Why right-wing historians could learn from D D Kosambi

The problem with writing history to please the piper, however, is that no one bothers with the whys

Actually, the Damodar I am talking about didn’t have “das” at the end of his name. He was plain Damodar.  Or to spell out his name fully, Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi, better known as D D Kosambi, one of the greatest scholars of India.

He was born in Goa in 1907 and died in Pune in 1966. In 2008 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Kosambi was a mathematician who made several original contributions. He was a statistician, too. Also a philologist and a geneticist. And a Sanskrit scholar. To top it all off, he was a historian, too, who studied India’s ancient