ANCIENT INDIA A Textbook of History for Middle Schools Romila Thapar National Council of Educational Research and TrainingOctober 1966 Kartika 1888 © National Council of Educational Research and Training Published by Publication Unit, National Council of Educational Research and Traming, 114, Sundar Nagar, New Delhi-i1 and printed at Indraprastha Press (CBT), Nehru House, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, ‘New Delhi-tFOREWORD Fe some years past the National Council of Educational Research and Training has felt the need to produce textbooks m Indian history of an excellence that will satisfy scholars, and an imaginativeness that wall stimulate the curiosity of school children. Evidently this is not easy, for great learning and the ability to communi- cate its content to children do not often co-exist The writing of Indian history 1s also beset with other difficulties. India 1s old, She 1s large; she contains multitudes. And both in some degree constitute hurdles, To penetrate the dim backward and abysm of time so as to enable a child to see the emergence of rational man is hard. But, perhaps, cven harder 1s, the task of holding the scales even between regional powers that make our history at once so vivid and so complicated, Today the child in our schools has to understand the mosaic of civilizations and cultures that underline the modern Indian nation, Noth- ing 1n the present can remain bewildering when tt is seen with some clarity against an explained past To explain this past and produce texthooks im Indian history for our schools, a panel of experts was set up by the National Council in 1962 under the chairman- ship of Dr. Tara Chand. The panel formulated, first, a curriculum, then a plan of graded textbooks, spelling out the materials that should go into each of them. It commissioned authors to prepate the textbooks. All this necessarily took time, The National Council wishes to place on record its appreciation of the work done by Dr. Tara Chand and his Panel. Towards the end of 1965, to speed up the process of bringing out model textbooks of Indian History for children in our schools, the National Council decided to set up an Editorial Board in place of the Panel. The Board consisted of a Chief Editor, Dr. S. Gopal, and three Editors, Dr. S. Nurul Hasan, Dr. Satish Chandra and Dr. Romila Thapar. The present textbook for middle schools on Ancient India has been consi- dered very carefully by the Editorial Board, discussed at length with the author, who has revised 1t in accordance with the Board’s recommendations, and has finally been accepted by the Board. It is the first of a series of six textbooks graded progressively to fit into the History curriculum for Secondary Schoolsand capable of being adapted to both a ten-year and an eleven-year pattern of schooling, Presently, a Hindi translation of this book will appear, and the National Council hopes that the State Governments will adopt the book and translate it into the regional languages. ‘Thereis an evident advantage for Indian children from the far-flung parts of India —and their adult counterparts—in seeing their country as an entity that transcends region and religion. This would enable the child to connect the life of a local and a regional community with the life of the nation and to learn to think in national and, indeed, international terms. For the books are planned, as they move upward, to help the child to see India whole, and to see her in the perspective of world history.