A New History of India: From its origins to the twenty-first century

The commissioner of lost causes
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shobita Punja, Toby Sinclair
Aleph Book Company
Rs.999
Pages 480

The story of the development of Indian civilisation and its march to modern nationhood told with elegance, precision and sensitivity

This is a textbook with a difference. It covers a well-known story of the development of India as a civilization, of its march to modern nationhood and does it with elegance, precision and sensitivity. It is this quality of tying together discrete elements of updated research, well-known debates and understanding with a brilliant array of visual material that makes this textbook genuinely a novel exercise in synthesis and analysis.

Let me focus on some of the unusual themes that the textbook takes up as it plots the history of India from its first urbanization in the form of the Harappan culture to a series of migrations and settlements that gave the subcontinent states, empires, social formations and cultural symbols.

Among these are the development of an art and architectural idiom, of the enrichment of the architectural landscape under successive political dispensations. What is impressive is the lucid explanation of architectural elements that came together in a very particular way to embody the complexity of India’s historical experience. The visual material is splendidly arranged and there is a clear exposition of how tombs and masjids altered the landscape.

Another key process the book captures is India’s orientation to the larger outside world — something that textbooks do not often capture. The inbuilt tendency to look at Indian historical development as an insular process of classical grandeur, followed by Islamic rule and then by British control whose modernizing tendencies were often too unpalatable for the majority of their subjects, meant that very little attention was paid to India’s links with the larger worlds of Asia and the Indian Ocean. This book decidedly reverses the trend as it refers to the commercial vitality of the pre-modern Indian economy and its linkages with early modern state building practices.

A third point of entry in the text which is definitively new is the analysis of India’s Northeastern societies that underwent radical transformation in the wake of British control, Christianity and plantation agriculture. One may of course, point out that this is not adequately done and seems an act of posturing, but it definitely marks an important beginning.

The last section of the book which looks at consolidation of British rule, India’s response and the slow delineation of nationalist consciousness does an adequate job of condensing an extremely complex set of historical processes and debates that surround them. What stands out is the ease with which details from famines to political churnings and events are integrated in an easy and smooth narrative that examines extraordinary changes Indian society, economy and polity underwent, albeit with fault lines and gaps. Readers will be left with evocative impressions and a clear understanding of complex experiences which is the hallmark of any country’s historical profile.

Whether it was the effects of long-term migrations and settlements, or the influence of Islam on the subcontinent, or indeed the impact of modern western ideas on the Indian intelligentsia that undertook the project of liberation and self-rule, the authors tease out diverse strands of historiography, persuading the reader to engage with social change free from ideological polarization.

This is especially apparent in the sections on Gandhi and the evolution of mass politics, the rise of the Hindu Right and the challenges that India faced after independence. On the other hand, given the gravity of the challenges that history writing faces in today’s India, it may have helped to provide greater context for the inevitable politicization of history writing.

Admittedly, a good history textbook demands lucid explanations free from bias, good illustrations that reinforce the narrative and production values, all of which the present volume under review demonstrates. There may be quibbles over the question of selectivity — of the emphasis some themes enjoy in relation to others but it is on the whole a difficult job well done.

For one, the south is very well analysed, in contrast to most writings on the subject which have always been Delhi-centric and as a result there is a refreshing quality about the book. It is accessible, readable and promises to go down as a useful textbook on the history of a country which has never been easy to retell.