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Romila Thapar
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A History of India: Volume 1 Paperback – Illustrated, September 1, 1990

by Romila Thapar (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 100 ratings
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A history of India upto 1300 AD introducing the beginnings of India's cultural dynamics
Previous page
  1. Print length
    384 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  4. Publication date
    September 1, 1990
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    7.84 x 5.18 x 0.98 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0140138358
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0140138351
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Romila Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 1, 1990)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140138358
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140138351
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.84 x 5.18 x 0.98 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 100 ratings

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Romila Thapar

Romila Thapar

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
100 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

barclay's connect
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, must read for every Indian
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2019
Very concise and scientific examination of Indian history.
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Gautham Halambi
4.0 out of 5 stars A good introduction to Indian history
Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2016
Verified Purchase
Written in a dispassionate and academic tone, which I feel a history book needs to be written, the book gives a very good introduction to Indian history starting with Harappa culture and the Vedic age through the great North Indian kingdoms, golden age of Indian history, emergence of southern kingdoms till the establishment of Delhi Sultanate. In religious sphere it covers all the lasing and impactful milestones like the emergence of Vedas, Upanishads and the Epics, rise of Buddhism and Jainism and emergence, spread of the Bhakti movement and Sufism. As one can see this is a humungous epoch to cover and difficult to layout an abridged version to a layman. . With concise and economical style of writing Romila Thapar manages to do just this and covers this in all of 384 pages in a pocket book. This style of writing might at times comes across as dry and pedantic to some of the readers. There are also a few departures from the academic approach when at times she is overly critical of Hindu temple architecture
7 people found this helpful
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F. I. Lowe Perry
5.0 out of 5 stars A HISTORY OF INDIA: VOLUME I
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2006
THIS BOOK IS EXCEPTIONAL AND I RECEIVED THIS BOOK ARRIVED MORE THAN ON TIME. THE BOOKSELLER IS A CREDIT TO THE AMAZON COMPANY.
2 people found this helpful
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dhara@amsoftinc.com
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book of history about India.
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 1998
Romila Thapar's description of Indian history is captivating. It is very objective and impartial. It is a great book for any person with interest in the history of India -- the land of spiritualism.
3 people found this helpful
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J C E Hitchcock
3.0 out of 5 stars Informative but Dry
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2018
This is the first part of a two-volume history of India; the second part, written by the British historian Percival Spear, covers the period from 1526 to the present day. 1526 was chosen as the dividing-line because that was the year which marked the rise to power of the Mughuls. (Thapar’s preferred spelling. Spear prefers “Mughals”, and when I was at school they were generally “Moguls” or “Moghuls”). Thapar’s starting point is the coming of the Aryans, in around 1500 BC. She does not deal at any length with the pre-Aryan Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation, which she regards as part of Indian prehistory rather than history.

One of the things which emerges most forcefully from this account is that for most of its history India has not been a united nation-state in the modern sense, or even an empire on the Chinese model. Before the Mughuls the nearest thing to a united India was the Maurya Empire which existed from around 322 to 187 BC and which extended across the whole of the sub-continent except the extreme south (a region which also escaped Mughul domination). It is therefore not surprising that the political/military parts of this history are little more than the story of the rise and fall of various regional dynasties. After the fall of the Mauryas various local rulers may have aspired to the position of Emperor of India, but none achieved it. The closest were the Guptas of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD, and even their empire only covered Northern-Central India. As Thapar points out, the North, with its fertile river plains, was better country for empire-building than the more mountainous South. One of her chapters, covering the approximate period 900- 1300 AD, is indeed entitled “The South in the Ascendant”, but this “ascendancy” refers to the cultural and artistic achievements of Southern India during this period, not to some political hegemony.

If, however, ancient India was not a nation-state, neither was it (as Metternich patronisingly said of Italy) a “mere geographical expression”. It had a cultural unity provided by the Hindu religion and by the use of Sanskrit as a “learned” language of intellectual discourse. Sanskrit, moreover, was used in this way not only in Northern India where most of the local languages were Indo-European Sanskrit derivatives but also in the Dravidian-speaking South. There are parallels with the Catholic Church and the use of Latin which provided a similar cultural unity to Western Europe in the Middle Ages, although there are also significant differences. Hinduism has never had a single central religious authority comparable to the Papacy, and, although it was the most important religion of India it did not have the virtual monopoly enjoyed by Catholicism. Rival belief-systems existed in the form of Buddhism and Jainism, both of which had more adherents in the subcontinent than they do today, although some Indians regarded them as heterodox Hindu philosophical systems rather than separate religions.

Towards the end of the period covered in this volume, Hinduism had another rival faith to contend with in the form of Islam, brought to India by invading Turkic tribesmen from Central Asia. This was by no means the first wave of invaders which India had had to face; the Aryans themselves had originally come as outsiders, and during the first millennium BC the country had been invaded by several other groups, including the Shakas (Scythians), Hunas (Huns), the Central Asian Kushanas and Alexander’s Greeks. These invaders, however, had eventually been assimilated into Indian culture, whereas the Turks brought with them their own religious ideology and refused to conform to the traditional Hindu or Buddhist patterns of thought. The newcomers established numerous kingdoms, including the Delhi Sultanate, the most significant empire of the period, although at first they made few converts to their faith, with the result that predominantly Hindu populations found themselves under the rule of Muslim overlords.

Thapar does not restrict herself to political/military history. There are also significant sections dealing with social, economic and administrative affairs, to art and culture and to the development of Indian thought, especially religious thought. She has been accused by some reviewers on this board of “Marxist bias”, an accusation which I found hard to understand. I have no idea what Ms Thapar’s private political opinions are, but if she is a Marxist this is not immediately apparent from her writing. There is, for example, no attempt to analyse Indian history in terms of class struggle; indeed, there is little in this book about class differences as opposed to caste differences. My main criticism would be that, although the book is informative, it is dry and not very interesting in terms of style. There is little attempt to make it more than a bare-bones chronicle of dates and events; few historical individuals, for example, emerge as characters in their own right. (A rare exception is Ashoka, the greatest ruler of the Maurya dynasty, who presided over an empire which he governed according to Buddhist religious principles). I must say that Spear’s contribution is much more interesting in this respect.
6 people found this helpful
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Solitaryreflection
4.0 out of 5 stars A necessary read to understand Indian history
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2014
Verified Purchase
This is a very manageable book, if one wants to delve into the ancient Indian history and society. The author is a well known historian and she effortlessly explains some of the more contradictory features in the Indian history which baffles many western readers. It is written in an academic format in the sense that one may feel he/she is reading class notes but one has to understand that when the author is writing almost 3,000 years of history, it can get a little dry at times. If the reader is patient one can understand the rich history of India.I would definitely recommend this book to a reader who wants to understand Indian history deeply.
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2024
I am a foolish American and a gringa at that, and last year I decided that I had spent too many decades obsessed with European history and I needed to try something new. So I started looking at books about the history and culture of India. Apparently, while this is a standard history text originally published in 1966, in the 21st century it has become controversial because Romila Thapar, now a very renowned and illustrious Indian historian, has continued to maintain the differences between the Hindu religion, Hindu culture, and Hindutva (the political Hindu movement). So, if you read some of the one star reviews of this book, you will encounter folks who disagree with Romila Thapar, and from what I have gathered online, those disagreements are political. But if you read history at all, you understand that everything is political: someone has to decide who's in charge, why they are in charge, and what they are going to do next.

It is my semi-frequent habit to read dry, dusty historical tomes, and this certainly qualifies as one. My problems with the text stemmed from my overwhelming ignorance of Asian geography (I really thought I was better at this) and no understanding at all of the major religions of the Indian sub-continent, including but not limited to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. The only way to get better at this is to keep ploughing forward, so I plan to continue reading about Indian history, culture, geography, and religion until I don't have to check online for the thousandth time to remind myself where Mysuru is. (Southern India, nearish the West coast. Yes, I had to check again. Google maps is your friend at times like this. At least I remembered that Bombay is now called Mumbai.)
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A reader from PA
1.0 out of 5 stars Outdated History Book
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2004
Verified Purchase
After advent of "Orientalism" by Edward Said, the playing field is even. This Book by Romila Thapar is an Outdated Marxist Rhetoric/
19 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Bigboss
5.0 out of 5 stars A brief rejoinder
Reviewed in India on January 11, 2017
Verified Purchase
When people say: outdated and a very dry style with a Marxist interpretation of Indian History, they are missing out the primal factor of the book itself. History as a subject is not something which you define or understand with a simple one-sided linear view or approach. It involves the reading and understanding of interpolation as well as the different school of thoughts that are considered to be authoritative yet, characterized by the debates and results of it. Indeed the historians like RC Majumdar or Sir Jadunath Sarkar which they so choose to cite or make a comparison with are very great historians but, that does not overlap the fact that there is an alternate to the history to which they had interpreted, namely with the presence of new sources and other factors. Nonetheless, the book is a great collection to us academicians who would very much be dry without the likes of Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib or Bipan Chandra or Sir Jadunath Sarkar and the others for that matter.
37 people found this helpful
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Amit Goel
2.0 out of 5 stars Poor print quality
Reviewed in Australia on September 22, 2020
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Quality of printing was quite poor.
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Charles Varghese
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in India on August 5, 2022
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Must read if you are interested in Indian History
One person found this helpful
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Pickyshopper
1.0 out of 5 stars Unsatisfactory
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 14, 2015
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Extremely old, very fragile copy.
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Hemant Jain
2.0 out of 5 stars Poor paper quality
Reviewed in India on August 30, 2020
Verified Purchase
This is not a review of the book content but quality of the book material. I don’t think the seller is delivering original prints of the book as it was poor quality print and paper. The book is decently priced( bought it for Rs 1350) and expected quality cover, print and paper.
3 people found this helpful
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