Native name किशोरी शरण लाल Died 2002 Name K. Lal | Occupation Historian, Academic Nationality Indian | |
Full Name Kishori Saran Lal Books The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India | ||
Education University Of Allahabad | ||
Kishori Saran Lal (1920–2002) was an Indian historian. He wrote many historical books, mainly on medieval India. Many of his books, such as History of the Khaljis and Twilight of the Sultanate, are regarded as standard works.
Contents
Career
He obtained his master's degree in 1941 at the University of Allahabad. In 1945 he obtained his D.Phil. with a dissertation on the history of the Khaljis. This dissertation formed the basis for his book History of the Khaljis. He started his career as a Lecturer of History in the Allahabad University, though he served in this position only for a brief period.
From 1945 to 1963 he was with Madhya Pradesh Educational Service and taught at the Government Colleges at Nagpur, Jabalpur, and Bhopal. In 1963, he joined University of Delhi as a reader and taught Medieval Indian history in its History Department.
For the next ten years, starting 1973, he was the Professor and Head of the Department of History, first at the University of Jodhpur (1973–79), and then at the Central University of Hyderabad (1979–83).
Besides his mother tongue Hindi, he was fluent in Persian, Old Persian, Urdu, and other languages.
In 2001 he was appointed chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) and also placed on the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) Committee to draft the model school syllabus on Indian History.
Works
Legacy
His work has been referred and used by historians, authors, such as Andrew Bernstein, John Esposito, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, Koenraad Elst, Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, and others.
Lal's early books were not controversial, but some of his later works were criticised by Irfan Habib. The criticism mainly included allegation of being a spokesman for the RSS. Lal noted: "As usual [my books] have been reviewed in journals in India and abroad, bestowing both praise and blame as per the custom of the reviewers. However, during the last fifteen years or so, some of my books have received special attention of a certain brand of scholars for adverse criticism." The controversy surrounding these events is reflected in the theme of the discourses of his books which allegedly describe Muslims as foreigners, destructive barbarians and immoral degenerates, Lal himself disputes these allegations, citing, in turn, that the ICHR has always been dominated by historians with a strong leftist bias and that the current controversy is "merely the outcome of an exaggerated sense of pique on the part of the excluded Left wing".
Recently, historian Jeremy Black in his book Contesting History: Narratives of Public History (2014), remarked his writings to be "recent good works".