Richard M. Eaton

When I picked up "India in The Persianate Age" by Richard Eaton, I was unsure what to expect. Books like this are difficult to review because they are so good.
Unlike many authors who focus on North India or the Mughals, he covers North, East, and South India. It starts with Mahmud of Ghazni and busts the Somnath myth. Then, he covered a wide sweep of history until the British. We may have become a Persian-speaking country if the Mughals had not imploded. My father studied Persian, apart from Punjabi and English, not Hindi.
Books like this cover great ground and are tough stories to write. Many themes weave together, each strand and node affecting the other. It can become confusing for the reader.
To Richard Eaton's eternal credit, he created a fascinating, engaging, eye-opening, and comprehensible book.
I believe this is a book every Indian, especially today, must read.… (meer)

A competent survey of Muslim rule in the Indian subcontinent during the second millennium CE. Despite the volume of the text, it has not the space to go too deeply into any period, hence a better understanding of the subject would probably call for dipping into other, more specialised, works. Perhaps the most evocative part of the book is the description of the decline of the Mughal empire under Aurangazeb, that poignantly misdirected monarch who spent the better part of his life chasing dust demons in the Deccan peninsula. The author has a tendency to try (perhaps too hard) to see only good in even the most outre of the Muslim regimes (e.g., his attempts to find some good in even the murderous and fratricidial rites of the Turco-Mongol system of succession), perhaps due to his deep commitment to the subject.… (meer)