In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India's modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India's huge advances in technology and the country's new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into Independence, the country has been transformed by its institutional structures. It is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century and paved the way for the modern success story. Despite these advances, poverty, social inequality and religious division still fester. In response to these dilemmas, the book grapples with questions of caste and religious identity, and the nature of the Indian nation.

A few years later, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing an edict that replaced his own revenue officials with the Company s representatives. Over the next several decades, the East India Company, backed by the British government, extended its control over most of India

Ian Watson's brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British SF in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication. Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an isolated tribe face eviction from their ancestral lands - and the psychedelic fungus that makes their religious language possible. In a British laboratory, a brilliant linguist conducts cutting-edge experiments - but does his search for answers come at too high a cost? And in the ultimate test of linguistics, First Contact presents a challenge unlike any humanity has faced before . . . Fiercely intelligent, energetic and challenging, The Embedding immediately established Watson as a writer of rare power and vision, and is now recognized as a modern classic of SF.

5,000 years of history—from the Bhagavad Gita to Bollywood—fill this masterful portrait of the world’s most populous nation and a rising global power. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. India—a cradle of civilization with five millennia of history, a country of immense consequence and contradiction—often defies ready understanding. What holds its people together—across its many cultures, races, languages, and creeds—and how has India evolved into the liberal democracy it is today? From the Harappan era to Muslim invasions, the Great Mughals, British rule, independence, and present-day hopes, John Zubrzycki distills India’s colossal history into a gripping true story filled with legendary lives: Alexander the Great, Akbar, Robert Clive, Tipu Sultan, Lakshmi Bai, Lord Curzon, Jinnah, and Gandhi. India’s gifts to the world include Buddhism, yoga, the concept of zero, the largest global diaspora—and its influence is only growing. Already the world’s largest democracy, in 2023, India became the most populous nation. Can India overcome its political, social, and religious tensions to be the next global superpower? As the world watches—and wonders—this Shortest History is an essential, clarifying read.

This book provides a linear history beginning at the time of the East India Company’s arrival, with its near 250 year struggle to the formation of the British Raj, and the withdrawal of the Raj in the 90 years following, highlighting how the EIC rode to power and its administration replaced the Mughal’s system, while describing how the Indian intellectual middle class developed. This work then describes how the Indian National Congress was established as a platform for nationalism and opposed British ambitions. This work emphasizes the events of about the last fifty years of the Raj which survived with domestic pressure and two great wars. It is a complicated political history of conflicts between nationalists and Imperialists surrounding communal agendas of the Muslim League, and interprets how two great wars consumed the resources of Britain as well as caused the decline of the Indian economy, and how the British trajectory tended to swing towards its withdrawal. The last chapter describes how Lord Mountbatten endeavored to effectuate the transfer of power which was constrained due to communal passion.