Description
As the essays in this collection testify, even half a century after his death in 1966, D D Kosambi continues to be provocative, instructive, and contemporary. Many of the arguments that he makes in his two didactic and hitherto unpublished essays are insightful and incisive, and display, in a new setting, the range of his scholarship and the breadth of his interests. The other essays that are included here are his passionate advocacy of solar energy, and his posthumously published autobiographical essay that outlines his credo, and that lends its title to the book.
CONTENTS
Preface
- An Introduction to Lectures on Dialectical Materialism
- On Statistics
- Atomic Energy for India
- Adventure into the Unknown
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (31 July 1907 – 29 June 1966) was an Indian mathematician, statistician, historian and polymath who contributed to genetics by introducing Kosambi’s map function. He is well known for his work in numismatics and for compiling critical editions of ancient Sanskrit texts. His father, Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, had studied ancient Indian texts with a particular emphasis on Buddhism and its literature in the Pali language. Damodar Kosambi emulated him by developing a keen interest in his country’s ancient history. Kosambi was also a Marxist historian specialising in ancient India who employed the historical materialist approach in his work. He is particularly known for his classic work An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. He is described as “the patriarch of the Marxist school of Indian historiography”. Kosambi was critical of the policies of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, which, according to him, promoted capitalism in the guise of democratic socialism. He was an enthusiast of the Chinese revolution and its ideals, and, in addition, a leading activist in the World Peace Movement. In the opinion of the historian Irfan Habib, “D. D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, together with Daniel Thorner, brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time.”
– Wikipedia
