Enter India which exores the immutable and mutes the inexorable, and generally relents unrelentingly while changing not at all. On the other hand, horizontal history is arguably even better given its rejection of most man-made sweeping narratives in favor of another sweeping narrative, the ungodly power of an interconnected species and its inexorable collective evolution.
I still watch Ollie Bye’s History of the world YT video every few months with the same thought about how amazing this would be if LSD were involved. Deep (or big) history, even restricted to anthropological scales bring an exhilarating sense of G-force as events invariably become denser and faster and the years compressed as we approach the present. I’ve recently been blown away with two historical presentation style.
Most insane among whom are those who try to cover 5000 years worth of it. As are the people who try and write about it.
At least on the latter two, this book gives me reason to believe it’s been very lazy to have resorted to the easy demonization of India and easier deification of Europe’s erudite love affair with its history. I’ve had easy targets to blame, a school syllabus that was heroically soporific and shallow (I would learn over the course of this book that I’ve actually misjudged the learned members of our school syllabus committee, because it turns out it is also pathetically ideological, stunted in its perspective, and entirely devoid of nuance or insight), an intellectual culture that always seemed to defer to mythology and literature when seeking the steadying wisdom of the past to explain a chaotic present, and a reductive myopia of the explanatory power of Indian history to a handful of isolated incidents that, like the cinema we consume, score high on drama and narrative value but low on substance and impact. It is appalling how superficial my Indian history is, and this book was a weak attempt to reverse decades of the lived experience Dunning-Kruger effect. There is a sort of sincere pathos about the tragic conceit of overconfidence in the knowledge closest to our reality.
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