Wow, this book took a long time to finish. It attempts to cover a huge amount of history in not that many pages. The book can be a bit difficult to stay focused on, especially when covering older history which is heavily based on speculation.

The book does assume a lot of knowledge about Indian geography and culture that was a bit frustrating. I spent a lot of time googling Vedas or maps.

Really the best part of the book were the little bits like "they had scarcely begun the mysterious business of cleaving rutting elephants’ temples and were not politically significant in India as a whole." or "Although freed for a fifty-elephant indemnity, Jayapala acknowledged the loss of caste implicit in capture and did the noble thing."

As Keay begins to cover more modern history, he loses some of his objectivity. Overall though, this covered a lot of material, and I learned quite a bit.

This book sits somewhere between a popular history and a textbook. Although it provides an overview of the entirety of Indian history, and thus can cover no one particular era in full detail, and is clearly aimed at beginners, do not mistake it for a frothy, light read. If you’re looking for only the simplest basics, look elsewhere. This is a fairly weighty tome, covering its subjects in a surprising amount of depth. A minor negative is that Keay sometimes goes off on tangential anecdotes when you wish he’d stick to the subject and era of each chapter. However, the book is cogent and very well researched, and does what it sets out to do very well. I can’t fault it for professionalism or historical accuracy (at least, as far as I know, but I am no Indian history expert).

7 out of 10

Well researched fantastic read.

I have never read a history of India that is better written or substantiated. From 5000 BC onwards, the reader is taken through a treasure trove of facts and observations, often reading like a fiction novel.

I have learned a lot and plan to reread the beginning to better understand the Genesis of this nation and it's identity.

Going into my first visit to India, I realized that I had almost no knowledge of its history, so I was seeking a readable single volume that would bring me somewhat up to speed. I had followed a similar approach with Leonard Thompson's "A History of South Africa" and very much enjoyed it. While I enjoyed Keay's book as well, it became clear pretty early on that it would be a bit more of a slog.

The fundamental difference, of course, is that while South Africa and India have both been inhabited for many thousands of years, South Africa's written history is pretty sparse before the arrival of the Europeans. As a result, Thompson's book ended up focusing mostly on the last 400 years or so, which meant a fairly linear narrative of proxy battles between European powers and struggles between the newcomers and the natives. India, by contrast, has a significant written history and was really a set of independent cultures until fairly recently. The result is that the book doesn't build any momentum until about half-way through. A short-lived power will spring up out of nowhere in the south of India and then fade away as quickly as it came, leaving no meaningful impact on the India of today. Meanwhile, something similar will be happening in the north, with neither power having any real interaction with each other. It is really only when the Mughal Empire begins to rise and unite the subcontinent that a more cohesive narrative begins to form. Indeed, Keay makes a comment to this effect when he teases the arrival of the Mughals at the beginning of Chapter 13:

"Through the agency of Babur, first of the Great Mughals, the multilateral history of the Indian subcontinent begins to jell into the monolithic history of India".

You can almost sense his relief rising off the page and as the reader, you feel much the same way.

Of course, I can't really fault the author for this. It wouldn't be appropriate for him to build a linear narrative where none exists. However, the casual reader looking to understand the India of today by learning about its history should be aware that there are several hundred pages of effectively "throwaway" history here, which is to say events and people that didn't have a meaningful impact on what happened later.

All that being said, once Keay did make it to Mughals, readability definitely picked up and I enjoyed the remainder of the book significantly more. As a neutral observer, his summary of the lead-up to and execution of partition seemed balanced and I appreciated that he followed through with the post-partition history of Pakistan and Bangladesh - in other words, this is the history of the Indian subcontinent, not just India the country that we know today.

Keay's writing style is clear and readable, with choice use of wit thrown in to liven up the history, my favorite example being:

"In what the latter often characterized as a doctor-patient relationship, it looked as if India could be retained on a drip-feed of concessions until the sacred cows came home. The First World War changed all that. With the imperial medico coming under severe strain, the Indian patient was co-opted onto the nursing staff. He was fitter, evidently, and the doctor frailer than had been supposed. Doing the rounds, he heard tell of an American panacea called self-determination and of a more revolutionary cure being pioneered in Russia. It was doubtful whether he should be in hospital at all. If the doctor was so obviously fallible, why should the patient be patient?"

If you want a thorough, readable single-volume history of India, I can definitely recommend this. Just be prepared for a bunch of false starts through the first half. And if you find yourself struggling through that part of the book, consider skipping ahead to the Mughals and proceeding from there. If your goals for reading the book were like mine, you'll get most of what you're looking for with much less of a slog.

The best popular history book on India currently. Very well balanced as the author has neither a left, right nor an Imperialist bias.