The judgment delivered by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute on 30 September has raised serious concerns because of the way history, reason and secular values have been treated in it.

We, the undersigned, welcome the public statement of Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress Party that the extreme neglect of the tribal areas is at the root of the present crisis in those regions.

This article discusses three of the many themes in D D Kosambi's writings which have been seminal to the study of early Indian history: the relationship between tribe and caste, the link between Buddhism and trade, and the nature of feudalism in India. Many of the methods of Kosambi's analyses are substantially valid even 50 years later. Some need reconsideration either because of new evidence or because of new theories of explanation or because the overall perspectives of the past are today differently nuanced. Kosambi's intellectual perspectives and sensibilities were inevitably of his own times. Up to a point they carry traces of both the idealism and the dismissals of those times. He insistently asserted his autonomy from the clutches of contemporary orthodoxies, both of the Left and of the Right. The past was not to be used as a mechanism of political mobilisation as it has increasingly come to be among some in our time. The sources that inform us about the past have to be meticulously analysed and subjected to a rigorous methodology irrespective of their status or the authority they command. Kosambi would undoubtedly have agreed that the advance of knowledge was dependent on a constant critiquing of existing explanations.

The decades of the 1950s and 1960s were a watershed in the writing of history. Narratives of the past continued to be written as they are to this day, and there continues to be a valuable gathering of new evidence. But the more challenging trend has been to pursue answers to questions that relate to why and how something happened rather than merely when and where. Actions and events had multiple causes and the priorities among these have to be justified by the evidence as well as by logical argument. There is also a need to integrate a variety of facets in constructing a historical context. History was an explanation of what happened in the past, an attempt to understand the past, and of basing this understanding on ?critical enquiry?, incorporated into what is also called the ?historical method?. Historical understanding also has to be viewed as a ?process in time?.