India - A History

Author: John KeayPublisher: HarperCollinsYear: 2001Language: EnglishPages: 576ISBN/UPC (if available): 0006387845 DescriptionA truly comprehensive and thoroughly readable history of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. From the myths of an impossible antiquity to the masterpieces of the classical glory, from the boasts of obscures dynasts to the chronicles of Islamic conquests, and from the triumphs of the liberation to the recrimination of partition, the author recounts a five thousand-year epic in which conflicts underwrites achievements and kings defer to saints. The monuments, tombs, temples and palaces are paraded in context and their significance explained and a new slant is given to the conventional tides of inward incursion and outer dissemination - Alexander the Great's debacle, the all-Asia diffusion of Indian culture, the Islamic, Mughal and British conquests, and the twentieth-century Diaspora of south Asian society. Beginning with the flood and ending with the bomb,