India by Audrey Truschke

India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent

By Audrey Truschke

Princeton University Press 2025

Broad historical overviews require some stable throughline to help cohere their index cards into a digestible story, and in her new book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent, Audrey Truschke (professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University) prefers a dismantling of the traditional scaffoldings associated with the story of India as the spindle around which to twist her narrative. Here understood to be the historical area covered by modern day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, with occasional forays into Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, the subcontinent is home to one in four people alive today, and has been the centre of rich traditions stretching back into the mists of time. Starting in the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilization and ending on contemporary skyscrapers, Truschke’s India comes alive through a conspicuous entanglement of religious, regional, social, and literary histories, where her primary creative force aims for ontological disruptions by eschewing the standard political retellings of this past.

An obvious academic distaste for “Great Man history” is complimented with a diffused focus on the lived realities of the multitude; Ashoka is too enigmatic for even this approach to subdue, but other kings and queens flit through the narrative leeched of colour, while the archaeological remains of everyday living are nudged off-stage by the literary detritus of cultures morphed into incomprehension to their modern successors. A reader unfamiliar with her Indian history can stumble out of this book with a decidedly cold perception of the personalities (elite or otherwise) that lived and died within these borders for millennia. When non-elite individuals figure in these pages, they appear as micro-histories of specific trends, often prioritizing voices not commonly heard in monographs prepared for a general readership. These stories are often chased by fatuous asides like “History is full of sad stories”, or “...a reminder that many premodern stories have unhappy endings”, remarks that one would have preferred to see confined within the hearing of the author's earnest undergraduates. One gets the distinct impression that wading through the literary remains of these people was the author's chief research interest, and it is in this direction that the book reaches its rhetorical heights.

The narrative is steeped in Sanskrit literature. “More texts were written in Sanskrit than in possibly any other premodern language on Earth”, asserts the author, and she makes the reader familiar with this vast corpus. Translations of select works under consideration are generously presented throughout the book, and Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, and female voices are allowed a chance to speak that has been denied to them in similar works before. The north-south dichotomy in talking about Indian history is given several course corrections, and the reader is as likely to glean insights from Telugu poetry as she is from the Therigatha, the earliest anthology of women's literature in the world. The Indo-Persian songs of Amir Khusrau stream through the same streets being prepared for a large-scale translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian under the Mughals, translations which provided many Hindus access to their own religious texts for centuries. For Truschke is an old hand at drawing the ire of modern day Hindu nationalists; she rightly denies any existence of a “Hindu rule” or a “Muslim rule” in India's premodernity, and it is not difficult to sense the covert joy she gains wherever she rips apart their assertions of participating in a continuous Vedic past, a claim she prefers to file as a “project of imaginative recovery”. The literary pillars of this Hindutva mythology also gets their time in the sun here, she's as likely to contextualise the Vedas and the Upanishads as ideations of an elite Brahminical culture as she is to dedicate an entire chapter to discussing the marvel of world literature that is the Mahabharata:

For a historian, the Mahabharata’s mutability marks it as a special source. Temporally, we must analyze the epic as a cultural product refined from 100 CE onward, undergoing especially robust changes between 300 and 450 CE … An older generation of scholars mistakenly worked out the epic’s temporality in the other direction. They projected the Mahabharata as representing a world that existed generations or even centuries before the myth was committed to writing … blindly repeat[ing] the Mahabharata’s self-conscious archaism … the evidence does not support it … [and] if we focus on Vyasa’s Mahabharata as the result of layered additions from 100 CE forward, we can best highlight its polyphonic value. There is not a single voice that speaks through Vyasa’s epic but rather a diverse cacophony, including less dominant Indian voices that we can hear if we listen closely to this gloriously complicated story.

Her own take on the gloriously complicated history of this land ends with two chapters after the 1947 partition of India after independence; the first breathlessly recounts the politics of half a century in a handful of pages, an exercise which leaves so much nuance on the cutting floor as to be almost harmful to the overall project of the book. And the story ends with her dissecting some trends in the everyday life of people in contemporary South Asia, one of the only sections where the veil of time actually slips enough to reveal flesh underneath; the corrosive right wing Hindutva gripping the heart of modern India as well as the political and ecological challenges in the immediate future of the subcontinent may leave readers wishing to return to the comfort of literary analysis. An insightful essay on her historiography, as well as a robust set of notes and bibliography ties up this decidedly idiosyncratic overview, as valid a stab at this history as many other lunges before, and an attempt that at times successfully unmoors centuries of ancient baggage from an easily distortable past.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi