India and Faraway Lands: 5,000 Years of Connected History

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

India and Faraway Lands is a compact yet panoramic exploration of the story of India from a global perspective. Meticulously researched and lucidly told, the book takes the readers on a journey around the world, in reverse chronological order, tracing pivotal events and unravelling intriguing connections with India.

Ashutosh Mehndiratta's retelling of the evolution of the United States, Britain, Ireland, Russia, Germany, Japan, France, Portugal, Central Asia, China, Rome, Persia, and Greece provides a context often missing in conventional histories of India. Along the way are recounted fascinating tales of travellers, the earliest accounts of interaction between the East and the West, forgotten cities that were once glorious, and books that changed the course of history. While there are several excellent works on world history as well as Indian history, there are not many books where the stories of India and the world are juxtaposed. India and Faraway Lands aims to fill that gap, and will at once inform and entertain readers.

Ashutosh Mehndiratta was born and raised in New Delhi. He holds an MBA from the University of Alabama and has had a long career in the consulting and technology industry. He has lived in the US, India, and New Zealand, and travelled extensively around the world. It was his experience straddling between the East and the West for almost three decades that sparked his interest in global history.

India and Faraway Lands is about the momentous events that took place around the globe in the past 5,000 years, how they shaped the Indian subcontinent and vice versa. In other words, this book presents a short history of the world from India's vantage point.

The idea behind this book did not emerge overnight; rather, it simmered in my mind for over two decades. The seeds of curiosity were sown in the 1990s, when I arrived in the United States as a university student. I met hundreds of students on the campus from a multitude of nations across every continent. The stimulating exchange of perspectives sparked a lifelong interest in me to understand how our world came to be.

Over the following years, marvelling at the world-class infrastructure and the abundant material wealth of North America, as well as of Europe during brief stopovers on trips to India, I wondered how, when, and why the West became more developed and wealthier than India. I had an inkling that it hadn't always been like that, which led me to revisit history books, something I had never imagined doing after tenth grade in school. Wading through bookstores and museums, I stumbled upon intriguing, lesser-known historical connections between India and other parts of the world. At some point, I started to connect the dots between these historical narratives of the world.

My parents and grandparents would often recount harrowing tales of how they lost their homes in what became West Pakistan after Partition in 1947 and their dreadful journeys across the border in overloaded 'refugee special' trains. The experiences of my family members were tied to the stories of their towns, and these stories were further linked to a wider web of the histories of the nation, and ultimately the world.

Histories of India have been mostly confined to India's boundaries, thereby missing a vital component: the story of the 'other side' or the 'outside', leaving the overall picture somewhat truncated and incomplete. The history of the British in India, for instance, began with their merchant ships landing in Gujarat in 1608. But it was around the same time that they had also landed in North America and established their first colony in Jamestown, Virginia (1607). What was going on in Britain in those days? What did the British merchants and colonists know about India and the Americas before they set sail from the shores of their tiny island nation? Who were the people who made these bold ventures possible? And why did they wait for more than a hundred years to sail out to these lands when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus had landed in the Americas in 1492 and Portuguese voyager Vasco da Gama had reached India in 1498?

Unlike India's commonly perceived image among Western historians as a static civilisation-shielded from the rest of the Eurasian continent by an arc of enormous mountain ranges in the north and surrounded by water in the south-India was an active player in world history. Steep mountain passes in the north- west, like the legendary Khyber Pass, allowed invading armies and trading caravans to pass through; the Indian Ocean was the hub of maritime trade and migration for thousands of years before humans were able to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific.