This book completes my four-volume study of the history of pre-modern India.
The four volumes in the set, all published by Penguin in India, are: Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation; The First Spring: The Golden Age of India; The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate; and The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals. The Last Spring was later published as two paperback books: Emperors of the Peacock Throne and The Mughal World.
I hope to follow up this set with a summation book, to link India’s past with its present, and to examine the historical processes by which India became the kind of nation it is today.
As in my previous books, I have in this book tried to portray the life of the people in the past, rather than merely chronicle events.
Historians, according to Mughal chronicler Muhammad Hadi, are like ‘thirsty explorers in the desert.’ Often there is not enough water to quench their thirst. There is, for instance, very little data in primary sources on the socio-cultural history of early medieval India, or on the life of the common people. But the source books have a good amount of material on the life of kings, and that enlivens the history of the age with human drama.
Another major problem that we have with early medieval Indian history is that our main sources of information about it are the accounts given by Arab, Persian and Turkish chroniclers. These are inevitably one-sided, though they seldom deliberately falsify facts. We have virtually no Indian sources for the history of this age.