India, Jan. 25 -- Prasenjit K. Basu's "India Reborn: The Epic Story of a Civilisation's Rebound from Two Centuries of Decline" is an important book with a clear purpose. It refuses to treat India's rise as a recent miracle, or as a story that begins in 1947, or even in 1991. Basu is asking the primal question: how did a civilisation with long standing economic weight and intellectual influence suffer such a steep relative decline, and what does rebirth look like when it is measured in institutions and agency rather than in mood? The range is wide, yet the spine is firm. He moves from India's historical economic scale into the mechanics of colonial conquest and extraction, into the layered struggle for freedom where he gives real weight to...