India is less than half the size of the United States, but it holds over four times as many people. The world’s largest democracy contains a greater diversity of religions and language families than any comparable swath of land, anywhere else. It is not all one thing. Geographic barriers, linguistic barriers, migrations, invasions, syncretism, and mimesis have all combined to create several palimpsest cultures.

So this book—a one-volume overview of the British Museum’s India collection prepared by T. Richard Blurton, the former head of its South and Southeast Asia section—is a project bold in concept, even quixotic. Imagine if a book were entitled Everywhere: A History in Objects. Just because a book is a failure, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting.

The book concerns only “material culture,” the physical remains of India’s history. Accordingly, vast lacunae exist in the survey. It shows us—can show us—nothing of the massively influential Vedic peoples (ca. 1500 B.C.). The creators of the world’s oldest living scripture left no stone or terra-cotta statues, and they did not create settlements that can be excavated. The same goes for the forest-dwelling philosophers of the Upanishads, whose ideas (rebirth, karma, and so on) the Buddha inherited.

So the foundational elements of India’s civilization are simply absent from this book.

So the foundational elements of India’s civilization are simply absent from this book. The reader has to leap, along with the museum, from Paleolithic bits of chert, pottery, and