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Dr. Shankar Goyal (b. 1959), the young and ebullient author of the present monograph, is emerging very rapidly as one of the recognized authorities on the historiography of ancient India. He has already produced three monographs dealing with some aspects of ancient Indian history writing viz. History and Historiography of the Age of Harsha (Jodhpur, 1992), Aspects of Ancient Indian History and Historiography (New Delhi, 1993) and History Writing of Early India (Jodhpur, 1996). He has co-edited a number of works with such eminent scholars as Professors G.C. Pande, B. Ch. Chhabra and Jagannath Agrawal which are directly or indirectly concerned with this discipline, including Political History in a Changing World (Jodhpur, 1992), Reappraising Gupta History (New Delhi, 1992) and S.R. Goyal: His Multidimensional Historiography (New Delhi, 1992). He has also-co-edited several other monographs with Shri M.C. Joshi and Dr. Sobhag Maghur which include King Chandra and the Meharauli Pillar (Meerut, 1989), Spectrum of Nehru’s Thought (New Delhi, 1994) and Rajasthan Bharati, in two volumes (Jodhpur, 1995) and authored more than seventy research articles. His research output in a period of less than six years has been stupendous, and its originality and quality superb, as is evident from the reviews of his works appearing in national and international journals. Dr. Shankar Goyal did his graduation from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, post-graduation from the Deccan College, Pune, and Doctrate on Main Trends in Indian Historiography Since Independence from the University of Jodhpur, Jodhpur, where he is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History.

Professor S.R. Goyal is the retired Professor and Head, Department of History, J.N.V. University, Jodhpur. Described as ‘one of the five best recent historians of ancient India’ by Professor David N. Lorenzen, the great Mexican Orientalist, Professor Goyal combines all the qualities associated with scientific scholarship. He has authored more than thirty voluminous works and over 150 research papers which cover so diverse fields as political history, religious history, literature, biographies, numismatics and epigraphy. He was honoured with the General Presidentship of the Silver Jubilee Congress of the Epigraphical Society of India held at Udupi in 1999 and was elected the Honorary Fellow of the Soceity. His doctoral thesis, A History of the Imperial Guptas (1967), was acclaimed as ‘the best analysis of the Gupta period which I have ever read’ by Professor A.L. Basham (National Professor of Australia) and as ‘imaginative’, ‘well-written’ and ‘a model of historiography’ by Professor Eleanor Zelliot (Minnesota, U.S.A.). The various theories propounded in it are described by Professor R.C. Majumdar as ‘deserving very careful consideration’. Among his other major works are included three corpus-like volumes on ancient Indian inscriptions, two volumes respectively on Kautilya and Megasthenes, a three volume authoritative study of ancient Indian history in about two thousand pages, a three volume study of ancient Indian numismatics, and four volumes on great rulers of ancient India. Professor Goyal is deeply involved with the study of the history of Indian religions. He has published two volumes entitled A Religious History of Ancient India (Vol. I, 1984; Vol. II, 1986), Harsha and Buddhism (1986) and A History of Indian Buddhism (1987). All these works of his have been highly acclaimed and admired both in India and abroad. Professor Goyal has been honoured with several Festschrifts, including Reappraising Gupta History for S.R. Goyal (ed. By Professor B.Ch. Chhabra et al) and S.R. Goyal: His Multidimensional Historiography (ed. By Professor Jagannath Agrawal and Dr. Shankar goyal). A four volume Festschrift in his honour entitled Sriramabhinandam (Reconstructing Indian History for S.R. Goyal) has recently been published).