Book Review | 'India and Faraway Lands' misses opportunity for meaningful exploration

The timing of the G20 summit being hosted in India’s capital, New Delhi, underscores the significance of fostering a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of India’s history. India is again in the limelight as a shaper of the world’s narrative, thanks to its presidency of the G20 forum this year. India has always remained pivotal in deciding the world’s history with its trade, economy, culture, and people.

During World War II, the British Indian Army was the largest volunteer army in the world, with more than 2.5 million men. These soldiers fought in faraway lands like Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and other distant lands. At the end of the war, 87,000 Indian servicemen died, and some 34,000 were wounded, in addition to 67,000 becoming prisoners of war. Still, the contribution of Indians in the victory of the Allies is mainly unrecognised by those whom these Indians helped. Indians and their connections to the faraway lands are comparatively less discussed and less studied.

Ashutosh Mehndiratta, in his debut book, India and Faraway Lands, attempts to cover India’s and the world’s history in a reverse chronological order. Mehndiratta holds an MBA from the University of Alabama and has a consulting and tech career. The pop-history book starts with recent and relatable events like the Cold War, WW-II, and WW-I – and then delves back to the different eras of history, including the European invasion of Asia and Africa, colonialism, the Islamic invasion, the Mauryan era, and Indus valley civilisation.

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Unfortunately, the book misses an opportunity for meaningful exploration, as it needs more depth and substantive learning than one might expect from its premise. Instead of delving into the subject matter, the book inundates the reader with trivial and disconnected facts, leaving them detached and disengaged. At times, the text reads like a collection of trivia, comprising disjointed paragraphs of ‘did you know this’ information, lacking a cohesive narrative thread—this lack of narrative yields the confusing reading experiment.

The introduction of the book seemed promising and raised an expectation that the book would do justice in telling India’s history from the Indian point of view. It might cover the perspectives that significantly fewer people have talked and written about. However, with the pages unfolding, the book falls regrettably into a glaring Western-centric, concealing the critical intersections between India and the rest of the world.

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India, particularly the region of Kutch in Gujarat, was well connected with the Middle Eastern countries even 300-400 years ago. The Indian traders from Gujarat were so influential that the Sultan of Oman owed money to them. One striking example of India’s influence in the Middle East can be seen in the case of Jairam Shivji, a renowned trader from Gujarat. Shivji’s wealth and power were so significant that he rose to the rank of collector of customs duties in Oman and Zanzibar. To honour his contributions, the Sultan even banned cow slaughter near Shivji’s residence in Oman. Such was the connection between India, Africa, and the Middle East, but the book doesn’t do justice to such history.

The same could be said about India’s connections with Far East countries like Japan, Mongolia, China, and Taiwan. Instead of explicitly covering the rich history of India and faraway lands, the author focuses on the petty battles fought on the ground of Europe that have little to do with India. This myopic focus not only neglects the vital contributions of other regions to India’s cultural and historical tapestry but also perpetuates a one-sided view of its past.

In summary, the book fails to explore the depth and breadth of the connected history of India and the world. Justice to such a vast subject should be done by narrowing it down to a single topic and going beyond what the Westerners tell in ‘world history’. Nonetheless, the book has made a way forward for the other authors to describe India’s history with the world from the Indian point of view.

The reviewer is an independent columnist who writes on international relations, and socio-political affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._

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