The Government And Geography Of Ancient India, by Gina Hagler

This book touts itself as a model guide for student research on its subject matter, but if any student came to me with research taken from this book, it would likely hurt their grade. In the contemporary age, if you want to find books that are particularly poorly written, often incoherent, and with obvious ideological agendas, reading books meant for children is often a safe bet. Of course, this is by no means new, as C.S. Lewis found the field similarly productive almost a century ago during his own examination of the poorly written and argued books aimed at young readers. Why is this so? One of the most obvious reasons is that young readers, by definition inexperienced and with less-developed critical facilities than more seasoned older writers, are often easier to deceive or to flatter (either will do), which means that writers find it less necessary to give even plausible reasons for their bogus conclusions in such books than they do normally. Similarly, history books often serve as locations where the roots of current political agendas can be found, and this book is certainly not slack in presenting such obvious myths and falsifications of history as occur when there are comparatively few sources to work with and where the imagination of an author can run wild.

One of the notable aspects of this book is its reflexive celebration of government and its collapse of concerns like geography to mere territory and physical features (6), to the point where the author views Hinduism as a positive element in government control, where even karma and reincarnation are viewed through the minds of their supposed positive role in social control (12). Somewhat puzzling is the author’s repeated praise of the caste system as being an important positive element within Indian civilization, with speculations that this caste system began in the Indus Valley Civilization (10). The author’s claim that the Hindu Kush protected India from invasion is belied by the repeated history of invasion over the course of Indian history, beginning with the Aryans, and continuing with such peoples as the Greeks, Kushan, White Huns, Arabs, and Moguls, to say nothing about the British and other Europeans later on (14). The author makes massive leaps of logic such as jumping from an assumption that no city in the Indus Valley Civilization was larger or grander than others to a view that material goods were not important and that the cities had some sort of peaceful utopian communal relations with each other (16). Nearly every page of this book makes some sort of baffling or self-contradictory or just plain unsupported general statement that demonstrates the lack of sound reasoning and judgment on the part of the author. Indeed, some young readers may be confused by the arguments of the book and mistakenly think that their lack of understanding is the problem, which sadly would not be the case.

In terms of its contents, this book is just under 50 pages long and is divided into a considerable number of unnumbered sections. The book begins by discussing ancient India’s government and geography before moving on to discuss the supposed relationship between government and geography (specifically political geography), before looking at such matters as the Indus River Civilization, theocracy, karma, a physical description of the Indus Valley, cities in the region, the Mauryan Empire, centralized government, defense and currency, trade, a large geographic span, Mauryan cities, the Gupta Empire, Gupta leaders, a weak government, the caste system, the extent of the Gupta Empire, and India today. The pages of the book are filled either with puzzling text or some kind of image, be it a map, drawing, or photograph. The book then ends with a glossary, suggestions for further information, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, and then an index. The book is part of a series, so one would think that some sort of editing and quality control went into this, but given the output, that may not have been the case.