What makes India a nation? What has held its many disparate societies with their diverse, sometimes conflicting, narratives together for more than sixty years? What has allowed India to sustain its commitment to the democratic process, given its location in a region that is largely undemocratic? In this magisterial analysis of the last five hundred years of Indian history, Meghnad Desai looks at India’s colonial past, its struggle for independence and its many contemporary conundrums, to discover answers to the questions that have confronted India-watchers for decades. Rejecting much received wisdom, including narratives fashioned by India’s ruling establishment, Meghnad Desai goes back to the beginnings of the East–West encounter at the end of the fifteenth century and tracks its impact on the cultures and politics of the present day. Through a series of ‘Counterfactual Boxes’ Meghnad Desai analyses the accepted defining moments of India’s past and suggests alternative courses that history could so easily have taken. Meghnad Desai draws on a wealth of sources to illuminate India’s journey to the twenty-first century. Whether it is an examination of British parliamentary debates on the question of India’s independence, or the liberalization of the economy after decades of licence-permit raj, or the state’s complicity in the Gujarat riots, Meghnad Desai’s original, occasionally iconoclastic, approach to seemingly settled arguments makes The Rediscovery of India a path-breaking and comprehensive account of India’s past and present.

The Book Considers The Partition Of India In 1947 To Have Been The Most Disastrous Of Political Solutions For The Subcontinent. Tracing Past History, It Shows How The Indian Leaders Were Manipulated By The British Into Seeing Partition As The Only Solution. The Author Does Not Accept The Official Reasons For Hurrying The Negotiation, Nor The Claim That Partition Had Become Inevitable. The Records Of The Transfer Of Power And Earlier Talks Do Not Show The Real Spring That Thrust Partition Upon The Subcontinent. The Book Sets Out To Find Precisely That. A Provocative Book On Historical Problems Which Have Acquired A New Dimension In The Contemporary Political Scene.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

A history of the rediscovery of India's history... Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Western world had very little knowledge - or an extremely distorted view - of the glorious and fascinating history of the Indian subcontinent. In fact, with little of the region's 3000-year-old heritage formally preserved and documented, it was widely believed that the country's history had begun with the reign of the Mughals. When the British gained control over the subcontinent, the scholars, explorers and Indophiles among them discovered things and areas of great historical wonder but found few answers. Armed with great intellectual curiosity, they set out to uncover things no one had given a thought to earlier. From William Jones who identified Chandragupta Maurya as 'Sandrocottus' mentioned in Greek sources and set the first chronological point of reference for recorded Indian history to Charles Wilkins who designed the first typeface of the Bengali script; from Henry Colebrooke who shone light on the wonders of ancient Indian scientific knowledge to Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology, who led the first excavation of the Harappa site in the Punjab - Forgotten Civilizations brings together the intriguing stories of fifteen intrepid Englishmen who dedicated their lives to rediscovering India's ancient heritage and redefining the significance of its pluralistic and sophisticated culture to the rest of the world.

"In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.