India: A History

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 thoroughlyreadable history of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for thirty years. 

A cradle of civilisation, the subcontinent is today the cockpit of one 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.

John Keay is the author of three acclaimed histories: The Honourable Company, about the East India Company; Last Post, about imperial disengagement in the Far East; and the two-volume Explorers of the Western Himalayas. His books on India include India Discovered and Into India. John Keay is married with four children, lives in Scotland and is co-editor with Julia Keay of the Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland.