Republics in Ancient India, c. 1500 B.C.–500 B.C. c6.s1.41

c6.s1.41

For the Vedic peoples, the sacrifice was the pivot around which the entire world revolved. They had no sense of history.³ The Buddhists and Jainas were so busy propagating their own doctrines and condemning those of their opponents that they had little time or thought for writing histories of states or biographies of politicians. In India no political biography is known to have appeared before the reign of Harṣavardhana in the 7th century A.D., and before Kalhaṇa's *Rājātaraṅgiṇī* India had nothing to match Thucydides or Xenophon, Herodotus or Livy, Cicero or Plutarch. Indians of today feel pride in the *ṛṣi*-composers of the Vedic hymns and the Upaniṣadic philosophers, and in historical figures like the Buddha and Aśoka. But the fact remains that at least until the mediaeval period their ideas of historical writing were in the main unscientific. This judgement, of course, is not wholly true of Ceylon, where the Buddhist tradition preserved a stronger historical sense.