Understanding Indian history is not a study of conspicuous history. But of event, fragment of personalities, tides of the mainstream and the flow of submerged currents in a word epitomes of bigger history have been clubbed together under a common title and given the form of a book. Piquant subjects of history like the response of the metropolitan Indian mind to British Indian science policy, agricultural growth of Gujarat in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pattern of Indian urbanization etc. have been taken as a content in a leaf of research available in the book. The essays on these subject unfold the question - what was India like when her accumen for science was cramped, when her urbanization was kept retarded ? With such questions taking a lead history -writing becomes trying and historians fall back upon archives in quest of source materials.