PRODUCT OVERVIEW
- ISBN 9780500283738
- Categories BX, BXOS, History, NF HIS, Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction: Humanities
- Author(s) Francis Watson
- Publisher Thames & Hudson
- Pages 200
- Format Paperback
- Dimensions 18.0cm x 1.6cm x 22.8cm
- Weight 0.56 kg
product description
Francis Watson's acclaimed history of India begins in the third millennium BC with the Indus Valley civilization. The subsequent influx of pastoral nomads, first in a long series of invasions from the north-west which included the Moghuls nearly 3,000 years later, established the Vedic religious tradition. In a gradual assimilation of popular cults, and a formalization by the Sanskrit language and the institution of caste, this tradition supplied the cohesion upon which a national consciousness, in its Western sense, is a comparatively recent grafting. The enduring distinctiveness of India, its widely recognized but often bewildering 'diversity of unity', emerges from these pages as a product of geographical simplicity and historical complexity.