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Synopsis Cultural Pasts is a collection of papers and lectures on a range of subjects pertaining to early Indian history, written over the last thirty years and published in various journals. Their collective publication makes them now more accessible. The focus of much of the contents is on historiography and on the changing dimensions of social and cultural history. The essays have been grouped thematically so as to give direction to the focus. The nine thematic groups are: historiography, which includes essays on modern writing on early India as well as historical perceptions of the past in earlier periods; social and cultural transactions; archaeology and history; pre-Mauryan and Mauryan India; forms of exchange; the society of the heroes in the epics and the later tradition of venerating the hero; genealogies and origin myths as historical sources; the social context of the renouncer; and the past in the present—the use made of the early past in the ideologies of the present.