DETAILS FROM Alan Machado's latest book: Discovering India Anew (Orient BlackSwan)

[Frederick Noronha]

Where does one begin to tell a story that spans many thousands of years, a story whose origins are obscured by stubborn mists that will not lift and enduring myths that will not shift under the weight of ages of telling?

 Discovering India Anew reconstructs the history of Indian peoples, taking off from where the history of Indians really begins: Africa. Exploring their earliest journey out of Africa through the colonisation of South Asia by different genetic groups to the end of South Asia’s first urban civilisation, Harappa, and the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, the author asks a fundamental question: Who are we Indians?

The book draws on fields as diverse as archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoanthropology, genetics, climatology, historical linguistics and literary sources. Using prehistoric evidence such as rock art and stone tools, the author studies the evolution of Homo sapiens and the dispersal of populations across the globe, against the backdrop of global climate changes. 

It discusses the forager-farmer conflict; maps out a linguistic history of India; traces the origin, growth, and decline of the Harappan civilisation and its impact on subsequent Indian history, and brings out the Mesopotamian and Elamite influence in its shaping. Through an anecdotal narrative style, the author artfully weaves together this astonishing story of human grit and opens new windows into our past.

Through the event of the drying up of the Sarasvati River, the book highlights how the narrative told by myth and bias contrasts with the alternate history revealed by modern scientific investigations. This unique book will fascinate scholars and researchers of history as well as the historically inclined, curious reader.

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