Anant Sadashiv Altekar was born into a Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmin family on 24 September 1898 in Mhakave, a village in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra.
[4][10] From 1951 to 1955 he led another excavation at Kumhrar, under the auspices of the Jayaswal Institute; his discoveries there confirmed the theories of David Brainard Spooner that the site, which Altekar described as "probably the earliest huge stone-pillared structure to be built by Indian architects", was a relic of the Maurya Empire.
[19] In his book, Altekar collected extensive historical information on education in India from Sanskrit, Brahminic, Pali and Buddhist literature, along with inscriptions and accounts by foreign travellers.
[19] In the book, Altekar proposes a theory of steady decline in Indian literacy from an earlier golden age, which later scholars such as Hartmut Scharfe dismissed as "sheer phantasy".
[20] Scharfe called Altekar an apologist, that his anti-British theory may have been influenced by his participation in the freedom struggle against British colonialism in 1930s when the book was first published.