Economist, environmentalist, and urban theorist Sanjeev Sanyal brings the deftness of a polymath to explore completely new ways to think about India and its place in the world.

Looking beyond immediate concerns and politics of the day, the essays in this volume examine and re-examine narratives in history and culture, economics, and urban design to ask some truly vital questions.

Does Indian history need to be rewritten? What roles do slums play in urbanization? Can Varanasi reinvent itself for the new century? What can Hindus do to secure the future of their religion? Where should we build our new universities? How long will the dollar endure as the world’s anchor currency? And importantly: what role should the State play in India?

India in the Age of Ideas, written over a decade and more, uses analytical tools drawn from an extraordinary array of sources—the Austrian school of economics, the philosophical framework of Complex Adaptive Systems, ancient Indian texts like the Rig Veda, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra. Sanyal challenges commonly held assumptions about India and the world to offer challenging and new perspectives on how we should respond to a rapidly evolving world.