Pt. Kota Venkatachelam Few debates in Indian history have been as charged or as enduring as the argument over our antiquity. How old India’s civilisation truly is, and who gets to decide that? Long before social media polemics and political appropriation hardened positions over the Aryan Migration theory and its counter, the ‘Out of India,’ a small group of scholars waged a more forbidding war over dates, dynasties and inscriptions. Among the most uncompromising of them (thou

D. R. Bhandarkar Rarely have a father and son been pioneers in reshaping a discipline as exacting as classical Indology and the reconstruction of India’s ancient past. Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837-1925) was among the earliest Indians to apply Western critical methods to Sanskrit and antiquities, creating what admirers would later call a rare synthesis of what the finest of the Oriental and Occidental worlds had to offer. The very existence of the Bhandarkar Oriental