A man, a question, ten years.

Rajendra Pradhan is not a scholar. He is one Indian man who has watched his own civilization with care for a decade, read its primary sources slowly, and decided the question the world is asking deserves a calmer answer than it has received.

Pradhan was born and raised in Kishangarh, a small town in Rajasthan that the modern world rarely visits and that has not, in any meaningful way, stopped doing what it has always done.

For most of his twenties, he worked in cities. He left a job some years ago without a plan for what would replace it. In that gap, a question arrived — not from anywhere in particular, just suddenly there — and refused to leave.

He still lives in Kishangarh. He writes in the morning. He keeps a small garden.

This is his first book.

What I am trying to do.

I am trying to look at one civilization with the same honesty other civilizations have looked at themselves. Not to defend India. Not to attack the modern world. Not to romanticize anything.

If the book works at all, it should leave the reader with a slightly better question to live with. That is the only ambition I have for it.

“I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to look with me, for a little while, at something we have all been looking past.”

— From the Preface