Author: John Keay
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0006387845
Description
A truly comprehensive and thoroughly readable history of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
From the myths of an impossible antiquity to the masterpieces of the classical glory, from the boasts of obscures dynasts to the chronicles of Islamic conquests, and from the triumphs of the liberation to the recrimination of partition, the author recounts a five thousand-year epic in which conflicts underwrites achievements and kings defer to saints.
The monuments, tombs, temples and palaces are paraded in context and their significance explained and a new slant is given to the conventional tides of inward incursion and outer dissemination - Alexander the Great's debacle, the all-Asia diffusion of Indian culture, the Islamic, Mughal and British conquests, and the twentieth-century Diaspora of south Asian society.
Beginning with the flood and ending with the bomb, this book combines narrative delights with social, economic and cultural analysis. Provocative and authoritative, it confirms John Keay's reputation as one of the foremost writer on the subcontinent.
It is history at its best, a work of the imagination stimulated by enigmatic remains of the past crying out for an interpreter....... The blend of revelatory detail with a sense of eternal India makes Keay's a superb book - Michael Fry, Herald(Glasgow)
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
List of Charts and Tables
Introduction
CHAPTER I
The Harappan World : C3000 - 1700 BC
CHAPTER II
Vedic Values : C1700 - 900 BC
CHAPTER III
The Epic Age : C900-520 BC
CHAPTER IV
Out of the Myth - Smoke : C520 - 320 BC
CHAPTER V
Gloria Maurya : C320 - 200 BC
CHAPTER VI
An Age of Paradox : C300 - 500 AD
CHAPTER VII
Gupta Gold : C300 - 500 AD
CHAPTER VIII
Lords of the Universe : C500 - 700
CHAPTER IX
Dharma and Defiance : C700-C900
CHAPTER X
Natraj, the Rule of the Dance : C950 - 1180
CHAPTER XI
The Natraj, the Rule of the Dance : 1180 - 1320
CHAPTER XII
Other Indias : 1320 - 1525
CHAPTER XIII
The Making of the Mughal Empire : 1500 - 1605
CHAPTER XIV
Mughal Pomp, Indian Circumstance : 1605 - 1682
CHAPTER XV
From Taj to Raj : 1682 - 1750
CHAPTER XVI
The British Conquest : 1750 - 1820
CHAPTER XVII
Pax Britannica : 1820 - 1880
CHAPTER XVIII
Awake the Nation : 1880 - 1930
CHAPTER XIX
At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour : 1930 - 1948
CHAPTER XX
Crossing the Tracks : 1948
Sources Notes
Bibliography
Index (Incorporating Glossary)