I’ve learned about Indian History in secondary school from the Mughal’s coming to India until the British Raj and Independence in 1947 but living in the UK we weren’t taught about Indian History before the Mughal Empire. As I’ve also seen the beautiful palaces, madrasa’s (Mosques) Hindu and Jain Temples on my visits to India.

John Keay has covered a lot of Indian History from the Indus Civilisation to the entry of the British Raj right the way through to Independent India and India after the Independence. This is a book that I would happily recommend to anyone wanting to know more about Indian History.

This book is kinda terrible. The beginning was ok, and the end was decent, but everything after Harappa and before the Mughals was absolutely brutal to read. This makes some sense given that India has never been a unified state until independence, although it did come close under the Mughals and the British Raj. Because of India's disunity, it is difficult to write a historical narrative (especially when earlier documents are scattered, if extant at all). But, surely there would have been some better way to frame this book in a way where it has meaning rather than a series of disjointed figures and events only linked together by their Indian-ness.

I'll find something else to read to fill in the gaps, and I recommend staying away from this one.

Not impenetrably dense, but pretty tough to get through for any newbie to Indian history. An all-in-one resource that is best served with supplementary materials, lest you get lost in this sea of info.

A long journey through India's long and varied history. Gave me a better perspective on the Indian subcontinent and its peoples.

Hate to be so negative, but I only managed a third of the book before I totally lost interest and quit. Bought this to read ahead of a trip to India. It started off strong and I'm glad I read the section on Ashoka. But then it got deep in the weeds of the details of specific princes who are only remembered for one specific thing. Too much detail, not enough story. In retrospect I probably wanted the 200 page history of India, not the 600 page one.

India, A history is an okay general history. It tells you a lot about the subcontinent, and not just evens shistory-- cultural and economic history as well, and it's good at contextualising things. However, a wide variety of things irked me. One was the unnecessary obfuscation. There are sentences with 70+ words, many with 8+ letters at that. I'm not illiterate, but dealing with large amounts of complex vocabulary makes a book really exhausting to read. And sure, being scholarly is okay, but to me 90-year old is just as acceptable a term as 'nonagenarian' . Another thing I struggled with was the constant comparison to English history. That might help some people (and hey it helped me to identify the demographic) but I don't know much about English history, and maybe some other parallels would have been appropriate. The other thing is that this is a general history. There might be specific things you're interested, but they just get a paragraph. Still, this is a good book if you don't know much about Indian History.