Ancient Indians: The Amazing Story of Our Earliest Ancestors!
Written by Tony Joseph and Devika Cariapa
Illustrations by Rajiv Eipe
Reviewed by Samantha Kokkat and Sujata Noronha
A text that looks back at the beginnings of human entry into India—one that disrupts current narratives of purity and originality, piecing together history into an accessible and engaging narrative for young readers.
| Publishing Date: 2025
ISBN: 978-9353452773 Page Count: 168 Publisher: Juggernaut Review Posted Online: June 2026 QBR Reviews Issue: Q2 2026 Categories: History | India | Civilisation | Migration
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In 2018, Juggernaut published Early Indians by Tony Joseph, a compelling narrative that went on to win multiple awards and accolades. Seven years on, this account, praised by award panels for bringing together research from multiple strands of study in a stimulating, accessible, and rigorous manner, has been published for young readers as Ancient Indians: The Amazing Story of Our Earliest Ancestors! (Juggernaut, 2025). Devika Cariapa—archaeologist and author of children’s books such as Uncle Nehru, Please Send an Elephant, Adventures of Kohinoor, A Children’s History of India in 100 Objects, and India Through Archaeology: Excavating History—has worked on this adaptation alongside illustrator Rajiv Eipe.
Ancient Indians documents for children important scientific discoveries about the origin of the people of the Indian subcontinent. At a time when numerous books attempting to bind the Indian nation state together through various entry points are dominating the Indian children’s literature market, what makes this book different? Why discuss it in libraries and classrooms with children?
Because questions of origin are increasingly becoming a political tool. While current political discourse looks back a few hundred years to establish origin and originality, Joseph and Cariapa share with children a discourse grounded in findings that reach back thousands of years, roughly 70,000 years. The book casts all communities and peoples of India as migrants. There are no original Indians, only first Indians. Those first Indians, who arrived from Africa about 65,000 years ago, are the ancestors of all people of the subcontinent today—a people formed through the intermixing of migrants from parts of present-day Africa, Iran, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. The book gives children access to a scholarly narrative in which no culture is native; the only culture that is native is the one that has emerged from intermixing. It enables a temporal zoom-out that organically demands a widening of worldviews.
In Cariapa’s able hands, a weighty and complex subject takes on a new lease of life. Positioned not as a work of history but as a “high-speed adventure” and a “wild detective expedition through time,” the book works to counter the notion that history is boring or dry. As adult readers we felt it succeeded quite well.
We shared the book with Suraj, a thirteen-year-old who visits Bookworm library almost daily and whose reading diet is dominated by fiction, to see whether he would be drawn to this narrative. Suraj found the front cover attractive and was willing to read a few chapters. When he returned the book, he acknowledged the attempt to make the account engaging, but also noted that a reader already interested in history would enjoy it more. His response reminded us that the book has not fully shed the sense of dryness we tend to associate with history, and that children know very well what they like and want to read.
Nevertheless, the book is important because it provokes new ways of thinking about who the people of the Indian subcontinent are. Cariapa has done a remarkable job of making the numerous multidimensional findings and conclusions of the original text accessible to children. Aided by Eipe’s characteristic quirky and charming illustrations, big ideas and centuries of unearthed information are distilled for readers aged eleven or twelve and above in under 160 pages. Though the design—font size and playful visual language—might lead an educator to assume the book is accessible to younger children, reading it makes clear that there is an abundance of information here, grounded in serious scholarly work, that a reader would need to sit with and unpack in order to retain it meaningfully. As adult readers, we found ourselves rereading sections to bring together the many different strands of study—genetics, linguistics, palaeontology, among others—woven into the narrative. A visual capturing the different stages of migration proved very helpful as a quick reference, though we missed an index at the end clearly stating where particular information can be found.
While we were genuinely thrilled by the possibilities of knowing and learning that Ancient Indians opened up, we also experienced some disruptions in the reading experience caused mainly by layout and design choices. Additional information is frequently placed in boxes to distinguish it from the main body of text. However, these boxes are often inserted in the middle of an idea, interrupting the flow of the argument being developed. Suraj agreed that this was disruptive. Better placement of these boxes could easily have avoided the need to pull a child’s attention from one idea to another before the first has been fully discussed.
At the same time, information that does not deviate from the main body of the text is also sometimes placed in boxes mid-paragraph. The logic governing the use of boxes is unclear, and adds an unnecessary obstacle to meaning-making. While many chapters end on a hook, that hook tends to get lost by the time the reader has worked through the boxes that follow it.
We also felt that the placement of several illustrations that visually breakdown complex pieces of information similarly interrupts the reading flow.
A visual representation that captures the different waves of migration into India
While these visual aids are genuinely helpful, they are often placed before the text has finished conveying a complex piece of information. For instance, the graphic above capturing the different waves of migration into India would have been better placed after the author had finished discussing all those waves, rather than in the middle of that discussion. Our young reader was interested in what the illustration was presenting, but felt, as we did, that it should have come after the text so that he would have known what he was looking at. The book, though impressive, would have benefited from more considered design choices.
Cariapa’s adaptation uses the framework of occupations as an entry point into the world of discovery and meaning-making. It is not the archaeologist or historian alone, but a large “crack team” of geneticists, linguists, palaeontologists, and palaeoanthropologists who work together to find, study, and trace the journey of Homo Sapiens. In Eipe’s delightful illustrations, many of these professionals present as women.
We missed seeing colour photographs of digs and sculptures, but were glad for the illustrations, which not only add whimsy but also offer gentle subversions. In one illustration, the scholar—the latest point in the evolutionary trajectory so far—is placed at the beginning, following the journey our ancestors have undertaken, quietly disrupting the conventional representation of human evolution as a linear progression.
Similarly, another graphic reminds us that we are not reading the history of the Indian nation, but of the Indian subcontinent, a landmass divided by political boundaries that today seem insurmountable, but which blur, disappear, and become insignificant as one zooms out.
Migration, mixing, and hybridity are the universal truths of Ancient Indians. A herding community in Baluchistan, Pakistan continues to speak a Dravidian language. Austroasiatic languages are spoken in Meghalaya (Khasi), in central Indian states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh (Santhali, Mundari, Ho), and in the Nicobar Islands (Nicobarese). The book resists the categorisation of the subcontinent’s peoples into “pure” groups, and allows children to move toward an evidence-based understanding of who we are and where we came from.
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