India: A Concise History (Revised and Updated Edition)

Francis Watson's acclaimed history of India begins in the third millennium BC with the Indus Valley civilization. The subsequent influx of pastoral nomads, first in a long series of invasions from the north-west which included the Moghuls nearly 3,000 years later, established the Vedic religious tradition. In a gradual assimilation of popular cults, and a formalization by the Sanskrit language and the institution of caste, this tradition supplied the cohesion upon which a national consciousness, in its Western sense, is a comparatively recent grafting. The enduring distinctiveness of India, its widely recognized but often bewildering 'diversity of unity', emerges from these pages as a product of geographical simplicity and historical complexity.