A Concise History of Modern India

In the preface, the authors openly acknowledge how much the field has changed since they "discovered" India as graduate students in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Contemporary historical writing is less driven by sweeping claims and more attentive to inclusive narrative — historians now attend not just to women, minorities, and the dispossessed, but to alternative histories shaped by local experience and distinct cosmologies. The authors cite an intriguing example from historian Paul Greenough: colonial-era census enumerators were required to record people's birth dates, but the population didn't celebrate birthdays — so enumerators would prompt memory by listing national events, like the coronation of King George V, to help people place themselves in time.

Chapter 1 opens with a concrete thought experiment: an imagined time traveler who lands in Mughal Delhi in 1707. They marvel at the splendor of Shah Jahan's (r. 1627–58) riverside palace, then learn that his son Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) has just died far away in the Deccan. If the traveler looks back a century, to the death of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), they'll find the institutions that made the empire far more powerful than the Ottoman or Safavid states already firmly in place — around 1700 the Mughal Empire held roughly 100 million people, five times the Ottomans' population and twenty times Safavid Persia's.

But if that same traveler jumps forward to 1803, the picture flips entirely: instead of a stable empire, a landscape of competing regional powers, with the Mughal emperor reduced to a merely symbolic ruler confined to the area around Delhi — and, at that very moment, falling under the control of a small European trading company centered in wealthy Bengal, the British East India Company. The authors challenge the traditional model used to explain this abrupt reversal — what historian David Arnold calls the "orientalist triptych": first, ancient India builds a great civilization; then Muslim rule brings decline (Aurangzeb's "intolerance" especially exaggerated); finally, enlightened British colonial rule arrives. The authors argue this three-stage scheme persists not only in older British sources but in anticolonial nationalist historiography, and even in today's Hindu nationalist ideology (discussed in Chapter 9).

The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the founding of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526). The authors quote historian Peter Hardy's description of the sultans as "sham policemen" working alongside "sham lawyers" — underscoring that these rulers held power through military and administrative skill, not religious authority. After the Mamluk dynasty founded by Qutb al-Din Aibak in 1206, Persian remained the language of the region's ruling elite for over six hundred years — these dynasties brought administrative innovation, legal and literary traditions, cavalry warfare tactics, irrigation techniques (including the famous "Persian wheel"), and urban reforms.

The authors also stress the religious and ethnic pluralism of the Sultanate era: non-Muslims held "dhimmi" status, allowed to keep their own laws and customs and exempt from military service in exchange for a poll tax (jizya); Muslims themselves were subject to different schools of law depending on region (Hanafi in Central Asia, Maliki in the south via Indian Ocean trade links with Arabs). The ruling elite itself was far from monolithically Turkic — it included Afghans, Persians, and migrants from distant lands.

As the most vivid evidence of this pluralistic milieu, the authors quote directly from the memoirs of the famed Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta (d. 1368/69), who served as a qadi in 14th-century Delhi. Describing his first audience with the sultan, he writes: "I approached the sultan, who took my hand and did not release it, and said to me most graciously in Persian: 'What a blessing your visit is to us...' He then asked where I was from, and I said, 'I come from the land of the Maghreb.'" This brief scene vividly illustrates the book's central thesis: the cosmopolitan, multiethnic character of the Sultanate court.

• A concrete "time traveler" thought experiment makes an abstract historiographical debate accessible
• Regular recourse to primary sources, including direct quotations from Ibn Battuta's 14th-century memoirs