ItihāsaChronicle of Indian History

A One-Stop Chronicle · Three Volumes · Twenty-Six Chapters

Indian history, from the first stone tool to the Republic

Not an exam capsule — a whole library distilled into one book. Every era explained in clear, brief, professional prose, with the lines worth remembering already underlined for you.

A mural timeline of Indian history from the Indus seals to the freedom movement
Plate I — The March of the Ages, from Harappa to 1947
Volumes
III
Chapters
26
Key passages
169+
Dated events
144+
Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it — Bal Gangadhar Tilak✦Give me blood, and I will give you freedom — Subhas Chandra Bose✦At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom — Jawaharlal Nehru✦They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas — Bhagat Singh (attrib.)✦In a gentle way, you can shake the world — M. K. Gandhi✦Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence — B. R. Ambedkar✦Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it — Bal Gangadhar Tilak✦Give me blood, and I will give you freedom — Subhas Chandra Bose✦At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom — Jawaharlal Nehru✦They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas — Bhagat Singh (attrib.)✦In a gentle way, you can shake the world — M. K. Gandhi✦Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence — B. R. Ambedkar✦

The Architecture

Three volumes, one civilisation

Read them in order to watch one continuous story, or open any volume like a reference work — each chapter stands on its own.

How this book works

Written like a real book

Each chapter opens with a standfirst, flows in short sections, and closes with the facts and dates — the way a good historian would tell it, not the way a dump of notes would.

Key lines already highlighted

The sentences examiners, essay-writers and dinner-table historians actually quote are marked in the text — the important line of every paragraph is impossible to miss.

Your progress is kept

Bookmark chapters, mark them read, and pick up where you left off. The chronicle remembers your margin-marks for you.

Begin Anywhere

Six chapters everyone should read first

See all 26 chapters

From Mehrgarh to the midnight hour

Five thousand years, told on one line

Every dated event in the chronicle, laid end to end — the quickest way to see how the story fits together.

Walk the timeline