The most authoritative and highly regarded single-volume history of India – from ancient time to the modern day. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s social, economic, political and cultural history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East.

South Asia boasts one of the world's longest, richest and most rewarding histories. It crowds the past with a teeming diversity of civilisations and packs the present with a kaleidoscope of regional and cultural entities. John Keay discerns the continuities and highlights the glories while here presenting, in a single volume, the first truly comprehensive and thoroughly readable history of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for thirty years.

A cradle of civilisations, the subcontinent is today the cockpit of its most explosive disputes. From the myths of an impossible antiquity to the masterpieces of classical glory, from the boasts of obscure dynasts to the chronicles of Islamic conquest, and from the triumphs of liberation to the recriminations of partition, Keay recounts a five-thousand-year epic in which conflict underwrites achievement and kings defer to saints.

The monuments, tombs, temples and palaces are paraded in context and their significance explained. Revelations from recent scholarship prompt unexpected insights. And a new slant is given to those conventional tides of inward incursion and outward dissemination – Alexander the Great's debacle, the all-Asia diffusion of Indian culture, the Islamic, Mughal and British conquests, and the twentieth-century diaspora of south Asian society.

Beginning with the Flood and ending with the Bomb, 'India: A History' combines narrative delights with social economic and cultural analysis. Provocative and authoritative, it confirms John Keay’s reputation as one of the foremost writers on the subcontinent.