Monday, April 30, 2007

Sham Lal on DD Kosambi

Braveheart reads Sham Lal's writings on DD Kosambi.

That night when I flipped through the pages, I saw how the high and mighty in the world of ideas and politics had been made into mince meat in the books. I vividly remember reading the acidic remarks on Marxist historian D D Kosambi's book - Introduction to the Study of History:

"We need not dilate too long on the slant or the bias in Kosambi's judgments. All that he wants to tell us is that all we have is the earth. The sky is there, but its deep blue is a fiction... Those who look for the heartbeats of an age not in its wage bills and sale deed but in its art and religion may at times get impatient with Kosambi...Those who look for poetry in history itself will search in vain."