Writing a textbook on modern Indian history at the current moment is an especially challenging task. Since the nineties, not only has there been a proliferation of revisionist studies, but also new questions for research have emerged. As a result, there is nothing even close to a consensus on many crucial questions. Furthermore, much scholarship has been marked by an acute sensitivity to what is marginal to mainstream history, or to the “fragment,” to use Gyanendra Pandey's suggestive phrase. But no textbook, by the very nature of the genre, can be centrally about the fragment. How to write of a center that no longer appears as monolithic as it once did, and how to simultaneously write of the margins that elude even this center—this is a challenge to which textbooks about South Asian history have to be acutely sensitive.

What makes Ishita Banerjee-Dube's new textbook A History of Modern India so valuable is the distinctive way it meets these challenges. Thus, rather than distill a magisterial narrative from the conflicting arguments, it scrupulously strives to present the differences amongst various historians. For example, the section of the introductory chapter on the eighteenth century discussing the collapse of the Mughal empire makes its way through the various arguments that have been put forth—beginning with Jadunath Sarkar, and making its way through the arguments of Satish Chandra, J. F. Richards, Irfan Habib, Christopher Bayly, Muzaffar Alam, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The historians whose work it draws on are usually cited in the text. By proceeding in this way, the book also quietly introduces undergraduates to a distinctive understanding of historical knowledge—as constitutively modest (even when historians themselves are not) because of the way it is always open to being remade by critical reevaluation.

Any textbook trying to make a nuanced argument faces also the challenge of narrative strategy—how to hold together the various concerns of historians of India, how to relate them to each other? Banerjee-Dube has resorted to the strategy of identifying several themes to which each chapter returns. One overarching theme is the constitutive role of colonial rule. While the book is also sensitive to the newer scholarship that has cautioned against ascribing too hegemonic a power to imperial knowledge and imperial governance, various chapters explore how the subcontinent was reconstituted not only through direct interventions of the colonial state but more broadly through the constitutive assumptions of colonial knowledge. There is thus an attentiveness on the one hand to the colonization of the economy and the devastation caused by famines, and on the other to the colonial construction of Muslims as a minority and Hindus as a majority, and to the colonial role in transforming caste and gender relations.

Another overarching theme is nationalism, which figures prominently in seven out of the eleven chapters. Again, the book's narratives around nationalism are inflected by the explosion of scholarship in the last two decades. When various chapters return to the transformations in rural India, they attend not only to agriculture or land settlement, but also to environmental questions, and to the struggles in the forested adivasi areas. Similarly, the account of the vicissitudes of the Congress as a formal political organization is placed in relation to the rise of Hindu nationalism, and to the evolution of labor and capital, and their intersections with nationalist struggles.

Moreover, an organizing assumption of the book is that “nationalism is not the sole identity that subsumes or organizes other identifications, [that] it exists in conflict or in harmony with several others” (p. 179). As a result, there is considerable attention to peasant and adivasi insurgencies, and to mobilizations such as the Kisan Sabhas. That organizing assumption also enables what are perhaps the three features that distinguish A History of Modern India from most other textbooks centered on India. First, questions of gender are explored quite systematically. A chapter on the late nineteenth century explores how “home and family became the inner retreat of educated men” from around the 1860s (p. 190), how the “separation of the family from the state” led to a “critical position” being assigned to “the new woman in the positing of a different modernity” (p. 191), the Age of Consent controversy, and how the charge of effeminacy played out in the reactions of middle-class Indian men. Again, the “Mahatma phenomenon” serves as an occasion to explore the question of “‘equality’ among men and women workers of the movement.”

Second, in another reflection of recent scholarship, the question of caste is prominent. The book explores the growth of non-Brahman ideologies, the growth of the Dravidian movement, the clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi, and more broadly Ambedkar's role as a political figure. A minor puzzle is that the theme is not more central still, given that Banerjee-Dube's own scholarship is on questions of caste and vernacular religions.

Third, in implicit acknowledgment of the impossibility of comprehensiveness, the book features boxes that often take up themes that are only hinted at in the main body. These boxes have some of the most intriguing material—the figure of Lakshmibai in literature, the verses and ballads around Bhagat Singh, the mapping of the northeast, the meanings of swaraj. One wishes there had been more of these boxes, which bring out so well the unruliness of Indian history-writing.

A History of Modern India also has several features designed specifically to make it work well in undergraduate survey courses—the narrative is not so loaded with details as to make it daunting, there are several well-conceived maps, and helpful reviews of the main themes are interspersed throughout. Indeed, because it does such a sophisticated and thorough job of describing current scholarship and debates, the book is useful even to professional historians—I have found myself consulting it to get a quick sense of the literature in fields with which I am not familiar. This is an unusually valuable addition to the range of undergraduate-level textbooks on modern India.