A Concise History of Modern India

"The reason I chose this book is that it is one of several books that has been written that has attempted to consolidate everything in modern Indian history from the time of the Mughals until now. There are several books that have attempted to do that, and it’s an extraordinarily difficult task, because you deal with how society has evolved over a territory that was never fully unified under the same banner and which has, for the past seventy years, been split up into two main countries, India and Pakistan, and then eventually, of course, three, when you get Bangladesh entering the picture, plus places like Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, etc. It’s extraordinarily difficult to do this task of condensing down a history of five hundred or six hundred years into a volume. But, in many ways, this book does it the best. First of all, like all the other books that I’ve recommended here, it is clear and simple and easy to understand. It’s easy to read. It doesn’t get bogged down in jargon, which is something a lot of academics love to do. And it doesn’t get bogged down in theory or historiography. Many books that attempt to consolidate scholarship tend to be a description of ‘this scholar said this; this scholar said that.’ This is not terribly important or relevant for the average reader. In contrast, this book sticks to giving not just a general narrative history, but giving an understanding of how our broad notions of Indian history have changed over time. The perspectives on Indian history have transformed dramatically over the past fifty or sixty years, and the historians who’ve written A Concise History of Modern India have seen many of those transitions and have reflected them in their book. It’s also nice in the sense that the book gives you insights into things that are fun to learn about in Indian history, like how architecture has changed. Thomas Metcalf wrote a great book about thirty years ago on the history of architecture in India, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj . Some of his insights are distilled here, so you get an understanding of the symbolism of different types of architecture, say, the types of buildings that were built during the British Raj, all the way up to what people like Le Corbusier built. At the same time, it zooms in on India itself after 1947. Many other books that look at South Asia in general look at everything after 1947, and it can get very confusing because the paths taken by, say, India and Pakistan, or India and Sri Lanka, diverge quite a bit. I think there’s some use in just sticking to the frame of talking about India because there you limit yourself to an area where it’s much easier to trace particular narratives."