BOOK REVIEW

The husband-wife duo of Teresita and Howard Schaffer has the right credentials to explore the various drivers of India’s foreign policy. In their long careers as US diplomats, they had several stints in India and in neighbouring South Asian countries, accumulating, as they went along, a more nuanced and perceptive understanding of sub-continental politics. But this book is not a memoir. It is an exposition of India’s world view, its historical and cultural roots. The authors get their history wrong by placing Ashoka a century