000			01423nam a22001697a 4500
005			20250730173305.0
008			250730b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780143064688 _qpbk
041			_aeng
082			_a954.0223 _bTHA
100			_aThapar Romila
245			_aSomanatha _cRomila Thapar
260			_bPenguin India _c2008
300			_a272p.
520			_aIn 1026, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided the Hindu temple of Somanatha (Somnath in textbooks of the colonial period). The story of the raid has reverberated in Indian history, but largely during the raj. It was first depicted as a trauma for the Hindu population not in India, but in the House of Commons. The triumphalist accounts of the event in Turko-Persian chronicles became the main source for most eighteenth-century historians. It suited everyone and helped the British to divide and rule a multi-millioned subcontinent. In her new book, Romila Thapar, the doyenne of Indian historians, reconstructs what took place by studying other sources, including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings and merchants of the period, court epics and popular narratives that have survived. The result is astounding and undermines the traditional version of what took place. What makes her findings explosive is the fact that the current Hindu nationalist regime in India constantly utilizes a particular version of history
942			_cENGLISH
999			_c578097 _d578097