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The book presents an account of the Art of war as known to the ancient
Hindus. It is a study of the aspect of the institutional life of ancient India.
In India, Kingdoms rose and fell in never-ending succession. Mighty conquerors sped across the land for adventure and conquest. Dig-vijaya (conquest of
regions) was held up as a righteous ideal and empires built up through the same mechanism
of bloody strife and diplomacy as the later-day empires of the Moghuls, the Marathas and
the British.
There is an extensive military literature in sanskrit and this
naturally constitutes the most copious source of information for the book. Among the
indigenous literary works, the most important for the purpose of this study? are the
two sanskrit epics ? the Ramayana and the mahabharata, treatises on Arthasastra and
Niti and extant manuals on Dhanur-Veda and other cognate topics.
Broadly speaking, the materials used for the present study fall under two heads: Literary and archaeological. Archaeological evidence consists mainly of the
ruins of old towns and forts, ancient sculptures, paintings, coins and inscriptions. The
literary sources, again, are of two kinds: viz indigenous and foreign; the foreign sources
are Greek and Graeco,Roman, Chinese and Muhammadan.
ISBN: 9788175365063,8175365064
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Pages : 212
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