The scope of this concise encyclopedia encompasses important people, places, and events in India's past and present (till 2004), as well as entries on the country's different schools of philosophy, culture, religious leaders, important branches of government, and the economy. The author's masterly introduction provides a rich overview with many an insight and is supplemented by a chronology, maps, and an extensive bibliography.

With more than two hundred new entries — most pertaining to the recent years — the second edition captures the rapidly evolving situation without neglecting the country's ancient past.

SURJIT MANSINGH recently retired as professor of International Politics at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and teaches part-time at the American University in Washington, D.C. Earlier, she was a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She took her master's degree in history from Delhi University and her Ph.D. in international relations from the American University, Washington, D.C. She has taught at universities in the United States, Italy, and India. Before assuming an academic career, she was a member of the India Foreign Service.

Professor Mansingh is the author of India's Search for Power: Indira Gandhi's Foreign Policy (Sage, 1984), Diplomatic History of Modern India (with Charles H. Heimsath, Allied, 1971), numerous papers in learned journals, and the revised edition of Heimsath's Teacher's Introduction to India (Educational Resources Centre, 1994). She has organized conferences and edited their proceedings in Indian and Chinese Foreign Policies in Comparative Perspective (1998), Nehru's Foreign Policy: Fifty Years On (1998), and Prospects for India-United States Relations: The Next Ten Years (2000). She is currently engaged in a study of India and China as rising powers and the implications of this for the United States.

Professor Mansingh is widely travelled and lives alternately in India and the United States, a pattern established decades ago along with her late husband, Professor Charles Heimsath. They have two sons, Arjun and Kabir.