India cover art

India

A History

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

India

By: John Keay
Narrated by: Mike Fraser
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £31.42

Buy Now for £31.42

About this listen

 The most authoritative and highly regarded single-volume history of India – from ancient time to the modern day. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s social, economic, political and cultural history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East.

India’s history begins with a highly advanced urban civilisation in the Indus valley, regressing to a tribal and pastoral nomadism, and then evolving into a uniquely stratified society. The pattern of inward invasion plus outward migration was established early: from Alexander the Great via the march of Islam and the great Moghuls to the coming of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj.

Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity and diversity. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent, while sharing a common history and culture, are not now, and never have been, a single unitary state; the book accommodates Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as other embryonic nation states like the Sikh Punjab, Muslim Kashmir and Assam.

In this brilliant new edition, John Keay continues the narrative of India’s history – covering events from partition to the present day and examining the very different fortunes of the three successor states: Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Republic of India. Based on the latest research, this is an indispensible history of a country set to be a definitive influence on the future of world economics, politics and culture.

(P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC Ancient Asia Civilization Colonialism & Post-Colonialism India Politics & Government South Asia World Ancient History Middle East
All stars
Most relevant
Impressive in its apparent ability to treat every part of Indian history more or less equally, from the mythical origins some 5000 years ago, via the limited traces of the Harappan and Indus Valley Civilisation up to (depending on the edition you have) Modi. Most impressive for a general history is the attention paid to the ancient, pre-recorded history - a good two fifths of the book are devoted to the period before the arrival of Islam and written history, where most seem to rush to the Mughal and British eras as fast as they can, just because they're so much better documented.

I'll confess I found some of the earlier periods pretty hard to follow, but that's largely due to the nature of what was going on in those early medieval years - lots of relatively short-lived, relatively regional powers rising up then fading away in different parts of the sub-continent, in much they way the did in the sub-continent of Europe during the same period. Equally, I got a bit lost in the politics of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh post-Partition, largely because I only really know this from reading Rushdie and Naipaul, but mostly because all the coups and sectarian uprisings tend to blur into one after a while. All my confusion I put down to my lack of familiarity rather than the author's lack of clarity.

I'll be returning to my hard copy to refresh my understanding, I can be certain. The maps and dynastic trees alone are invaluable.

The narrator, though, sadly almost ruins this. He has a good voice, but a stilted way of speaking that introduces pauses in strange places - and a really weird tendency to mispronounce random words. Not just Indian names and words (with which he often seems unfamiliar - even some of the most famous ones), but also various English ones. I nearly gave up as a result - it was giving me a headache.

Excellent overview

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An amazing story handled carefully. Would have been better with a PDF to help with visualising some of the discussion points. It does refer to a PDF but after checking with Amazon it is apparently not provided.
Narrator speaks in clear BBC English (as I call it) so not sure what other reviewers mean by the pronunciation maybe they were expecting American English.

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Probably the best history of India I’ve consumed though I wish I’d read it instead of listening. The narrator has a pleasing enough voice but that’s the only positive. It isn’t monotonous per se but only because of a natural rise and fall of tone in the voice. There is no emphasis and no “reading with understanding”. Paired with the frequent mispronunciation of English words (really too many to list and none being a case of British vs American pronunciation. A single example being “emissary”), I was left unsure whether the words in Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil were anywhere close to their correct pronunciation. All this made me grind my teeth at times and check at least twice whether the narration was actually AI. It isn’t but that surprised me.

Excellent book in dire need of a narrator with better delivery.

Thorough research, attempts to be unbiased.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.