A Concise History of India

A Concise History Of India is the collaborative work of Barbara Metcalf (Professor in the Department of History, University of California, Davis) and Thomas Metcalf (Professor of History and Sarah Kailath Professor of India Studies, University of California, Berkeley). Their work focuses on the fundamentally political theme of the imaginative and institutional structures that changed and sustained both the colonial and an independent India. A Concise History Of India documents both the social changes and the rich cultural life that arose from the political structure and evolving social categories and concepts such as "caste", "Hindu", "Muslim", and "India". Earlier chapters cover the period of the Muslim dynasties preceding colonial conquests, and concludes with the dramatic events of the 1990s including economic change, religious nationalism, and India's emergence as a nuclear power. With an informative, scholarly text enhanced with illustrations and quotations taken from historical sources, A Concise History Of India is recommended for academic reading lists and reference collections, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in understanding India's contemporary political and economic relationships with the community of nations in general, and Pakistan in particular.