Audrey Truschke’s India is a stunning new history of the Indian subcontinent and its diverse peoples in global contexts—from antiquity to today. Sweeping across five millennia, this engaging and richly textured narrative traverses the dawn of the Indus Valley Civilization, the births of Hinduism and Buddhism, Ashoka and the Mauryan Empire, the Silk Road, Indo-Muslim culture and Mughal rule, European colonialism, Partition, art and climate change in the twenty-first century, and more. Truschke presents a wide range of voices, including those of women, religious minorities, lower classes, and other marginalized groups. She emphasizes how the region of South Asia has been continuously reshaped by its astonishing diversity, social stratification, and religious and political innovations.
An overview history of South Asia is ambitious and challenging. What inspired you to write such a sweeping work?
Audrey Truschke: I teach the history of South Asia—from the Indus Valley Civilization until the current year—over two semesters annually at Rutgers University-Newark. And so, I have been working out for the past decade how to present South Asia history in a semi-coherent fashion. In a sense, I wrote the book I want to teach and from which I want my students to learn.
I was also cognizant that nobody has written a book like this for decades. There are plenty of books out there that claim to offer an overview history of India or South Asia, but they generally short shrift premodernity, sometimes covering the period before 1750 in a precious few chapters. I find ignoring the past an impoverished way to understand it. A full two-thirds of my book focuses on pre-colonial India and its myriad of social, political, intellectual, and religious shifts.
Last, we all stand in history ourselves, and at this moment in both the West and South Asia, careful academic analysis is under threat from fierce populist and nationalist forces that prefer to mythologize the past. I refuse to participate in such ahistorical projects. I wrote the book, in part, because I think there’s an audience hungry for real stories about real people and real historical change that preceded and created the world in which we live today.
Why did you title the book “India”? Why not “South Asia”?
AT: A recurrent scene in my life is as follows – I meet somebody new, and they ask what I do for a living. I say that I am a historian of South Asia, and they look confused for a moment before launching into the details of their recent trip to Thailand.
This repeated experience demonstrates an enduring issue with the term “South Asia,” which is that it is not widely understood. “India” is far more legible and, also, more historical. People have been calling the subcontinent “India” for millennia, whereas “South Asia” is a social science term dating to the twentieth century. That said, I use both terms throughout the book, especially employing “South Asia” to also include Sri Lanka.
It is important that, for most of the book, I use the term “India” in its older geographical sense of the subcontinent, which includes parts of the modern nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh. This practice may be uncomfortable for some readers who are accustomed to “India” meaning the modern nation, which covers only some of the Indian subcontinent, but I can live with that discomfort. In fact, challenging reader assumptions is important to shake everybody out of our collective tendency to write the present onto the past.
What was the greatest challenge you encountered while writing the book?
AT: I found it difficult to walk the line between cultivating empathy for people in the past while simultaneously recognizing that earlier times were often radically different from our own. To me, both things—exercising empathy and cognizing difference—are critical parts of the historian’s craft.
On the one hand, I want readers to sympathize, if possible empathize, with the real-life experiences of historical actors. I found this easiest, personally in writing this book, in cases of sorrow and oppression. For instance, I mention in the book multiple cases of premodern families losing infants and toddlers, a common tragedy in premodernity. I write without sugarcoating about slavery and human bondage. I acknowledge the severe human cost of famines and the opium trade in British India. I repeatedly call attention to social hierarchies, such as caste, trying to recover viewpoints from those oppressed within such structures.
On the other hand, appreciating the past involves recognizing that there were real differences between prior societies and our own. To be blunt, nothing stays the same. And the ideas, identities, and assumptions that many hold dear today were often not even yet in existence, say, 1,000 years ago in India. Those that were—including caste, various religious practices, and political power—often operated quite differently than in the modern world. Like any responsible historian, I strive to compel readers to confront such gulfs of difference and recognize that earlier times were not just like our own.
What’s the answer to that tension? How can we empathize with people who lived in radically different societies from our own?
AT: You listen to their stories and find both commonalities and differences. Key to me was listening to a variety of stories from the past. Historians tend to talk about dominant groups the most, largely because they appear most commonly in the historical record. In researching and writing India, I made a robust effort to hear from and then amplify lesser-heard voices in South Asia’s past, meanings non-elites, lower classes and lower castes, women, and religious minorities. South Asia’s past was incredibly diverse (as is its present), and I honor that through deliberate choices in elevating under-appreciated perspectives and stories.
At times, I tell stories that other historians might gloss over, such as that of Ashu, a southern Indian slave who was granted her freedom, converted to Judaism, and moved to Aden (only to be shunned by its Jewish community). I also strive to integrate the stories of lesser-heard voices into standard narrative, such as by including Pandita Ramabai among the Hindu reformers I survey in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. Millennia earlier, I elevate the voices of Buddhist women (rather than men) in capturing the early history of Buddhism on the subcontinent. I cover some highlights of civil rights movements in twentieth-century India led by Shudras and Dalits, which are far too often omitted in overview histories.
What is your favorite part of South Asian history and why?
AT: Why choose among the stars in the sky? Premodernity tends to enliven my imagination more than modernity, but beyond that I refuse to choose. My interest in premodern South Asia is, thus far, inexhaustible. It also prohibits neither critical thought nor investigating unsavory aspects. I want more people to feel the endless fascination about premodern South Asia that drives me, and there’s more than a little of my passion for Indian history in the book.
What would you say to a potential reader who thinks of history as a dry subject, with lots of names, dates, and battles but little to inspire one’s imagination?
AT: History always has its human interest, even tawdry, bits. Some of the more eye-popping questions I investigated while writing this book include: Can birds process alcohol, and will a parrot’s speech become slurred? Can a woman physically have sex with a horse? Did people really try all these crazy aphrodisiac recipes in premodern India? The answers are, in order: yes, no (more of an urban legend), and most likely yes, given the human sex drive.
There are lots of approaches to history, and, in my experience, things tend to become a tad drab for many when we focus on one kind of history more than others. For South Asia, political history has often dominated over social, material, and cultural histories. I cover plenty of dynasties in these pages, but readers will not find the politically-dominant approach that has defined earlier overview works. Instead, I cover a broader range of topics, ranging from jewelry fashions 2,500 years ago to premodern Indian animal fables and board games to truck art in modern-day Pakistan. I am willing to bet that the breadth of depth of India will pleasantly surprise many readers.
About the Author
Audrey Truschke is professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the bestselling author of Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King and other books.