India's past in the present

This lucidly written and persuasively argued book pushes readers to think about ancient India beyond the prevailing stereotypes

The history of ancient India is not a monochromatic jubilee. Rather, it is a mosaic with variegated and often contradictory patterns. This is one of the attractions for studying the ancient Indian past — its innumerable layers, its openness to different interpretations and the many different kinds of sources that allow us to access it, albeit not in its entirety, from archaeological remains to different kinds of texts. The study of India’s past, Upinder Singh reminds us, “can be beautiful and inspiring; it can also be ugly, unsettling and disturbing”. Her book by “focusing on the co-existence of certain radical