CONTENTS:- 1. India: country and nation--an introductory essay/Irfan Habib; 2. The earliest notions of India: 'Meluhha' in Mesopotamian records/Shereen Ratnagar; 3. Names for India in ancient Indian texts and inscriptions/Ishrat Alam; 4. Ideas of India in ancient Greek literature/Udai Prakash Arora; 5. Hiuen Tsiang's India/J.S. Grewal; 6. Evolution of a regional identity: Kerala in India/Kesavan Veluthat; 7. Concepts of India: expanding horizons in early medieval Arabic and Persian writing/Imtiaz Ahmad; 8. Concept of India in Alberuni/Iqtidar Alam Khan; 9. The idea of India in Amir Khusrau/Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi; 10. The monetary integration of India under the Mughal Empire/Najaf Haider; 11. Seventeenth-century India as seen by the Dutch/Om Prakash; 12. Francois Bernier's idea of India/Aniruddha Ray; 13. The vision of a free India in the Bengal renaissance/Gautam Chattopadhyay; 14. Swami Dayanand's Aryavarta/Indu Banga; 15. A Juster India for women -- the thought and work of Pandita Ramabai and Rameshwari Nehru/Kamlesh Mohan; 16. India as "Hindusthan": elements of the ideological structure of Hindu communalism/Mridula Mukherjee; 17. Nehru's economic vision for India: the road to fulfilment/Aditya Mukherjee.
DESCRIPTION
What India means may elicit different answers from people today. The answers that might have been given a thousand, two thousand or three thousand years ago would have been possibly quite different. This volume explores how notions of India have grown: even as a geographical expression the notion (under whatever name) took time to form. Political factors and cultural diffusion both helped in the formation. Nor is the role of outsiders in looking at India as country with some identifiable features of custom, belief, and language, to be ignored. The different contributions in this volume bring out how the idea of India has changed as Indian civilization has developed and received various cultural streams. The contributors also essay the issue of India's transformation into a nation under the stresses generated by the colonial conquest, resistance and the influx of modern ideas. The volume closes with discussions how the future of the nation was conceived in the past and what message this has for the people of India today.
