History of India (and the rest of the subcontinent)
Last update: 14 Feb 2026 23:14First version: 29 August 2015
Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder.
- Recommended, big picture:
- A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
- John Keay, India: A History
- Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India
- Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
- V. A. Smith, The Oxford History of India
- Recommended, close-ups:
- Raziuddin Aquil, Sufism, Culture and Politics: Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India
- Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, Tarikh al-Hind [Which I know in the English translation from 1888, Alberuni's India, apparently the only English translation]
- John M. Rosenfield, The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans
- To read:
- Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River
- Catherine B. Asher, India Before Europe
- Ross Bassett, The Technological Indian
- C. A. Bayly
- Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
- Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India
- William Dalrymple
- White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
- The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
- Rana Dasgupta, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi
- Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
- Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History
- Richard Maxwell Eaton
- Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography
- Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757
- Michael H. Fisher, An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century
- Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter
- Ramachandra Guha (ed.), Makers of Modern India
- John Guy, Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100--1900
- Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland
- Gary Jacobsohn, Wheel of Law: India's Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context
- D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow
- John Keay, When Men and Mountains Meet: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas 1820--1875
- Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary
- David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind
- Prakash Kumar, A History of India’s Green Revolution Reign of Technocracy
- Nayanjot Lahiri
- Ashoka in Ancient India
- Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization Was Discovered
- Pankaj Mishra
- From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia
- Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
- Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India
- Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within
- Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India
- Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India
- A. K. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil
- John Reeve, The Lives of the Mughal Emperors
- John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire
- Janet Rizvi, Ladakh: Crossroads of High Asia
- Francis Robinson, The Mughal Emperors: And the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia
- Tirthankar Roy
- Geoffrey Samuel, Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions To the Thirteenth Century
- Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
- David Shulman, More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India
- Nico Slate, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India
- Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, Casting Kings: Bards and Indian Modernity
- Aurel Stein, On Alexander's Track to the Indus: Personal Narrative of Explorations on the North-West Frontier of India
- Burton Stein, Vijayanagara
- Robert W. Stern, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution
- Romila Thapar
- Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas
- Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300
- Somanatha
- Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court
- Rita Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy and Society