With a vast subcontinent and more than four millennia to cover, plus some of the imperial history of the Islamic world and the colonial history of modern Europe, it is difficult to know where to begin in recommending reading about the history of India. This brief survey covers the sources of every major quotation in the book, while also mentioning some important unquoted sources and giving some references to subjects omitted from the main text for lack of space. Much as I would like to have included a few books and articles in Indian languages, I have stuck to English, given that there are more than twenty official languages in India, of which I myself read only one (Bengali); and that rustily. I have also omitted references to the internet – invaluable as it is for research – purely for lack of space, as is customary with short histories.
Before coming to the individual chapters, something should be said about histories of India as a whole. The sole, up-to-date, short history in print is Thomas R. Trautmann’s 250-page India: Brief History of a Civilization (New York, 2011), an introductory textbook for American students that stresses the pre-colonial over the colonial period and naturally avoids expressing many personal opinions. Other one-volume textbooks by professional academics are considerably longer, for example, Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund’s A History of India (fifth edition, London, 2010). None, it must be said, is an enjoyable read. By contrast, the writer and historian John Keay’s 600-page India: A History (London, 2000) is aimed at a non-academic readership, well researched and enjoyably written, with plenty of opinion but not always factually accurate, especially on the modern period. Otherwise, general histories come in more than one volume, written by more than one expert. The best known, rightly so, is The Wonder That Was India, vol. 1 by A. L. Basham (third revised edition, London, 1967), covering the period up to the coming of Islam, and vol. 2 by S. A. A. Rizvi (London, 1987), taking the story up to 1700; to which must be added Early India: from the Origins to AD 1300 by Romila Thapar (London, 2002) and A History of India, volume 2, by Percival Spear (revised edition, London, 1978), covering from the Mughal empire to the post-Independence period. Also still valuable are some of the scholarly essays in Basham’s edited collection, A Cultural History of India (Oxford, 1975), and the well-illustrated Time-Life Cultural Atlas of India (Amsterdam, 1995) by Gordon Johnson (general editor of the New Cambridge History of India) with contributions from others. Another highly illustrated book, Manosi Lahiri’s Mapping India (New Delhi, 2012), shows maps of India through the ages, beginning with Ptolemy’s. Some of the above books are long in the tooth, especially Spear’s book and Basham’s two books, the older of which was influenced by the first flush of Indian independence. Even so, no academic or general writer has yet managed to beat Basham’s Wonder for its range, its depth, its readability and the quality of its many translations from Indian languages.
Introduction
I begin with two classics: Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (London, 1946) and Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London, 1951). Both books are intellectually flawed but beautifully written. B. R. Ambedkar’s The Untouchables: Who Were They?: And Why They Became Untouchables (New Delhi, 1948) is also historically important, and powerfully argued, as is the Marxist D. D. Kosambi’s The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London, 1965). All my quotations from Mahatma Gandhi may be found in the comprehensive volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, published by the Indian government since 1958.
Most of Satyajit Ray’s English writings on Indian and world cinema and culture, dating from 1948–91, can be found in his two collections, Our Films Their Films (New Delhi, 1976) and Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema (New Delhi, 2012). Ray’s English screenplay of The Chess Players appears in The Chess Players and Other Screenplays, edited by me (London, 1989). My biography of Ray is Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (second edition, London, 2004).
Amartya Sen’s academic writings are extensive. The most readable of those about India are collected in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London, 2005). Sen’s magazine article on Indian growth, ‘Putting Growth in its Place’ (Outlook, 14 November 2011), was written with his collaborator Jean Drèze, with whom he wrote An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (London, 2013). Ramachandra Guha’s critical review of Sen’s 2005 collection, ‘Arguments with Sen’ (Economic and Political Weekly, 40 (2005), pp. 4420–25), was followed by Sen’s response, ‘Our Past and Our Present’ (Economic and Political Weekly, 41 (2006), pp. 4877–86). Guha’s thorough and impressive history of India since 1947, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London, 2007), is essentially a political and economic, rather than a cultural, study.
Selecting the most significant from the outpouring of books about the ‘new’ India is inevitably invidious, nor can I claim to have read all of them. But I can vouch for the intelligence and readability of the following books (in date order of publication): V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now (London, 1990), which should be compared with Naipaul’s more personal first book on India, An Area of Darkness (London, 1964); Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (London, 1997; revised edition, 2003); Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age (New Delhi, 2000); Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi, 2003); Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (London, 2006; second edition, 2011); Pranab Bardhan’s Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton, 2010); Patrick French’s India: A Portrait (London, 2011); Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London, 2012); Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (London, 2012); and Shankkar Aiyar’s Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change (New Delhi, 2012). Also of interest, though less well written, is A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s Turning Points: A Journey through Challenges (New Delhi, 2012), given that its scientist author served as a notable president of India.
I have omitted from the book recent English-language fiction about India, because there are so many writers and none of them is absolutely outstanding, at the literary level of R. K. Narayan (or Naipaul). Interesting are: Aravind Adiga, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie. Also omitted, with regret, are visual artists such as M. F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, K. G. Subramanyan, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore and Ravi Varma, though I have made an exception for my favourite modern Indian artist, Benode Bihari Mukherjee. See Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904–1980): Centenary Retrospective (New Delhi, 2006), the catalogue of a National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition curated by the painter Gulammohammed Sheikh and R. Siva Kumar.
1 The Indus Valley Civilization
Accessible, well-illustrated studies of the Indus Valley civilization include: Michael Jansen, Máire Mulloy and Günter Urban’s Forgotten Cities on the Indus: Early Civilization in Pakistan from the 8th to the 2nd Millennium BC (Mainz, 1991); Jonathan Mark Kenoyer’s Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi, 1998); and Jane R. McIntosh’s A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization (Oxford, 2002).
The leading study of the Indus script is Asko Parpola’s erudite Deciphering the Indus Script (Cambridge, 1994), but for a brief introduction see the relevant chapter in my Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (revised edition, London, 2009). Gregory L. Possehl’s Indus Age: The Writing System (Philadelphia, 1996) discusses in detail, often entertainingly, the many attempts to decipher the script since the 1920s. A recent attempt by N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram published in The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology, Readings, Interpretations (New Delhi, 2000) is criticized by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in ‘Horseplay in Harappa’ (Frontline, 13 October 2000).
Nayanjot Lahiri’s Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization Was Discovered (New Delhi, 2005) is a well-written history. Sudeshna Guha’s edited collection, The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Ahmedabad, 2010), is a lavishly illustrated study of the work of Sir John Marshall, though it devotes relatively little space to the Indus Valley.
2 Vedas, Aryans and the Origins of Hinduism
The best-known modern version of the Vedas is The Rig Veda: An Anthology, translated by Wendy Doniger (London, 1981). The Upanishads, translated by Juan Mascaró (London, 1965), is one of several currently available translations. Rabindranath Tagore’s comment on the Upanishads appears in Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge, 1997).
Thomas R. Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997) is the most readable introduction to the tangled debate about the Indo-Aryans, especially when read alongside Trautmann’s edited collection, The Aryan Debate (New Delhi, 2005), which includes S. P. Gupta’s ‘The Indus-Saraswati Civilization: Beginnings and Developments’. The most comprehensive discussion is, however, Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (New York, 2001). A fierce critic of the Indo-Aryan theory as racist is the archaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti in his book, The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology: The Archaeological Foundations of Ancient India, Stone Age to AD 13th Century (New Delhi, 2006).
Enjoyable biographies of William Jones, Friedrich Max Müller and Rammohun Roy are, respectively: Michael J. Franklin’s Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011), supplemented by Alexander Murray’s edited collection, Sir William Jones 1746–1794: A Commemoration (Oxford, 1998); Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Friedrich Max Müller (London, 1974); and Amiya P. Sen’s Rammohun Roy: A Critical Biography (New Delhi, 2012).
3 Buddha, Alexander and Asoka
There are dozens of recent introductions to the life and thought of the Buddha. I recommend: Karen Armstrong’s Buddha (London, 2000); Paul Williams with Anthony Tribe and Alexander Wynne’s Buddhist Thought (second edition, London, 2012); Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (London, 2004); and The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha, translated by Thomas Byrom (London, 2002). Also of interest, though hard going, is Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Indian and Greek Philosophies (New York, 2002), on how Buddhism may have reached the classical world; and Donald S. Lopez Jr’s From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chicago, 2013), on how East and West understood the Buddha prior to the 19th century. The much-disputed dating of the Buddha is discussed by Richard Gombrich in Heinz Bechert’s edited collection, The Dating of the Historical Buddha, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1992). Criticism of this book, mainly by Indian scholars, appears in A. K. Narain’s edited collection, The Date of the Historical Sakyamuni Buddha (New Delhi, 2003).
Buddhism’s disappearance in India and its modern revival are the subject of Gail Omvedt’s Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (New Delhi, 2003) and Trevor Ling’s Buddhist Revival in India: Aspects of the Sociology of Buddhism (Basingstoke, 1980). The story of the European scholars responsible for Buddhism’s rediscovery is told in Charles Allen’s The Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion (London, 2002); and the Ajanta cave paintings (now almost hidden in darkness for visitors) are wonderfully displayed in the photographer Benoy K. Behl’s The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India (London, 1998). On the Mahabodhi Temple, see Alan Trevithick’s The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (New Delhi, 2006) and David Geary, Matthew R. Sayers and Abhishek Singh Amar’s edited collection, Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Buddhist Site: Bodh Gaya Jataka (London, 2012). Rabindranath Tagore’s comment on the Buddha appears in his ‘Buddhadeva’ (Visva-Bharati Quarterly, winter 1956/57, pp. 169–76).
An excellent recent biography of Alexander is Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (London, 2004). On the later Greek influence in northwestern India, see A. K. Narain’s The Indo-Greeks (revised edition, New Delhi, 2003). Charles Allen’s Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (London, 2012) is a well-constructed history that does not skimp on difficult scholarly issues. The attorney Bruce Rich promotes Asoka (and Kautilya) for the modern world in To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India (Boston, 2010), without being entirely convincing.
4 Hindu Dynasties
There are no accessible studies focusing on the Hindu dynasties, so it is best to read the general histories of Romila Thapar and A. L. Basham. Brief introductions to the ideas behind classical Hinduism include K. M. Sen’s venerable Hinduism (London, 2005, with a foreword by Sen’s grandson, Amartya Sen) and Sue Hamilton’s Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001), as well as A. L. Dallapiccola’s Hindu Myths (London, 2003). I also recommend Richard Lannoy’s The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (London, 1971).
The novelist R. K. Narayan’s ‘shortened modern prose versions’ of the Indian epics are: The Ramayana (London, 1972) and The Mahabharata (London, 1978). There is a translation by the Sanskrit scholar John D. Smith, The Mahabharata: An Abridged Translation (London, 2009). Rudyard Kipling’s comment on The Mahabharata appears in Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88, edited by Thomas Pinney (Basingstoke, 1986). Gurcharan Das stimulatingly relates The Mahabharata to modern Indian concerns in The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (New York, 2009). Many classics of Sanskrit literature are available in the translations of the Oxford series World’s Classics and the series Penguin Classics.
On Hindu aesthetics, T. Richard Blurton’s Hindu Art (London, 2002) is a good introduction. George Michell’s The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India, vol. 1 (London, 1989), covering Buddhist, Jain and Hindu structures, is intended as a guidebook but in addition serves as an excellent source of reliable information, based on the author’s thorough research on the spot. There are also numerous large-format, highly illustrated studies intended for both scholars and coffee tables, such as A. L. Dallapiccola’s edited collection, Krishna: The Divine Lover (London, 1982) and Christopher Tadgell’s The History of Architecture in India (London, 1990). On India’s relationship with Southeast Asia, there is a dearth of writing; Paul Wheatley’s ‘India Beyond the Ganges: Desultory Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia’ (Journal of Asian Studies, 42:1 (1982), pp. 13–28) is good.
5 The Coming of Islam
Francis Robinson’s highly illustrated reference book, The Mughal Emperors: and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran and Central Asia (London, 2007), has the virtue of seamlessly combining the Islamic world, beginning with the Mongols in Iran, and the later world of Indian Islam. S. A. A. Rizvi’s essays on medieval Indian Islam in A. L. Basham’s A Cultural History of India are also helpful. The archaeologist and sailor Brian Fagan’s Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans (London, 2012) has a chapter on the maritime history of the Arabs in the Indian Ocean.
The translation of al-Biruni by Edward C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India (London, 1888; abridged edition by Ainslie Embree, New York, 1971), is a crucial contemporary source on the Muslim conquests. Sita Ram Goel’s edited collection, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, vols 1 and 2 (New Delhi, 1993–98), makes an impassioned Hindu nationalist case for the severity of Muslim iconoclasm. More measured assessments appear in Richard M. Eaton’s brief Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (New Delhi, 2004) and in Eaton’s edited collection, India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750 (New Delhi, 2003), in which his introduction discusses theories of conversion to Islam. Romila Thapar investigates Muslim iconoclasm at Somnath in depth in Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (New Delhi, 2004). Some evidence for the destruction of Nalanda appears in C. Mani’s edited collection, The Heritage of Nalanda (New Delhi, 2008). On the Vijayanagar empire, the leading modern authorities are John M. Fritz and George Michell. Among their several books, an excellent illustrated introduction is Hampi Vijayanagara (revised edition, London, 2011).
A well-known early edition of Kabir in English is One Hundred Poems of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore with the assistance of Evelyn Underhill (London, 1915). More reliable editions include a translation by Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir (Oxford, 1974), and another by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Songs of Kabir (New York, 2011).
6 The Mughal Empire
Bamber Gascoigne’s beautifully illustrated, but also seriously researched, history of the Mughal empire, The Great Moghuls (London, 1971), has worn well. There are of course many illustrated books on Mughal art and culture, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum’s The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule (London, 1982). An up-to-date cultural study, based on an exhibition taken from the manuscript collections of the British Library, is J. P. Losty and Malini Roy’s Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (London, 2012).
Philip Davies’s The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India, vol. 2 (London, 1989) covers Islamic and Rajput buildings, including those of the Mughals, and is a useful reference source. On the Taj Mahal, the definitive book is Ebba Koch’s The Complete Taj Mahal: and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra (London, 2006), while Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal (London, 2008) is a briefer history, which also explores the cultural significance of the Taj to the world.
Among books about individual Mughal emperors, the foremost is probably the memoirs of Babur. The original translation is Memoirs of Zehir-Ed-Din Muhammed Babur, Emperor of Hindustan by John Leyden and William Erskine (revised edition, Oxford, 1921), from which I quote. There is also a 1921 translation by Annette Susannah Beveridge, Babur Nama (abridged edition by Dilip Hiro, London, 2007), and an illustrated large-format edition translated by Wheeler M. Thackston, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (New York, 1996). The art historian and poet Laurence Binyon’s brief biography, Akbar (London, 1932), is still worth reading, while Shireen Moosvi’s collection, Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (New Delhi, 1994), captures the diverse facets of Akbar’s personality vividly. William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London, 2006) portrays the last Mughal ruler, his court in Delhi and his downfall.
7 European Incursions and East India Companies
India’s trading history is covered in Tirthankar Roy’s India in the World Economy: from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012). Dick Whitaker’s ‘Conjunctures and Conjectures: Kerala and Roman Trade’ (South Asian Studies, 25 (2009), pp. 1–9) contains informed speculations on the earliest period. James Chiriyankandath’s ‘Nationalism, Religion and Community: A. B. Salem, the Politics of Identity and the Disappearance of Cochin Jewry’ (Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), pp. 21–42) is good on the Jewish community. On the Portuguese empire, J. B. Harrison’s essay in A. L. Basham’s A Cultural History of India is an excellent introduction; Heta Pandit’s edited collection, In and Around Old Goa (Mumbai, 2004) is also useful, with good illustrations. The most complete history of Assam, at least for the Ahom and colonial period, is probably still Edward Gait’s A History of Assam (second edition, Calcutta, 1926).
On the origins and development of the British trading empire, a general history is John Keay’s The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1991). The period is also covered in an excellent and well-illustrated exhibition catalogue edited by C. A. Bayly, The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947 (London, 1990); in studies of Robert Clive and the Company in Bengal, such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Clive of India: A Political and Psychological Essay (London, 1975) and P. J. Marshall’s East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976); and in Gillian Tindall’s City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (London, 1982).
On the controversy between the Orientalists and the Anglicists, see Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir’s edited collection, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (London, 1999). It also features in Jon E. Wilson’s The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, 2008); in Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher’s biography of the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (London, 2012); and in Blair B. Kling’s Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley, 1976).
8 The ‘Jewel in the Crown’
Life in the Indian Army before the 1857 Mutiny is described in James Lunt’s edition of Sita Ram Pandey’s From Sepoy to Subedar (London, 1970) and in Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s brief account, Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? (New Delhi, 2005). Although there is some doubt about the authenticity of Pandey’s manuscript, most military historians accept it as genuine.
William Howard Russell’s My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–9, 2 vols (London, 1860) is a vital eye-witness account of the last stage of the Mutiny and its aftermath. Modern historical accounts include: Surendra Nath Sen’s Eighteen Fifty-Seven (New Delhi, 1957); Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London, 1978); Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Avadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A Study of Popular Resistance (New Delhi, 1984); Andrew Ward’s Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London, 1996); Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s The Great Uprising, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (Woodbridge, 2007); and Amaresh Misra’s War of Civilizations: India AD 1857 (New Delhi, 2007). The British demolition of part of the Red Fort in Delhi is criticized in James Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London, 1876). On the Indian Civil Service, see David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London, 2005).
Some 19th-century Indian reform movements are discussed in Ramachandra Guha’s edited collection, Makers of Modern India (Cambridge, MA, 2011), which includes essays by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Jyotirao Phule and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Brahmo Samaj is covered in David Kopf’s The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979). Sumit Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (Calcutta, 1973) is the standard history of the Swadeshi movement.
On the Amritsar massacre, Winston Churchill’s humane parliamentary speech in 1920 appears in his India: Speeches and an Introduction (London, 1931), which may be compared with his later contempt for Indian lives, described in Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York, 2010). Recent studies of Amritsar include Nick Lloyd’s The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London, 2011) and Nigel Collett’s biography, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London, 2005).
9 End of Empire
The conversation in 1921 between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore appears in Leonard K. Elmhirst, Poet and Plowman (Calcutta, 1975). For a detailed discussion of their relationship, see Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s biography, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (revised edition, London, 2007), and also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s edited collection, The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941 (New Delhi, 1997). Gandhi’s early views on machines are found in his Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1997), edited by Anthony J. Parel; all of his views are discussed in David Arnold’s Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago, 2013).
There is of course no end to books on Gandhi. Two recent biographies of interest are his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire (New Delhi, 2006) and especially Kathryn Tidrick’s Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London, 2006). Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London, 2012) grapples with Gandhi’s attitude to violence. Arthur Herman considers Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (London, 2008).
The best introduction to the Partition of India is The Partition Omnibus (New Delhi, 2002), with an introduction by Mushirul Hasan, which includes the full texts of two books by two civil servants present at the Partition: Penderel Moon’s Divide and Quit (London, 1964) and G. D. Khosla’s Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading Up To and Following the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1950). Other eye-witness accounts appear in Patrick French’s Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London, 1997) and in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand, Great Anarch!: India 1921–1952 (London, 1987). Cyril Radcliffe’s letter is quoted from Edmund Heward’s biography, The Great and the Good: A Life of Lord Radcliffe (Chichester, 1994). The effect of Partition on the Indian princes is discussed in my book, Maharaja (London, 1988).
Leonard Woolf’s verdict on the British-Indian empire is from his memoir, Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (London, 1967). For an Indian view, see the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri’s memoir, The World in Our Time (Delhi, 2011). More objective verdicts appear in Lawrence James’s Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1997), Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London, 2007) and John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012).
10 The World’s Largest Democracy
Zareer Masani’s Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization (Noida, 2012) makes a thought-provoking case. The importance of English in India emerges fascinatingly from Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s dictionary-cum-glossary-cum-encyclopedia, Hobson-Jobson (London, 1886; recent editions, Sittingbourne, 1994, with a ‘historical perspective’ by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Oxford, 2013, edited by Kate Teltscher).
Srinivasa Ramanujan comes alive in Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (New York, 1991). On the history of Indian mathematics before Ramanujan, see Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009). The current state of Indian science is described in Gautam S. Desiraju’s ‘Bold Strategies for Indian Science’ (Nature, 484 (2012), pp. 159–60). Its troubled development during the 20th century occupies Abha Sur’s Dispersed Radiance: Caste, Gender, and Modern Science in India (New Delhi, 2011) and also Jahnavi Phalkey’s ‘Not only Smashing Atoms: Meghnad Saha and Nuclear Physics in Calcutta, 1938–48’ in Uma Das Gupta’s edited collection, Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784–1947 (New Delhi, 2011). On modern caste politics in general, see Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany’s The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge, 1998).
The most substantial biography of Jawaharlal Nehru is Sarvepalli Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 3 vols (London, 1975–84), but there are many other more recent biographies. Katherine Frank’s Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London, 2001) is probably the best biography of Indira Gandhi. Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology (Gurgaon, 2012) is highly critical of Nehru and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – too dismissive of Nehru, but nevertheless worth reading.
On the current Indian economy, among many recent books I recommend: a provocative collection of essays, The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change (New Delhi, 2002), and India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State (New Delhi, 2012), by Gurcharan Das, a former businessman with philosophical training; William Nanda Bissell’s Making India Work (New Delhi, 2009), an ethical plan for development by a successful Indian businessman; sociologist Shehzad Nadeem’s Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton, 2011); journalist Dinesh Sharma’s detailed history The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India’s IT Industry (New Delhi, 2009); M. V. Ramana’s The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (New Delhi, 2012), a scientist’s highly informed, independent and balanced assessment of the reasons for the failure of India’s nuclear power industry; and Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari’s disturbing study of corporate power, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India (New Delhi, 2012), by an economist and an ecologist.
Postscript
Satyajit Ray’s 1991 interview (with Gowri Ramnarayan) is quoted in my Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema (London, 2005, with photographs by Nemai Ghosh). Extracts from Javed Akhtar’s memorial lecture on Satyajit Ray appear in my The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic (London, 2011), and more fully in the Times of India, 4 May 2009. V. S. Naipaul’s comment appears in ‘A Million Mutinies’ (India Today, 18 August 1997). Markandey Katju’s remarks are from the Indian Express, 9 April 2012. Significant studies of corruption are: A. Surya Prakash’s Public Money Private Agenda: The Use and Abuse of MPLADS (New Delhi, 2013) and Arvind Kejriwal’s Swaraj (New Delhi, 2012), written by a former inland revenue official turned social activist and politician.