(60 maps, tables, andĬharts 32 pages b&w photos) (First printing of 25,000)Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Without peer among general studies, a history that is intelligent, incisive, and eminently readable. His chronicle closes in 1998 with the Indian government’s first nuclear-weapons test,
And heĬondemns England’s sometimes lackadaisical, sometimes oppressive administration while sympathizing with the obvious logisticalĭifficulties of ruling so distant a fiefdom. That Indian corruption was nothing compared to the power of European arms and the overarching desire for empire. With European apologists who insist that India fell into Europe’s lap almost by accident, like an overripe fruit, insisting instead Possible for the Europeans to gain a foothold on the subcontinent and eventually to assume political control. KeayĮxplores the subsequent divisions in Indian society-one that embraces hundreds of religious and ethnic groups-that made it Opening with a clear discussion of what is known of the ancient Harappan peoples, Keay proceeds to offer a carefulĪccount of the much-misunderstood and politically misused Aryans, Indo-European clans that came to dominate the adivasi, orĪboriginal, people sometime around 500 b.c., though whether by casual migration or deliberate invasion remains unclear.
Shortage of good documentation for these thousands of years, Keay suggests, but there has been a shortage of scholars who know Reverses this formula, devoting most of his space to the vast span of Indian history before the European arrival. Of the Europeans, when, in an all too common view, the historical materials become reliable. Many overviews of Indian history offer a few cursory opening chapters that take the reader from Mohenjo-daro to the arrival
A superb one-volume history of a land that defies reduction into simple narrative.
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