Book review- Discovery of India

An awesome book that traces all of Indian history from pre-historic times to 1944 when the book was written. As Nehru puts it, the intent of the book is to establish the integrity of the Indian past, history independent of British renditions and make people of India proud of their heritage. Nehru wrote this book while in jail with little access to journals and other books and so this is mostly a work of his learnings from explorations across the country. I am not sure how many of present day politicians possess that understanding of Indian culture and have a vision for future as expressed by Nehru in 600+ pages book.

While book presents interesting bits for anyone who wants to understand our culture and heritage, here are some of them –

1. Our origins in form of Indus valley civilization was more advanced (stemming from city planning, houses, trade and law) than similar civilizations elsewhere but probably didn’t get noticed because European researchers who came up studying in 18^th century focused more on the later (the Greek, Roman etc.)
2. Our civilization has been based on security and stability via joint family etc. and that makes it successful than any other in West. Indian philosophy is “individualistic under a social structure” which means perfect freedom to think and believe what one liked while adhering to the social norms
3. While there are many theories of how caste came into being but one theory relates to Aryan conquest of India. Instead of terminating or enslaving the entire population, as was the norm those days, they created a caste system assigning lower caste to people here and upper caste for themselves. While the system had its own shortcomings, caste system allowed people from new conquests to be merged into respective castes.
4. Coming on to Akbar, Nehru says while he was a great ruler, what surprised him was his lack of sea knowledge, no focus on scientific research, no training of people abroad, and no book printing. This legacy carried forward by later Mughal rulers was exploited by Europeans to bring in their rule in India
5. An interesting take on why we find certain skills confined to certain religions only. The reason for this is that religions conversion those days were group conversion and not individual conversions and hence the entire village (the villages in those times being organized around skills) would convert
6. Rise of British is attributed to multiple reasons including conquest of Bengal which gave them enough money to proceed to other regions and then keep adding, possible fluke as individually each of the Sikhs, Marathas, Tipu had defeated them but never together, infighting amongst Indian states and finally fall of Mughal Empire and disintegration of country into smaller states
7. With British rule, for first time, center of gravity fell outside India and with people who felt that they were superior and that the ‘new’ people didn't want to Indianize.
8. All talk of great infra development and running of government during British raj came at significant cost. For example, the railway was guaranteed by government of India at 5% return on capital invested
9. 1857 revolt was essentially a feudal outburst and it was only in 1900s that the real struggle from masses began to oust British