ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the personal and professional development of the author as a historian through her first three, defining works on early south Asian cultural history. In sections titled ‘Portrait of the Historian as a Person’, ‘Portrait of the Person as a Historian’, and ‘The Historian and the World’, the author identifies the moving forces behind the revisionist questions she investigated and novel methods she put forth in her books. Emphasized are temperamental over ideological affinity, originality and freshness, demonstrable rigour as the claim to truth, and an apolitical humanism.
