Review: John Zubrzycki’s The Shortest History of India acts as an antidote to blinkered images of India’s past on social media

The Shortest History of India compresses 5,000 years of the country’s history in less than 300 pages. (Source: Amazon.in)

Very often such broad-brush accounts lapse into the Rankean folly of looking at history as descriptions of kings and rulers. Zubrzycki’s account has place of eminence for the Chola, Maurya, Mughals, the British rulers, and Indian nationalists. The preliminary pages also have a list of dates of some of the seminal events in the country’s history. But The Shortest History of India’s greatest merit is drawing the reader toward other interesting aspects of the past: How did religion shape the country’s history? What was the role of trade? How did the caste system function? What were the views of foreign travellers? It also takes the reader to significant post-Independence events: Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the war with China, the turmoil in the Congress, the Emergency, the Mandal Commission, the economic reforms and the tearing down of the Babri Masjid and the rise of Hindutva.

The brief biographies in the book will help the reader unravel social processes and she is sure to come away with a picture of a country that is diverse and complex — one that resists being cast as a monolith. His abiding concern for the country’s diversity is, in fact, one reason that Zubrzycki describes India’s democracy as the country’s greatest achievement after Independence: “Over more than seven decades, it has successfully conducted 17 general elections and hundreds of state polls with participation rates that regularly outstrip the world’s next largest democratic country, the USA. A free and vibrant press and a civil society keep a check on the inevitable lapses of its politicians”.

He is also right in cautioning that this success shouldn’t blinker India watchers to the main unfulfilled tasks — improving standards of life, removing gender and caste disparities, cleaning rivers, addressing pollution, and educational and health-related shortcomings.

Zubrzycki’s greatest concern, however, is the nation’s recent slip towards majoritarianism. “What India has lost and what will be hardest to restore is the state’s commitment to secularism,” he writes in the book’s concluding chapter. As a powerful caveat for people interested in history, he writes: “In recent decades, notions of India as a historical entity, a people and a civilisation has become highly politicised. Hindu nationalists refer to India as Bharat Varsha, the ancient Sanskrit name for a homeland that stretches from the ‘Indus to the Seas’. The evidence for charting India’s history is longer found in archaeological records or genetic DNA but in mythological epics such as Mahabharata. India’s ‘real heritage’ is contained in even older texts such as the Vedas.” That’s also the reason that works such as his should be antidotes to accounts of the past that are peddled today in fora as diverse as TV and cinema to social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Twitter.

Zubrzycki, however, is not all pessimistic. “As a civilisation, India has shown remarkable resilience, tackling challenges such as growing inequality and authoritarianism, and providing a model to the world. Visionary leaders will emerge who can unite the country’s diverse communities and ensure that the country’s social and economic progress are spread equitably and sustainably.”