History and ethnohistory

That Hindu India has had a severely underdeveloped sense of history is a commonplace assumption. Unfavorable contrasts are made not only with the West, but with that most historical of Asian civilizations, China, and with the Islamic world. Traditional Indian “historiography,” when it is referred to at all, is most often characterized as fabulous legend and religious myth, bearing no relation to the past succession of real events. Not only is there thought to be a paucity of chronicles providing the political historian with definite dynastic details and other political facts, there is no philosophy or philosopher of history to allow one even to identify an intellectual domain, let alone to compare with something like Ibn Khaldun's sage and still much cited Muqaddimah. But is it true that India had no sense of history until the British introduced it? If not, why has this assumption borne so little critical scrutiny?

For the past 200 years historians of India have remained unquestioning in their assurance that they are the first practitioners of the art of Clio. They have only recently begun to use any indigenous “histories” at all.