Customer Reviews

A History of India

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This book was so bad, so poorly written, and so rote (even comical) in its recitation of dry fact that I feel compelled to write also to the (somewhat favorable) editorial reviewers cited above to find out just what drugs they were on. There is an utter disconnect between the mind-numbing recitation of fact and any attempt on the author's part to offer an expert's unique point of view. Argument could be made that India's vibrant history is one of the most vivid and lively subjects one could possibly choose for a book. That the author has somehow turned that country's amazing tale into such a snorer is truly a towering achievement. This book couldn't even be of interest to pure academics, except maybe as a (highly effective) sleeping aid. It's that dry. It's that bad.

Robotic recitation of facts not brought to their natural conclusive effects is the worthless waste of paper this volume represents. Peter Robb should be made to reimburse everyone who had the misfortune of buying this snore.

OK so I'm giving you a heads up. This book is the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. Wordy, dry, and sometimes ambiguous, Robb makes India's colorful heritage a monochromatic wasteland.

When I first received this book, I was a little suspicious of it. It proclaims to be a history of India, and yet it is 344 pages long, which seems pathetic when considering a country credited with inventing Buddhism, the number zero, as well as many different systems of law, government, and existence that we would not have today if India had not evolved as a country and culture in this specific way.

Robb is a professor and maintains these facts in his long-winded writing form, and seems to be focusing more on an urban history of culture and society, a human geography that strays from an actual history. A History of India is more of a report on people, specializing on the last hundred years, instead of India's ancient existence, which I consider far more interesting, considering how important this country was in shaping the civilized world.

Originally published on December 9th, 2002.

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I think the real flaw of this book is not that it's too dry or rote, but that it doesn't seem to be calibrated for any particular audience.

It's no good for someone new to Indian history, because it tends to make very fleeting references to individuals without properly introducing them (often not even giving their full names, or their titles/positions, or their dates of birth or death), and to events without ever explaining what they were. Paragraphs read somewhat like gossip columns, with elliptical references to names or nicknames, and vague hints as to what they might have done.

That kind of writing could be useful, however, in a higher-level book intended for deep scholars of India. If the author intends to make a new analysis of the facts, he doesn't necessarily need to explain who the Mughals were or what happened in the 1857 rebellion. But, as far as I can tell, is in fact trying to write a comprehensive history of India. It seems like he's trying to cram some reference to everything that happened on the Subcontinent into the pages of this slim, slim volume. There just isn't room for it, and the end result is something that doesn't seem of much use to more or less anyone.

This is an insightful book in that it attempts to understand how the
socio-economic cleveages have come to dominate India's poltically complex landscape. This book gives an insight very recent outcomes related to the 2004 national elections in India, especially the last chapters of the book. Concise and deliberate. Jay Pineda, Ph.D., Political Science and Administration, University of California, Santa Barbara.