India: A Concise History

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.