India: A History - Softcover

The first single-volume history of India since the 1950s, combining narrative pace and skill with social, economic and cultural analysis. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s history will be interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East.

India’s history begins with a highly advanced urban civilisation in the Indus valley, regressing to a tribal and pastoral nomadism, and then evolving into a uniquely stratified society. The pattern of inward invasion plus outward migration was established early: from Alexander the Great via the march of Islam and the great Moghuls to the coming of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj.

Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity and diversity. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent, while sharing a common history and culture, are not now, and never have been, a single unitary state; the book accommodates Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as other embryonic nation states like the Sikh Punjab, Muslim Kashmir and Assam.

Above all, the colonial era is seen in the overall context of Indian history, and the legacy of the 1947 partition is examined from the standpoint of today.

South Asia boasts one of the world's longest, richest and most rewarding histories. It crowds the past with a teeming diversity of civilisations and packs the present with a kaleidoscope of regional and cultural entities. John Keay discerns the continuities and highlights the glories while here presenting, in a single volume, the first truly comprehensive and thoroughly readable history of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for thirty years.

A cradle of civilisations, the subcontinent is today the cockpit of its most explosive disputes. From the myths of an impossible antiquity to the masterpieces of classical glory, from the boasts of obscure dynasts to the chronicles of Islamic conquest, and from the triumphs of liberation to the recriminations of partition, Keay recounts a five-thousand-year epic in which conflict underwrites achievement and kings defer to saints.

The monuments, tombs, temples and palaces are paraded in context and their significance explained. Revelations from recent scholarship prompt unexpected insights. And a new slant is given to those conventional tides of inward incursion and outward dissemination – Alexander the Great's debacle, the all-Asia diffusion of Indian culture, the Islamic, Mughal and British conquests, and the twentieth-century diaspora of south Asian society.

Beginning with the Flood and ending with the Bomb, 'India: A History' combines narrative delights with social economic and cultural analysis. Provocative and authoritative, it confirms John Keay’s reputation as one of the foremost writers on the subcontinent.