Radha Kumud Mukherjee

"For full thirty centuries India stood out as the very heart of the old world and maintained her position as one of the foremost maritime countries. She had colonies in Pegu, in Cambodia, in Java in Sumatra, in Borneo and even in the countries of the farther East as far as Japan. She had trading settlements m Southern . China, in the Malayan Peninsula, in Arabia and in all the chief cities of Persia and all over the East Coast of Africa. She cultivated trade relations not only with the countries of Asia, but With the whole of the then known world, including the countries under the dominion of the Roman Empire, and both the East and West became the theater of Indian commercial activity and gave scope of her naval energy and throbbing international life." "We now know that many ports on both Eastern and Western Coast had navigational and trade links With almost all Continents of the world. There are many natural and technological reasons for this. Apart from Mathematics and Astronomy, India had excellent manufacturing skills in textile, metal works and paints. India had abundant supply of Timber. Indian - built ships were superior as they were built of Teak which resists the effect of salt water and weather for a very long time."

"Radhakumud Mukherji’s book on Indian shipping24, published in 1912, dramatically changed the scenario of writing books on ancient India, by focussing on her material achievements, including maritime activities and commercial and manufacturing interests. The Aryan invasion was not forgotten; Mukherji, in fact, calls it a momentous event in the world’s history, if not its most important. In his The Fundamental Unity of India (from Hindu Sources)25, 1914, he points out the element of geographical unity of the country and argues that this unity or at least its perception was not a contribution of the British but lay in the historic consciousness of the ancient Hindus. Mukherji’s Local Self-Government in Ancient India26 (1919) and Ancient Indian Education27, the bulk of the latter written in 1918- 20, vigorously put forward Mukherji’s nationalist ideas and arguments in the respective contexts. The main argument is that through ‘indigenous machinery of appropriate institutions’, ancient India could preserve her organizational identity through centuries of political domination. One would argue that these four books by Radhakumud Mukherji introduce a strong gust of nationalism in the ancient Indian studies without a single slip in his data and arguments."