The Shortest History of India

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John Zubrzycki is an Australian author who has been studying Indian history for more than forty years. He has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign. Correspondent, taught Indian studies and written extensively on Indian society, culture and politics. He is the author of four books, besides The Shortest History of India-The House of Jaipur the inside Story of India's Most Glamorous Royal Family, Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and finns A Magical History of India, The Mysterious Me Jacek Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy and The Last Nizam The Rise and Fall of India's Greatest Princely State. He majored in South Asian history and Hindi at the Australian National University and has a PhD in Indian history from the University of New South Wales. John was the deputy foreign editor at The Australian before becoming a full time writer.

EARLY ON THE morning of 9 August 1942, the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and nine of his colleagues were bundled into a train at Bombay's Victoria Terminus. Their destination was Ahmadnagar Fort in the sweltering hills of modern-day Maharashtra. In 1707, the last of the Great Mughals, Aurangzeb, had died in the fort the moment of his passing coinciding with a whirlwind 'so fierce that it blew down all the tents standing in the encampment...villages were destroyed and trees overthrown. Under the British, Ahmadnagar had been turned into a high-security jail. Nehru's incarceration would last two years and nine months - the longest of his nine stints as a prisoner of the Raj. His crime was to launch the 'Quit India' movement, a desperate bid by the Congress to pressure Britain into granting immediate independence if it were to count on India's full support for the war effort. The war would be almost over by the time he was released.

India's future prime minister described Ahmadnagar as a kind of 'Plato's cave' - a prison whose inmates can only see shadows of what is going on around them. Yet he took solace in the sky over his prison yard with its 'fleecy and colourful clouds in the daytime, and... Brilliant star-lit nights'. Inside the fort's walls was a firmament of a different kind-Nehru's small cohort of fellow prisoners represented a cross-section of Indian politics, scholarship and society. Between them, they spoke four of India's classical languages-Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic and Persian- as well as more than half a dozen of its modern ones, including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Telugu. 'I had all this wealth to draw upon and the only limitation was my own capacity to profit by it,' Nehru mused. There was plenty of time to cultivate a garden, hold impromptu seminars and speculate on what was going on in the rest of the country. As he had done during his earlier jail terms, Nehru took the opportunity to Satisfy his voracious appetite for reading classic works on history and politics, and to translate those ideas into his own writings.

**Contents and Sample Pages**