With 2015 speeding to a close and at least some of you already engaged in your Diwali/Christmas/None of the above gift shopping, this seems as good a time as any to dedicate a column to a reading list.

Of all the emails I get from readers, the most frequent by far are requests for lists of “good and interesting and non-boring" books on Indian history. I usually respond to these requests in piecmeal fashion. But this week, let me try to pull them together into one list.

At the end, I will also try to answer two other questions that I am asked very, very often:

1. Why are you recommending books by “XYZ" who is clearly a biased Marxist/Right-wing/Nutjob/Revisionist historian?

2. Which history book do you “trust"?

(Amateur history enthusiast disclaimers apply.)

I recommend everyone start with a snappy single-volume history of India such as the book by John Keay. I was also recently recommended the single-volume history by Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund.

Such a book helps to put things in perspective. It gives you a sense of the sheer scale of Indian history.

(The Wikipedia entry on the history of India is also not a terrible place to start.)

After you have enjoyed the single volume, you could then move on to books that focus on specific periods or geographies. For instance, Romila Thapar’s History of Early India (up to AD 1300) is a classic. (Wait. We will come to that.) You may also want to look at Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha, a somewhat challenging book, but a landmark work nonetheless, especially in the field of Buddhist studies.

For many years, I used to refer to K.A. Nilakanta Sastri’s books on south India. But a more recent one I’d like to recommend is A Concise History of South India, edited by Noboru Karashima. It is great fun to read and quite unintuitive in parts. Readers may be interested to know that some of the finest work on south Indian history in the world takes place in Japan. Nine of the 13 authors featured in Karashima’s book are Japanese.

If your interests lie in matters more scriptural and spiritual, so to speak, then Patrick Olivelle’s books all come highly recommended. Born in Sri Lanka and an expert on Sanskrit and Pali, Olivelle’s translations and commentary on the Upanishads, in particular, are regarded very highly.

Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of the Seven Rivers is superb, especially for its take on Indian geography. One last recommendation for this “early period" before we move on: The Aryan Debate edited by Thomas Trautmann. If you know nothing about the Aryan controversy except that it is a controversy, but wish to know more, then this is a good place to start.

Next I’d like to recommend Abraham Eraly’s books on the classical period and the Mughals. They are all enjoyable to read and make for great gifts because most editions are really quite beautiful.

Moving on, across the centuries, next I point you to the works of Dharam Pal, especially Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, a work that will particularly interest readers who would like to look beyond eurocentric views of science history.

Tirthankar Roy’s history of the East India Company takes us nicely to the 19th century. From which point very popular books by William Dalrymple and Ramachandra Guha bring us more or less to our present day.

Then there are thematic history books. For instance, Jadunath Sarkar’s Shivaji and His Times is quite good and also freely available online. Raghu Karnad’s Fartherst Field explores the history of Indian involvement in World War II. Uday Kulkarni’s Solstice at Panipat, an account of the Third Battle of Panipat, has been on my reading list for some months now. And I have been consumed by Bertil Lintner’s Great Game East in recent weeks.

This list could go on and on, especially if I include all the books on my wishlist that I will almost certainly never get around to reading.

Now, there is one qualifier that I should have used with every single book on this list but did not: “flawed". Every title here is flawed in some way. They all contain some mistakes and are the products of biased and subjective minds. As Trautmann writes: “The idea of truth in history involves the idea that it exists independent of our will, and is therefore inherently difficult to know, because our interpretations are will-bound, and our facts are never independent of our theories."

And we all, writers and, pertinently, readers, have our own theories. Historians ask the questions they like to, and look for answers where they want to. Therefore, aspiring to read a bias-free history book is futile. And equally futile is the pursuit of a history that can be believed or trusted.

Don’t believe or trust any of the books on this list. I don’t. But read them critically, enjoy them, disagree with them, love some of a book and hate the rest of it. These are all legal under the Indian Penal Code.

In my opinion, there is only one sure-shot way to never read a biased history. And that is to never read any history.

Every week, Déjà View, scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview

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