The history of India is a story of many states and empires which 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 northwest that included the Moghuls nearly 3,000 years later, established the Vedic religious tradition. In a gradual assimilation of popular cults, formalization of 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.

In modern times, two hundred years of British ascendancy were followed in the twentieth century by India taking its place among the nation-states of the modern world. For this revised edition, a new chapter by Dilip Hiro covers the events that have taken place in India from the 1980s to the present day. 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. 186 illustrations and 4 maps.