A.L. Basham

A.L. Basham (1914–1986) was an English Indologist and one of the twentieth century's most respected historians of ancient India. His masterpiece The Wonder That Was India, a one-volume survey of Indian civilisation from the Indus Valley to the Muslim conquest, has initiated generations of students into the field.

A professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and later at the Australian National University, Basham combined vast learning with luminous prose. His posthumous The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism carried his scholarship on the evolution of Hindu religious thought to an even wider readership.