India: A History. Revised and Updated (133 page)

The City Palace, Udaipur, Rajasthan, from 1567. Udaipur was adopted by the (Maha)rana of Mewar after Akbar’s sacking of Chitor. Here James Tod gathered the materials for his epic account of the rajput clans.

Robert, Baron Clive of Plassey, engraving after a portrait by J. Drummond. While engineering British supremacy in Bengal, Clive realised a colossal fortune, yet, with reason, stood ‘astonished at my own moderation’.

Warren Hastings, first British governor-general of India, from a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. A reluctant imperialist, Hastings found himself elevating the British presence in India to a position of paramountcy.

Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi. The Indian Joan of Arc, Lakshmi Bai’s exploits during the Great Rebellion won her even British regard as ‘the only man amongst the rebels’.

The Indian National Congress at Allahabad, December
I888.
George Yule, president (seated centre), with local convenor Pandit Ayodhia Nath (on his right), and William Wedderburn and secretary A.O. Hume (on his left).

George Nathaniel, Lord Curzon (centre), on a tiger-shoot. Curzon, the most brilliant of British viceroys, precipitated the first great surge of nationalist resistance with his ill-judged partition of Bengal.

Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal. As ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’, the Panjabi
Arya Samaj
leader, the great Maharashtrian firebrand and the radical Bengali editor spearheaded
swadeshi
protest in 1907.

M. K. (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi leading the April 1930 Salt March. In the set-piece which launched the civil disobedience movement, Gandhi upheld man’s inalienable right to the untaxed enjoyment of a common condiment.

Protestors on the streets of Calcutta during the Quit India movement of 1942. In this wartime protest the British recognised the most violent phase of the independence struggle and reacted accordingly.

Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah at the Simla Conference, 1945. The Partition of British India into Jinna’s Pakistan and Nehru’s Republic of India would provoke one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The most controversial of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Mrs Gandhi dominated the political scene for nearly twenty years, but suborned the consensus on which it rested.

Rajiv Gandhi (third from left) at the cremation of his mother, Indira Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi’s 1984 assassination by Sikh extremists, and a retaliatory massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, plunged India into crisis and precipitated Rajiv’s elevation to office.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

List of Charts and Tables

Author’s note to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 The Harappan World: c3000–1700 BC

2 Vedic Values: c1700–900 BC

3 The Epic Age: c900–520 BC

4 Out of the Myth-Smoke: c520–c320 BC

5 Gloria Maurya: c320–200 BC

6 An Age of Paradox: c200 BC –c300 AD