMINton (talk | contribs) at 20:50, 14 September 2006 (The material is NOT copyrighted. It appeared in the Pioneer and it is freely distributed. Several websites are using it.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 20:50, 14 September 2006 by BADMINton (talk | contribs) (The material is NOT copyrighted. It appeared in the Pioneer and it is freely distributed. Several websites are using it.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)R S Sharma is Emeritus Professor, Department of History, Patna University and one of the leading historians of India. The eighty-seven year-old Bhumihar is the Founder Chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research.
He has earlier taught at Delhi(1973-85) and Toronto Universities.
He has been among the most renowned historians of ancient India. He belongs to the Marxist school of thought and is the favourite historian of the UPA government which consists of Marxist parties. He leads the team of historians who write the NCERT history textbooks during the UPA regime.
Controversies
People accuse him of being a leftist historian keen on attacking Hinduism. Many of his works like 'Ancient India' (banned by the Janata Party government in 1977) have been banned. He has also supported the controversial biased addition of the Ayodhya dispute and the 2002 Gujarat riots calling them 'socially relevant topics'.
The Class 11 book Ancient India History, written by Prof. Ram Sharan Sharma, discards the presence of Lord Krishna during the Mahabharata. The book says, "Although Krishna plays an important role in the Mahabharata, inscriptions and sculptural pieces found in Mathura dating back to 200 BC and 300 AD do not attest to his presence. Because of this, ideas of an epic age based on the Ramayana and Mahabharata have to be discarded."
Criticism
Despite grandiose declarations about free debate and scientific rigour, the Marxist view of history can survive only when presented as revealed truth, like the Koran and Hadith in madrasas. A look at the critique of "eminent historian" R.S. Sharma's work, Indian Feudalism, by Andre Wink, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, would substantiate this argument.
In Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Vol. I), Wink castigates Sharma for misguiding historians to look for Indian parallels to European feudalism. Sharma contends that the "absence of finds of gold coins" in the seventh to tenth centuries proves that the Indian economy was exclusively rural with trade and urbanism having suffered a distinct decline. Rubbishing this claim, Wink points out that the "texts refer to the abundant use of coined money and land charters speak of taxes in gold and there remains evidence of commercial activity on the coasts." He also ridicules Sharma's assertion that land grants to Brahmins amount to political feudalism.
Wink concludes that Sharma's thesis "involves an obstinate attempt to find 'elements' which fit a preconceived picture of what should have happened in India because it happened in Europe (or is alleged to have happened in Europe by Sharma and his school of historians whose knowledge of European history is rudimentary and completely outdated). The methodological underpinnings of Sharma's work are in fact so thin that one wonders why, for so long, Sharma's colleagues have called his work 'pioneering.'"
If Andre Wink, who is no saffron scholar, holds this opinion about the man handpicked by then Education Minister Nurul Hasan to head to Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and fund the now-challenged genre of historiography, one is within one's right to question the accuracy and integrity of other works as well. In the context of the textbook controversy, the assertion that twenty-three Jain Tirthankaras are fictional is worthy of contempt. Wink also scorns the work of D. Desai and G.C. Choudhary, as also K.A. Nizami, who has glorified the Turkish conquest of northern India for ending the alleged isolation that encompassed India from the eighth century.
The discerning reader would be savvy enough to realize that the objective of Leftist scholarship is to prove, despite all available evidence, that the Islamic invasion was really India's age of enlightenment. Hence the denigration of the Vedic Age and the stubborn insistence that the Aryans were not indigenous people. This is why Bipin Chandra protests if medieval Muslim rulers are described as "foreign" (Hindustan Times, 2 December 2001). Objecting to the "artificial glorification of all and sundry who fought against Sultanate and Mughal rulers," he derides glorification of ancient India as "undue national pride has its own negative aspects."
Works
- Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India (ISBN : 8120808983, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers)
- Perspectives in Social and Economic History of Early India (ISBN : 8121506727)
- Urban Decay in India c. 300-c. 1000 (ISBN : 8121500451)
- Sudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order Down to Circa A D 600 (ISBN : 8120808738)
- Higher Education (ISBN : 8171693202)
- Looking for the Aryans (ISBN : 8125006311)
- India's Ancient Past (ISBN : 0-19-566714, Oxford, 2005)
- Indian Feudalism