A review of ‘Indians: A brief history of a civilisation’ by Namit Arora

This is a compelling book about the deep history of India and its effects on the present. How did the author achieve it? He was once an IT professional who worked in USA for several years. In his 30s, he took a two year leave and travelled the length and breadth of India like several illustrious people before him, followed by deeper reading and writing. Some of it appeared in his first book, “The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social inequalities”. If his essay ‘A place called home’ is any indication, his desire to understand India and Indians more deeply must have long been with him. 

After a few more years of working and travelling the world, he quit his job, relocated to India and began exploring more thoroughly the questions that bothered him. To do so, he chose six major historical sites he had visited before, covering different regions and timespans. He studied the historical sources and modern scholarship available and travelled to them again, talking to various people along the way. He has also presented insights from the chronicles of famous historical travellers, the most compelling of whom (for me) is Francois Bernier. The result is a book that combines a narrative history of India with archaeological travel writing.

As the author says in the introduction, “I hoped to find the essence of each site’s [historical] inhabitants—their defining beliefs, customs and institutions; their struggles and living conditions—and their legacy in the cultural mosaic of India.” Namit Arora has done the hard yakka and given us a guide and model to study India’s past. I think Patrick French summarized it well in his tweet about this book: “Options: spend a decade thinking and reading deeply about the early history of India, and going to all the key places. Or read this 250 page book, INDIANS, by someone who has done the work. An extraordinary feat of imaginative framing, achieved through close observation.”