A complete one-volume history of India illustrated throughout by maps and photographs in full colour. The book covers all the major landmarks of Indian history from prehistoric times up to the twenty-first century—starting with the country’s geological origins a few billion years in the past and the migration of Homo sapiens from Africa into the region several millennia ago. It traces the evolution of Indian civilization through a multitude of epochs, personalities, and turning points, including the Harappan Culture, Vedic Society, the age of Mahavira and the Buddha, Ashoka and the Mauryas, the Gupta period, the Delhi Sultanate, major kingdoms in the east, west, and south, the Mughal empire, European incursions into the subcontinent, the British Raj, the freedom struggle led by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose, Tagore, and others, Independence and Partition, and key developments in the life of the modern republic. Deepening the overarching narrative are essays on archaeology, caste, religion, art, architecture, philosophy, language, culture, the economy, and various aspects of the nation’s plural, diverse society Written by award-winning historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee along with cultural historian Shobita Punja and photographer-archivist Toby Sinclair, A New History of India brings the story of one of the oldest, most complex countries on earth to vivid life by blending state-of-the-art pictures and maps with a text of depth, clarity, and rigorous scholarship.

Over the centuries, Indo-Islamic and European ideas merged with Hindu traditions to make Lucknow a powerhouse of creativity and the centre of what was known as Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the evocative Awadhi phrase for Hindu–Muslim syncretism. A city known for its art and artisans, the courts of the nineteenth–century rulers of Lucknow swarmed with people from all over the subcontinent as well as European painters and photographers. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, poets from Delhi’s Mughal court migrated to Lucknow in the hope of better emoluments. Lucknow’s legendary status as a city of culture waxed with every new influx of creative geniuses. A Shadow of the Past celebrates the people responsible for the city’s fame—its nawabs, painters, writers, revolutionaries, and freedom fighters. At a time when Uttar Pradesh has been reduced to one of the most backward states of the country, Mehru Jaffer shows us how Lucknow’s glorious cultural heritage ensures that it remains a city of substance.

Abu’l Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, is widely regarded as one of the greatest rulers in India’s history. During his reign, the Mughal Empire was one of the wealthiest in the world, and covered much of the Indian subcontinent. Although there are dozens of books on the empire, there are surprisingly few full-length accounts of its most remarkable emperor, with the last major study having been published over two decades ago. In Akbar: The Great Mughal, this outstanding sovereign finally gets his due, and the reader gets the full measure of his extraordinary life. Akbar was born on 15 October 1542 and after a harrowing childhood and a tumultuous struggle for succession following the death of his father, Humayun, became emperor at the age of thirteen. He then ruled for nearly fifty years, and over the course of his reign established an empire that would be hailed as singular, both in its own time and for posterity. In this book, acclaimed writer Ira Mukhoty covers Akbar’s life and times in lavish, illuminating detail. The product of years of reading, research, and study, the biography looks in great detail at every aspect of this exceptional ruler—his ambitions, mistakes, bravery, military genius, empathy for his subjects, and path-breaking efforts to reform the governance of his empire. It delves deep into his open-mindedness, his reverence towards all religions, his efforts towards the emancipation of women, his abolishing of slavery and the religious tax—jiziya—and other acts that showed his statesmanship and humanity. The biography uses recent ground-breaking work by art historians to examine Akbar’s unending curiosity about the world around him, and the role the ateliers played in the succession struggle between him and his heir, Prince Salim (who became Emperor Jahangir).eautifully written, hugely well-informed, and thoroughly grounded in scholarship, this monumental biography captures the grandeur, vitality, and genius of the Great Mughal.

In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain's 'conscious and deliberate bleeding of India... [was the] greatest crime in all history'. He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British-in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief. When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India's share of world GDP was 23...

In Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions, one of India’s most distinguished historians takes readers on an exhilarating voyage of discovery into the distant past. Upinder Singh urges us to abandon simplistic stereotypes and instead think of ancient India in terms of the coexistence of five powerful contradictions—between social inequality and promises of universal salvation, the valorization of desire and detachment, goddess worship and misogyny, violence and non-violence, and religious debate and conflict. She does so using a vast array of sources including religious and philosophical texts, epics, poetry, plays, technical treatises, satire, biographies, and inscriptions, as well as the material and aesthetic evidence of archaeology and art from sites across the subcontinent. Singh’s scholarly but highly accessible style, clear explanation, and balanced interpretations offer an understanding of the historian’s craft and unravel the many threads of what we think of as ancient Indian culture. This is not a dead or forgotten past but one invoked in different contexts even today. Further, in spite of enormous historical changes over the centuries, the contradictions discussed here still remain. Beautifully written, deeply original, and profusely illustrated with masterpieces of ancient, medieval, and modern art, the book brings to life the rich complexity of ancient India and its connections with the present in a vivid and compelling manner.

Asia Reborn unveils the story of Asia’s resurgence over the past century, cutting through the fog of Western narratives that have long obscured our view. In the first single chronicle of the modern economic and political history of the whole continent, Prasenjit K. Basu weaves together a compelling account of how Asia’s nations overcame European domination in the twentieth century—and its legacies of war and famine—to begin the long climb to economic dynamism. From the story of Burma’s guillotined birth to the stunted path of nationalism in the Philippines to the less-than-non-violent tales of India’s struggle for independence to Arabia’s complex politics of oil to the emergence of Japan as an economic power to Britain’s destructive divisiveness in resisting the end of colonialism, this is a lucid and in-depth history of Asia’s modern era. The book gives particular credence to the catalytic role Japan played as leader of Asia’s rebirth. As the author recounts, the most prosperous parts of Asia in the second half of the twentieth century were those that had been ruled by Japan, while those parts of Asia that were ruled longest by the British were its poorest. In Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria, the Japanese built physical infrastructure, modernized land tenure, invested in heavy industries and vastly boosted literacy. That legacy proved vital in launching them onto the path of modern economic growth in ways that no European colony was ever equipped to do; instead they were debilitated by the social conflicts sparked by European overlords. Asia Reborn shows British, Dutch and French colonies to have had scant infrastructure or modern industry, and to have consequently been far behind Taiwan, Manchuria and Korea in social indicators such as literacy and life expectancy by mid-century. In West Asia and Burma, the brief European imprint (especially the hand of Churchill) created the ethnic conflicts that still plague these regions. The British Indian Army held the edifice of empire together. Ultimately, it was the undermining of its legitimacy by the armies of Subhas Bose, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh and Aung San that helped end the ravaging of Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, the eastern part of the liberated continent, from South Korea to China and India, had emulated Japan and Singapore in transforming itself into an industrious, dynamic and increasingly creative force finally capable of taking its people to new heights in an Asian twenty-first century.

Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord is the first comprehensive biography of a sleepy city in northern India, which has been a place of reverence for many faiths for millennia, but has also been a place of violence, bloodshed and ill-will. Ayodhya lodged itself permanently in the national consciousness with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The destruction of the mosque was the climax of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that has been at the heart of Indian politics for a quarter century since the BJP first campaigned on the promise of building a Ram temple at the site of the mosque. The demolition was followed by large-scale riots that killed thousands of people and permanently communalized the polity of the country. In the first section of the book, the author tells the complex story of a city holy to many faiths—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Jainism. Through a comparative analysis of the various versions of the Ramayana in which it features, Valay Singh goes back almost 3,300 years in time to when Ayodhya is first mentioned. He then traces its history showing its transformation from being an insignificant outpost to a place sought out by kings, fakirs, renouncers and reformers. He looks at the propagation of an aggressive Hindu cultural and religious consciousness in the city that was exacerbated during the period in which the East India Company became a military power in north India in the eighteenth century. The second section seeks to bring together the disparate events and developments after India’s Independence in 1947 that were responsible for launching Ayodhya to centre stage in Indian politics and the political imagination. This section goes deep into the violent years leading up to the demolition and its aftermath through which the right wing gained decisive ground in electoral politics. Drawing on archives, current scholarship, numerous interviews with key players from various castes, communities and religions in the city and the surrounding region, Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord is a balanced chronicle of faith, fanaticism and the war between secularism and religious fundamentalism in a key battleground in modern India.

The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj.’ These lines were composed by Mohsin Kakorvi, an Urdu poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna’s birthday but that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author’s birthplace, was steeped in this exquisite confluence of cultures. Sadly, this glorious tradition has been systematically destroyed over the past century. In many ways, Awadh stood for everything that independent India could have become, a land in which people of different faiths co-existed peacefully and created a culture that drew upon the best that each community had to offer. Instead, what we have today is a pale shadow of the harmony that once existed. Everywhere there are incidents of sectarian murder, communal propaganda and divisive politics. And there seems to be no stopping the forces that are destroying the country. In this remarkable book, which is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Muslims and Hindus began in the modern era. The British were the first to exploit these divisions between the communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the run-up to Independence, and its immediate aftermath, some of India’s greatest leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and others only served to drive the communities further apart. Successive governments, whether formed by the Congress or BJP, compounded the problem by failing to prevent (if not actively supporting) tragic events like communal riots in Gujarat (1969 and 2002), Bombay (1992, 1993), Muzaffarnagar (2013), the breaking of the Babri Masjid (1992) and so on. As a reporter, and editor, Naqvi covered all these events (with the exception of Partition), and in the book he shows us, with acuity and insight, how each of these resulted in the shaping of the discontent of the Muslim in India. Thought-provoking and troubling, Being the Other is essential reading for all those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped contemporary Indian society.

In 1526, when the nomadic Timurid warrior-scholar Babur rode into Hindustan, his wives, sisters, daughters, aunts and distant female relatives travelled with him. These women would help establish a dynasty and empire that would rule India for the next 200 years and become a byword for opulence and grandeur. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the Mughal empire was one of the largest and richest in the world. The Mughal women—unmarried daughters, eccentric sisters, fiery milk mothers and powerful wives—often worked behind the scenes and from within the zenana, but there were some notable exceptions among them who rode into battle with their men, built stunning monuments, engaged in diplomacy, traded with foreigners and minted coins in their own names. Others wrote biographies and patronised the arts. In Daughters of the Sun, we meet remarkable characters like Khanzada Begum who, at sixty-five, rode on horseback through 750 kilometres of icy passes and unforgiving terrain to parley on behalf of her nephew, Humayun; Gulbadan Begum, who gave us the only document written by a woman of the Mughal royal court, a rare glimpse into the harem, as well as a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of three emperors—Babur, Humayun and Akbar—her father, brother and nephew; Akbar’s milk mothers or foster-mothers, Jiji Anaga and Maham Anaga, who shielded and guided the thirteen-year-old emperor until he came of age; Noor Jahan, ‘Light of the World’, a widow and mother who would become Jahangir’s last and favourite wife, acquiring an imperial legacy of her own; and the fabulously wealthy Begum Sahib (Princess of Princesses) Jahanara, Shah Jahan’s favourite child, owner of the most lucrative port in medieval India and patron of one of its finest cities, Shahjahanabad. The very first attempt to chronicle the women who played a vital role in building the Mughal empire, Daughters of the Sun is an illuminating and gripping history of a little known aspect of the most magnificent dynasty the world has ever known.

Seventy-five years after Independence, India faces stark questions. Some of the most pressing ones relate to jobs and the cost of living. But questions about the state of our democracy are equally critical, if not more so. When India won independence and prepared to become the world’s largest democracy, the people, through their leaders and elected representatives, looked to create a nation built on the ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity. That this seemed a successful exercise—in a densely populated country with high levels of illiteracy and poverty, a bewildering variety of religions, castes, and languages, and a history of internal conflict—surprised many and gave hope to many more. However, over the years, these ideals have repeatedly come under attack. In the book, the author reflects on key issues that India will need to deal with. He asks if India’s future will be dictated by the resentful victimhood that seems to grip the champions of Hindu nationalism in a country where Hindus dominate the economy, the polity, the media, the culture, and everything else. Or will calm, thoughtful, self-critical yet confident young Indians—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and others—prevail and continue to build a country that treats everyone as equal? He addresses debates about the idea, image, and personality of Ram throughout India’s life and history; analyses the fallout of Partition and the concept of Akhand Bharat; and delves into what Mahatma Gandhi stood for and against—all of them issues that are contested in today’s India. In addition to these reflections, the author looks back at the history of the nation from 1947 onwards and examines what we, the people of India, should do to remain a viable and vibrant democracy that ensures that none of its citizens are left behind or feel oppressed, unwelcome, or unsafe. A timely study of the state of the nation from one of our foremost thinkers, India After 1947 is an essential read that reminds us of who we are as a nation and what we should aim to be.