History Of India: From The Earliest Times To The Present Day For The Use Of Students And Colleges

IT is in no spirit of disparagement towards the works of predecessors that the following pages are offered to the reader. Many of those works are, in their several ways, of much value. Nevertheless, all are open to some objection are too bulky; have grown obsolete owing to the discovery of new matter or are insufficient for the purposes of the student. It is with a full sense of the difficulties of their task that the present work has been undertaken. The writer has endeavoured to give, without prolixity, a statement of the relevant facts at present available, both in regard to the origin of the more important Indian races, and in regard to their progress before they came under the unifying processes of modern administration and the tracing of that evolution forms the subject of the first chapters. In the residue will be found the brief relation of that unprecedented series of events under which a remote commercial people have begun to weld those races into a single nationality. The obstacles to success in both of these respects were perceived by Elphinstone, whose own labours have done so much for students of the subject. So far back as 1833, apparently contemplating a complete treatment of both the periods of Indian history, he wrote to Erskine, the translator of Babar’s memoirs, endeavouring to convince him, that a history of the Mughal Empire would necessarily involve “a complete history of India,” extending at least as far down as Warren Hastings, the inadequacy of whose record by James Mill he was the first to point out. Some years after- wards Elphinstone took in hand a portion of the task, and recorded in his diary the noble conception that sound know- ledge and opinions ought to be diffused through India, till the people were capable of producing indigenous statesmanship for the government of themselves. The book was first published in 1893.