Going into my first visit to India, I realized that I had almost no knowledge of its history, so I was seeking a readable single volume that would bring me somewhat up to speed. I had followed a similar approach with Leonard Thompson's "A History of South Africa" and very much enjoyed it. While I enjoyed Keay's book as well, it became clear pretty early on that it would be a bit more of a slog.The fundamental difference, of course, is that while South Africa and India have both been inhabited for many thousands of years, South Africa's written history is pretty sparse before the arrival of the Europeans. As a result, Thompson's book ended up focusing mostly on the last 400 years or so, which meant a fairly linear narrative of proxy battles between European powers and struggles between the newcomers and the natives. India, by contrast, has a significant written history and was really a set of independent cultures until fairly recently. The result is that the book doesn't build any momentum until about half-way through. A short-lived power will spring up out of nowhere in the south of India and then fade away as quickly as it came, leaving no meaningful impact on the India of today. Meanwhile, something similar will be happening in the north, with neither power having any real interaction with each other. It is really only when the Mughal Empire begins to rise and unite the subcontinent that a more cohesive narrative begins to form. Indeed, Keay makes a comment to this effect when he teases the arrival of the Mughals at the beginning of Chapter 13:"Through the agency of Babur, first of the Great Mughals, the multilateral history of the Indian subcontinent begins to jell into the monolithic history of India".You can almost sense his relief rising off the page and as the reader, you feel much the same way.Of course, I can't really fault the author for this. It wouldn't be appropriate for him to build a linear narrative where none exists. However, the casual reader looking to understand the India of today by learning about its history should be aware that there are several hundred pages of effectively "throwaway" history here, which is to say events and people that didn't have a meaningful impact on what happened later.All that being said, once Keay did make it to Mughals, readability definitely picked up and I enjoyed the remainder of the book significantly more. As a neutral observer, his summary of the lead-up to and execution of partition seemed balanced and I appreciated that he followed through with the post-partition history of Pakistan and Bangladesh - in other words, this is the history of the Indian subcontinent, not just India the country that we know today. Keay's writing style is clear and readable, with choice use of wit thrown in to liven up the history, my favorite example being:"In what the latter often characterized as a doctor-patient relationship, it looked as if India could be retained on a drip-feed of concessions until the sacred cows came home. The First World War changed all that. With the imperial medico coming under severe strain, the Indian patient was co-opted onto the nursing staff. He was fitter, evidently, and the doctor frailer than had been supposed. Doing the rounds, he heard tell of an American panacea called self-determination and of a more revolutionary cure being pioneered in Russia. It was doubtful whether he should be in hospital at all. If the doctor was so obviously fallible, why should the patient be patient?"If you want a thorough, readable single-volume history of India, I can definitely recommend this. Just be prepared for a bunch of false starts through the first half. And if you find yourself struggling through that part of the book, consider skipping ahead to the Mughals and proceeding from there. If your goals for reading the book were like mine, you'll get most of what you're looking for with much less of a slog.
How do you boil down thousands of years of civilization, empires, kingdoms and conquests too numerous to mention here into one book? I haven't the faintest idea how he manages to pull it off, but in India, A History John Keay does exactly that- and more to the point, does it extremely well. This book represents the best one volume answer to everything you ever wanted to know about India but were afraid to ask. Starting with the earliest civilizations (the Harrapans of the Indus Valley) and wending and winding its way through to the present day, Keay takes the reader by the hand and does his best not to put you into a coma, though he doesn't necessarily succeed at that for the entire book. So yeah, as a history book, this wasn't bad. I've read, seen and heard about plenty worse- dry, dusty and academic to the point of putting the reader into catatonia, but this, thankfully isn't one of those books. Keay is sufficiently engaged and enthusiastic about his subject matter that his enthusiasm is translated to the reader and you actually want to get to more juicy bits when you're stuck between empires.I guess the obvious question to ask when reading volumes of history is a simple one: did you learn anything? Happily, I can report that with this volume, I learned- a lot. There's a lot more to India than Bollywood movies, curry and catching 'Gandhi' on AMC's Oscar month- much, much more and Keay's real strength lies not in illuminating or saying new things about the Mughal Period or the British Conquest, but filling in the wide gaps of well, my general knowledge about what came before. Empires like the Mauryans, the Cholas (who spread into the SE Asia) and the Guptas with their gold- or even more recent Empires like Vijayanagar in the South were all completely unknown to me, so I learned more than I could possibly want to know- all in one volume.If Keay does have a fault, well, it's that this book is 500 pages long. Comprehensive, yes, but difficult to read all at once- in fact, I can say that about the next three books I've been reading (including this one)- which is why it's taken me so long to read them. I just couldn't concentrate on this book for an extended period of time and read it all at once- I'd just slip into a coma if I tried. But, slowly but surely- with the right amount of breaks in between, you can get through this book, be entertained, be informed and learn a heckuva lot.Another fault for Keay: the closer it gets to the present, the less detail Keay offers. To be totally fair, he is trying his best to put the entire history of India into one volume- not an easy feat, so you're probably going to lose something along the way, but the fight for independence and certainly the disaster of Partition and the ramifications of that throughout the past century weren't given the analysis they truly deserve- especially given the magnitude of the disaster of Partition, it's hard to think of another disaster, man-made or otherwise that has impacted the sub-continent so much, even after thousands of years of civilization and history.Overall: Believe it or not, Keay manages to credibly achieve the near impossible and put the history of this magnificent country into a single volume. If you need to learn about India, rest assured that Keay provides a remarkably clear-eyed view (as free as you can be of Western, colonialist or culturalist biases) of the incredible complexity and succession of kingdoms, empires and civilization that have risen and fallen throughout the history of India and the rest of South Asia.
What do You think about India: A History (2001)?
The most important thing to know about India from the outset is that India only became a country in the 20th century. Before that it was a region like Europe, like Latin America, like Christendom, like the Middle East, etc. As such, in encompassed a vast collection of cultures, peoples, kingdoms, civilization, and a huge chunk of the world. A book trying to distill the entire history of the whole of India is as ambitious as a book about all of Europe would be. So John Keay get kudos for just writing such a book. But considering the improbability of ever condensing 4000 years of the history of an entire subcontinent into a single book, he does an excellent job. He has some very helpful charts and graphs illustrating the dynasties and other power centers and how much of India they controlled during which periods. He puts the history into a useful cultural context which is essential to understand the history of India. I recommend it to anyone interested in this increasingly important nation.
—Robert Wilson
This is an excellent history of India. I found it exciting, and so I was surprised that some people found it to be dry. It is detailed indeed, and there is so much to be discovered. John Keay has done us a great service by laying out the book in sections age wise, which makes the history easy to follow. The history of the country has been extremely turbulent, with shifting borders, loyalties and influences. It can be bewildering, and the manner in which the book has been written and laid out makes it easy to follow.It is well written, and I can only but recommend it to people who want to know about India.
—Rajiv Chopra
This was perhaps one of the most anticipated books I have ever read. The anticipation owes itself to the fact that this was the fourth time that I had flipped the cover of this book and started reading it. Long ago, when I was in class 10th or so, I was gifted this book as a read by a man who has had much to do with my current reading habits. I used to enjoy history quite a bit in those days. But somehow, I never got around to finishing the book, or even reading the first quarter of it, until eventually it went travelling through hands in Roorkee and ultimately became untraceable. Sometime back, I remembered the book and as luck would have it, flipkart had a new edition to offer. The order was placed without hesitation.The book is a marvelous piece of general study. For anyone who has ever had a fascination for Indian history of any age, there is more in here to fuel the spell-bind. Keay's love for the subcontinent and its history is evident and so is his research and the travel he has undertook to personally visit some of the sites described.The book starts at the earliest of ages known to belong to the subcontinent. The Harappans are scrutinized as the enigma that they are. Then the ages move onwards to the Aryans, Mauryas, Guptas, and eventually to the Mughals, the Raj and independent India. There is no story to be told. Just history as the historians documented it and as others perceive it.Keay's effort in compiling this piece of historical study is apparent. The most remarkable feature of Keay's writing is that he keeps his opinions to himself. The history shown is largely unbiased (or at least not blatantly biased). The author provides quite a few contradicting opinions prevalent on a debated historical topic (and there are numerous such topics), with a slight tilt towards his personal belief, but leaves the reader free to do his own research and form his own opinion. This in itself increases the enthusiasm in reading by manifold.This book re-lit the love for history I used to have as a boy. The fact that I read the entire modern history of India without much strain is a testimony to Keay's writing skills, for nothing bored me as much as modern Indian history. I will try to find comparable historical readings, failing which I will revert to something more conventional.
—Karan Gupta
