A bird's eye view of India's long history

From the making of the Indian landscape to the reign of Narendra Modi, A New History is a single volume historical account where sound scholarship is interwoven with state-of-the-art photographs

A New History of India: From Its Origins To The Twenty-First Century

Author: Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shobita Punja and Toby Sinclair

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 480

Price:  Rs 999

I am loath to review books of friends. Rudrangshu Mukherjee and I go back to October 1979. We shared the same carrel at the Indian Institute Library in Oxford; together savoured our morning cup of coffee; had lunch together at St. Edmund Hall when it served trout; and, in June 1980, went to Lords to watch Michael Holding taking six wickets in the first innings followed by a 145 by Viv Richards. Reviewing a book co-authored by an old friend could have been tricky.

So, I decided to buy and read the book before taking a call. Having read it over two sessions, I realised that, after the two volumes of Romila Thapar and Percival Spear published in 1965, we now have a book that will appeal to serious visitors and many other lay readers who want, but haven’t got, an accurate, pictorially rich sweeping bird’s eye view of the long history of India. My reviewing doubts vanished.

To start with, there is the sheer span of the book: From making of the Indian landscape starting 4.5 billion years ago, human beginnings, Harappan culture and the Vedic age to an independent India right up to the reign of Narendra Modi is a gargantuan task that few would have undertaken. Yet, the authors have done so to create a single volume history of India where “historical scholarship [is] interwoven with state-of-the-art photographs, maps, and illustrations to provide readers with a book that [has] made history come alive without being superficial or inauthentic.”

There is no escaping the amazing quality of photographs, illustrations and maps, plus the excellent texts that accompany these. This is the first time that I have read an Indian publication that is so perfectly published with correctly placed photographic and illustrative details, each explained with excellent notes. These make the book attractive and readable.

Throughout the book, while the text follows a neutral tone of chronological description, “there is a subterranean tow… that probes the status of women, the presence of caste, India’s interaction with other parts of the world, the plurality and diversity present in the country” which becomes explicit often enough, when needed, especially in a short concluding section on the challenges of contemporary India.

Personally, I enjoyed reading some chapters more than others. Chapter 11 which deals with the Vijayanagara and the Bahmani kingdom in the Deccan, including a wonderful short section on a text called Tarikh-i Firishta, a magnum opus on the history of the Deccan written by in the early 17th century by Muhammad Qasim Firishta. As the authors write, unlike accounts of most court appointed writers, “Fishta’s Tarikh is not a chronicle of kings… [but] by people of Hindustan [who] are not defined by the exotic and the marvellous but by the ordinary”. 

I also appreciated Chapter 17 on the northeast. Few academics, leave aside the laity, know much about this area, its geography and history. Therefore, this section is important and written well, although it could have been a bit longer and more detailed.

Chapter 19 is perhaps the finest. It deals with the Indian response to Company rule, especially the Mutiny of 1857. Ten pages provide considerable detail on the mutiny which, had it succeeded, would have created a different story. But it didn’t. In its aftermath, the John Company was disbanded in August 1858, and the British government directly took over the task of ruling India for the next 89 years up to August 1947.

Chapters 21, 22 and 23 deal with the national movement under Gandhiji, outside the Gandhian fold under Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and the gory years of 1945 to 1947, which accelerated Partition and Independence. The most poignant was the plight of Gandhi. “As soon as he realized that his hand-picked men… were becoming backroom politicians completely divorced from the people, and when he saw the country being engulfed by communal violence, Gandhi withdrew from Delhi to go to work among the victims… in Noakhali, Bihar and Calcutta… “The person called the Father of the Nation was not present at the birth of the nation”.

I have four critical observations. The last 22 pages of the book cover independent India. This is too short. Consider two facts. In the 71 years between 1950-51 and 2021-22, (inflation adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) increased at a compound annual rate of almost 6 per cent per year; and per capita GDP by a tad less than 4 per cent. Never in the history of India has there been such growth. Yet, it doesn’t get the attention that it should.

Second, the book gives short shrift to Jawaharlal Nehru’s premiership. When Nehru proclaimed India’s “tryst with destiny”, the country was bereft of sufficient industry and infrastructure. Poverty was at 75 per cent of the population. Modern manufacturing was 9 per cent of GDP. Nehru changed this with his “temples of modern India''.

Between 1951 and 1960, India constructed 235 large dams and four huge integrated steel plants (at Durgapur, Rourkela, Bhilai and Bokaro). Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Heavy Engineering Corporation, Bharat Earthmovers, Hindustan Shipyard, Garden Reach Shipbuilders, the Shipping Corporation of India, Hindustan Aeronautics and many more were set up. These were Nehru’s contributions — of creating a modern manufacturing base in a newly independent nation.   

My third criticism is about an omission. The authors write of three great building blocks inherited from the British Raj: The “steel frame” of administration; a strictly apolitical armed force; and the university educational system. There was a fourth: Data. Without the British there wouldn’t have been the great gazetteers, the survey and settlement reports, the decennial census starting from 1872, and the hundreds of annual, quarterly and monthly publications that published data on virtually everything under the sun. These are the basis for any modern

Indian history, for which we must thank the British.

My fourth criticism relates to the omission of the Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed 3 to 3.5 million people. It deserved serious mention.

None of these oversights are fatal, and should be attended to in the second edition. Which will make it an even better tome. And that’s high praise.