First Sentence

"There are comparatively few persons, Indian or English, outside those who have rendered themselves fairly familiar with Indian History as it really is-not as it is written by foreigners, ignorant of the language of its great literature, and misled, when coming into contact with its people, by the nature of a civilisation so different from their own-who have any but vague and crude ideas of India, as she lived and wrought between, say, 5000 B.C. and 1857 A. D."