Forgotten Fires of Rebellion

History that India Ignored offers an unconventional retelling of Indian history—putting spotlight on the less-talked-about revolts, unsung heroes, and the contested legacy of colonial resistance, putting everything as part of an expansive past

- Sanjeev Chopra

The founder and chair of the multimedia news agency ANI, nonagenarian Prem Prakash, is perhaps India's oldest working journalist and observer of contemporary affairs. He was present at Tashkent when Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri signed the Kosygin-brokered peace treaty with Ayub Khan. He was absolutely prompt in responding to my request to write a few lines of endorsement for my book on Shastri under the title "The Great Conciliator".

I was therefore delighted to receive a review copy of his seminal work 'History that India Ignored' published by Vitasta. As the book covers a very wide span of history — from the attacks of Darius in 536 BCE, and that of Alexander almost two centuries later in 327 BCE to the liberation of Goa in 1961 — I decided to keep the focus on the 19th and the 20th centuries, when the country was making the transition from the medieval to the modern: the terminal decline of the Mughals, the advent of the EIC, the struggle towards our freedom, and the emergence of a democratic Bharat that is India, and a union of states.