India: The Long History

Khilnani on how democracy, the state, the city and the nation were argued into being after independence. A short book about what India was meant to be.

One volume from the Indus Valley to the present. Not the most current scholarship, but the clearest single narrative to hang everything else on.

Thapar from the origins to 1300, revising her own earlier work. The standard scholarly account and unusually clear about what the evidence does and does not support.

The classic survey of Indian culture to the Muslim conquests. Dated in parts and still unmatched on daily life, art and religion together.

How Ashoka was recovered by nineteenth-century archaeologists after being almost entirely forgotten, and what the edicts actually say.

The most thorough modern textbook of the period, built from archaeology and inscriptions rather than dynastic lists.

The standard account of the Pallavas, Cholas, Pandyas and Vijayanagara. Old-fashioned in method and still the base text.

The Indian Ocean as the organising feature of the region's history rather than its edge. Popular history, and useful for reorienting the map.

The standard account of the Sultanate and after, strong on administration, land revenue and the economy rather than only on rulers.

Eaton tells five centuries of Deccan history through eight lives, from a Sufi to a poet to a slave who became a king.

A Moroccan judge who spent eight years in Delhi working for Muhammad bin Tughluq, a sultan he found both generous and terrifying. The best eyewitness account of the period.

Babur to Aurangzeb as narrative, drawing heavily on the court chronicles and the European travellers.

The founder's own diary. Babur writes about melons he misses, men he killed and gardens he planted, in the same register.

Eaton's argument that from 1000 to 1765 India is best understood through the meeting of Persian and Sanskrit worlds, not through religious conflict.

The East India Company as a corporation with an army, told through the collapse of Mughal authority that made it possible.

Davis argues the great famines were not natural disasters but the predictable result of market policy meeting drought. Contested and hard to dismiss.

The standard account of the nationalist period, attentive to peasants, workers and the left rather than only to the Congress leadership.

Essays on how colonial reform and nationalist politics both made women into a symbol to be argued over rather than people with positions.

An illustrated history of women's movements in India from 1800 to 1990, built from pamphlets, posters and organisational records.

The standard nationalist account, written by historians who saw the movement as a genuinely popular one. Read knowing that framing.

Written in Ahmednagar Fort between 1942 and 1945. It is history, but mostly it is one man deciding what kind of country he wants to build.

Partition through oral history, particularly of women, children and Dalits, whose experience is absent from the political accounts.

The fullest narrative history of the republic, from Partition to the present, and the rare book that treats post-1947 India as a serious historical subject.

How the Constituent Assembly actually argued its way to the document, clause by clause. Still the standard account.

A journalist's survey of the republic through people rather than policy, including the statistical work on hereditary politics that made the book notorious.

Growth without comparable gains in health, nutrition and schooling. The argument is that the failure is political rather than economic.

Reporting from the ten poorest districts in India, on how development money is actually spent. Twenty years old and still the best book on rural poverty.

The other end of the same economy: how a small number of tycoons captured Indian growth, reported by a journalist who covered them from Mumbai.