India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent

by Shankar Chaudhuri
published on 29 September 2025

Colonial and post-colonial panoramic surveys of Indian history have often been self-serving narratives. They also have been largely North-India-centric political histories with hackneyed accounts of dynasties and political figures, leaving out stories of South India, as well as the voices of marginalized groups. "India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent" fills this gap by offering a balanced, insightful, and inclusive account of South Asia’s complex and multilayered history.

General readers would find this elegantly written work stimulating, while college and university faculty would welcome this as a much-needed textbook for their Indian history or world civilization courses.

Audrey Truschke traverses a vast period, from the 2,500 BCE Indus Valley Civilization all the way to contemporary South Asia. The thrust of her story is that far from being a stagnant society constrained by caste, class, and social structures, the subcontinent has always been a space of ideation, innovation, introspection, contact, syncretism, and acculturation. Relying on new research, Truschke shows that the urban-centric Indus Civilization maintained a trans-regional trading partnership with Mesopotamia. She explores in detail that, while the Vedic caste hierarchy led to the ascendancy of the Brahmin caste, Buddhism, Jainism, the Ajivikas, and the Bhakti movement in turn offered alternatives that emphasized personal experience and ethical conduct over ritual and caste affiliation. Truschke further traces how the Gandhara Civilization (circa 250 BCE - 600 CE) emerged as a multicultural society where Hellenic cultural influences blended with Indian Buddhism, and how India became a critical component of the Silk Route, importing horses and exporting slaves and textiles all the way to the Roman Empire. She deftly narrates that while the overland Silk Route flourished, a parallel maritime route evolved, linking the Indian subcontinent with Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Mediterranean. It was the sea routes that facilitated the transmission of India’s Sanskrit culture to Southeast Asia, impacting local religious practices, languages, and artistic expressions.

Even during the Islamic rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the Great Mughals, cooperation and cultural ties between Hindus and Muslims were more the norm than the exception, asserts Truschke. For the first time, many Indians became familiar with their religious texts and epics only through Mughal translations. The author is spot on that it was the British Raj that deliberately fomented the Hindu-Muslim animosity as part of its strategy of divide and rule. It was not until the colonial rule that Indians thought of themselves as ‘Hindus.’ Until then, they mostly presented themselves as Vaishnavites, Shaivites, or other affiliations.

A professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark, and an author of three acclaimed works on Mughal India, Truschke employs a vast body of primary and secondary sources, including recent findings in genetics and climate science. Her expertise in Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu serves as a valuable asset for analyzing and interpreting an extensive body of original works. A big plus of Truschke’s analysis is that each of her chapters is supplemented with excerpts from primary sources that range from Vedic Hymns to Ashoka’s Rock Inscriptions on ethical living to many others. These primary materials help to provide readers with a sense of immediacy and relatability to the subject matter under discussion.

There are just a few areas where Truschke’s analysis could be subject to debate. Truschke tends to minimize the Subaltern Studies group as an elitist and theory-heavy movement. One could argue that Subaltern historiography, if anything, at least helped to heighten the awareness of long-neglected marginalized groups in India. Her discussion of the Bhakti movement could have been more thorough, given how it challenged the authority of the Brahmins by encouraging personal agency in spiritual matters. In her discussion of the movement, Truschke leaves out important regional figures such as Chaitanya in Bengal, the founder of the Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Gaudiya Vaishnavism became a major religious force in Eastern India and came to exercise a profound impact on the development of the Hare Krishna Movement globally. Finally, Truschke’s discussion of the Indian independence movement and the Partition of 1947 feels rushed. She mentions that while less than one in twenty Indian Muslim voters endorsed the Muslim League in 1937, a staggering 75% did so in the general elections of 1945-1946. Unfortunately, she doesn’t explain the reasons for this dramatic change.

But these are minor omissions considering the scope of the work. By synthesizing the most recent scholarship with her own painstaking research, Truschke has produced a commendable work. It will inspire readers to look beyond traditional narratives and delve deeper into the complexities of India’s past with an objective and critical mind.

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