India's Cultural History

Cultural History is interesting in itself, but it becomes even more so since it takes away the heat and dust from political and economic history and can be pursued with much more objectivity and a sense of discovery than the other two genres of history. Of course social history can sometimes be more fascinating. But in India due to lack of efforts and lack of documented sources, social history is very underdeveloped. By the way the distinction between political, economic, social and cultural histories are not easy to make and really history is not divided in this manner. These categories are nothing more than vague points of reference like so many international borders and should be taken as such. Culture is as much determined by politics as social is influenced by economics.
Be that as it may, if one were to focus on the cultural history, one would find very little to read, especially about Ancient and Medieval India. It is surprising that since the work of A L Basham, The Wonder that Was India, not much work has been done in that area. Basham continues to be a classic covering the cultural history of the whole of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari [North Indian historians continue to neglect teh history of south and vice versa!]. It is a thick book, but the easy prose and the excellent translation from Indian languages make it a pleasure to read even for the non-practitioner. In recent times, I am happy to report that there have been an Indian writer who has been following on the footsteps of Basham and has written some excellent books on various facets of cultural and social history. I refer of course to Abraham Eraly and the following books by him: The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals and The Seeding of the India Civilization. For a complete list of Eraly's books see here. Of course, Romila Thapar's India Volume I and Percival Spear's India Volume II by Penguin continue to be classics especially the former.