Book Reviews
Audrey Truschke. 2025. India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent. Princeton University Press
William Dalrymple. 2024. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Bloomsbury Publishing &
Virat Chirana. 2022. Stories & Sutras: Timeless Legends, Priceless Lessons. Penguin Books
Satish Y. Deodhar. 2019. Economic Sutra: Ancient Indian Antecedents to Economic Thought. IIMA Books Series. Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
By Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD
Former (Economics) Professor, SRCC, DU
“Once upon a time, I was great. And I am now rising to be great again”. You might say this, pointing your safety stick, to a forlorn and growling street dog, on your morning walk. The same thing has been said, over the past decade, at the national level. Haven’t you been touched by the MIGA movement—Make India Great Again?
As such, the comments made by a towering educational intellectual and administrator such as Brig (Dr.) R S Grewal are the point of departure here. On the one hand he has referred to the MIGA forces professing a national aspiration for the emergence of Bharat as World Teacher (Vishwa Guru). On the other, he has lamented that “The prevailing national discourse relies heavily on rhetoric instead of making any serious effort to start teaching about India’s past national heritage…(Its) worrying feature…is that …(it)…degenerates into hate campaigns against certain segments of society.”
There is also criticism that “it is sounding hollower than ever because all that India has to offer is land and cheap labour, apart from a handful of highly qualified CEOs”, even as the multicultural nation is increasingly polarised with manifold divisions by class, caste, race, gender, region, tribe, and creed to be afflicted with highly prejudiced, divisive, conflict-ridden, brutalized and dysfunctional zero-sum and even negative sum games (Bose and Dhwani, 2025).
In light of this, I recently bought these four historical books in order to find out what could be the noble takeaways from the great past that can offer guidance to the current elites who have utterly failed to reconstruct a depolarised and prosperous India.
Truschke has delivered a 687-page book, Dalrymple a 482-page book, Chirana a 366-page book and Deodhar a 199-page book. How these writers accomplished these tasks is beyond my comprehension. Truschke took 25 years to complete the job and Dalrymple, 5 years. The bibliographies of these books are so astounding that one life is indeed not enough to fathom ‘deep time’ like these authors have endeavoured to do, going backwards up to 10000 years or so in order to move forward now staring at an uncertain and risky future! It will take four to five months of dedicated reading for anyone to ingest such books. But I have readily grasped from them some lessons for the MIGA elites of India, and for you too in case you too want to be a kind of Brutus-elite among them.
There is no need to indulge in the arrogance that we were the greatest in the world once upon a time. It is true to find that we were great indeed. Dalrymple highlights India’s “forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds and as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China.” India or Bharat, however defined, “set the template for the way much of the world would think and express itself, and would significantly alter the trajectory of the history of a great swathe of mankind. For more than a thousand years it was a garden that issued the seeds that, once planted elsewhere, flowered in new, rich and unexpected ways.”
There is no need to destroy the diversity and hide the exploitation in our country. We must know how Truschke presents the greater diversity of voices than we often hear in terms of gender, caste, class, region, language, and religion. In concrete terms, that means that we need to encounter now as in the past more women, Dalits, lower castes, poor and disadvantaged communities, south Indians, non-Indian South Asians, non-Sanskrit speakers, and non-Hindus. This diversity helps us better understand Indian history, both in underappreciated aspects and, also, its dominant groups. Hindu nationalists must not reproduce the oppression of Dalits and lower castes as was present in the first millennium CE.
The present like the past is full of sad stories, with and without silver linings. We must feel good that diversity has long been our shared feature like in the past. We also must reckon with the fact of migration now as in the past when waves of people came into our country. There is no Hindu purity now as in the past. New groups brought their own ideas and interacted with indigenous and earlier migrant populations, resulting in kaleidoscopic of syncretic South Asian traditions. Telling stories about these features must continue to celebrate the simultaneous forces of diversification and unification. Hindu nationalists must not decimate the tribal people in India. Instead they must draw on their indigenous knowledge for dealing with the climate-changed world.
We can feel great when Chirana says that we can become great by drawing on India’s ancient school of management and leadership. We can learn communication skills, negotiation skills and emotional intelligence from the historical tale of Hanuman. How to run a start-up can be learnt from Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Chanakya can be our teacher in figuring out business strategy, the art of influencing and public finance. Adi Shankaracharya and Kabir can give us spiritual leadership and inter-faith messaging for coexistence in peace. Rani Abbakka was a great fighter against the Portuguese imperialism and she can ignite our passion for independence from destabilizing external forces like Srinivasa Ramanujam was the embodiment of independent intellectualism in mathematics.
We can also feel great when Deodhar informs us that ancient Indian economic thought was permeated with concerns of pursuit of material wellbeing in conjunction with charity as an instrument to provide merit goods and help alleviate poverty; provision of public goods and quasi-public goods along with market facilitation, private property rights; responsibilities of welfare state; regulation and use of common property resources, control of natural monopolies, etc. The MIGA movement must factor in these concerns into their policies. In other words, India must become great again by adopting inclusive policies to overcome growing inequalities and social disharmony integral to the shameful current realities.
Let us heed what these India’s historians and historical tales tell us, not the ranting of religious demogogues and megalomaniacs misleading the people to hate and kill each other. Freedom, respect, mercy and love should guide us in living together and making this world a better place like the Socotra island in terrible Yemen.
References
Bose, Annavajhula J C and Dhwani, Arun. 2025. Social Healing and Management Reform. Hans Shodh Sudha. 4 (4). Hansraj College Journal.
https://briggrewal.com/indias-vishwaguru-syndrome/
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/indias-vishwaguru-syndrome-marks-intellectual-regression-1112043.html
Mostly Economics 
