Indian Religious Historiography, Vol. I

In the present volume which deals in the studies on the religious systems of ancient India the term historiography has been used to denote the history of researches on various systems both in its heuristic and interpretative aspects. It is against the background of the academic activities of the last 200 years that Prof. Bhattacharyya has dealt with the contents of the major works of every decade, the perspectives and theorizations of their authors, their methodology, assessment, criticism and interpretation, the dominant outlook of various ages by which the approaches of the authors are conditioned and many allied features. It is a stock-taking of the earlier works on Indian religion, of the varied developments in the study of the description of its formal structure and also in that of the methodological principles of interpretation and of the canons of assessment put forward by modern schools of academic disciplines necessary for the purpose of a better understanding of the multi-dimensional character of Indian religious systems.