Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi was a towering figure in the field of history-writing in India. His works on various aspects of ancient Indian history brought about a paradigm shift in the scholarly understanding of the period.
Kosambi’s creative employment of Marxist methods in the Indian context cleared away earlier misconceptions about Indian society being static and unchanging, and established history as an important social-scientific discipline in the country. Eminent figures in the field of Indian Marxist historiography like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar have spoken about the importance of his pioneering work.
D. D. Kosambi was born on July 31, 1907, in Goa in an upper-caste Konkani family. His father, Dharmanand Kosambi, was a renowned scholar of Buddhist studies who taught Pali at Pune’s Fergusson College. He later went on to Harvard University to teach as a visiting faculty member and to work on a number of Pali texts.
D. D. accompanied him and grew up in the United States, eventually going on to study mathematics at Harvard. According to his daughter Meera, a leading sociologist, Kosambi was drawn toward the subject because of its rigorous, logical nature. During his time in the United States, he dived deep into the study of Marxist political thought, an interest that he had picked at an early stage.
Kosambi was a towering figure in the field of history-writing in India.
He came back to India and subsequently taught mathematics at the Banaras Hindu University, the Aligarh Muslim University, and Fergusson College, Pune. Later he joined the…
Auteur: Ananyo Chakraborty
