Somewhere under the plains of Pakistan and northwest India lie the drains of cities as old as the pyramids of Giza, built by people whose writing nobody can read. Four thousand years later, the same land produced a constitution that handed the vote to every adult, most of whom could not read either. Between those two moments sits one of the longest and most argued over histories on Earth: an emperor who publicly regretted his own war, a Mughal who invited every faith to debate him, a trading company that ended up collecting a kingdom's taxes, and a border drawn in five weeks by a man who had never seen the country it cut.

Indian history is full of questions people still fight about, from where the Vedic peoples came from to what the sultans did to temples and whether British rule built or bled the subcontinent. You will meet the strongest case on each side and learn to read an edict, a pilgrim's diary or a museum label for what it reveals and what it hides. Today's arguments in Indian and Pakistani politics will make more sense once you can trace them to their roots, and so will the reason a nation of more than a billion people still measures itself against what B. R. Ambedkar asked of it.