In the shadow of mountains older than the Himalayas, along a coastline that received Roman gold and sent back spices and gems, across a plateau whose rock faces gave the world some of its greatest cave art, a civilisation has been building itself for over two millennia, in no particular hurry to be noticed.

This is the home to a queen who had coins minted in her name long before feminism was a word. Of a 16-year-old who carved a kingdom founded on justice, dignity and fair play. Of a feisty warrior-queen who held an empire together against the mightiest conqueror of her age. Of a teacher extraordinaire who walked to school through a hail of stones and built the foundation of women's education with those very stones.

Where a scholar drafted a constitution that became the conscience of a nation. Maharashtra's soil has always bred conviction over compliance: Its thinkers didn't ask for self-rule, they demanded it as birth right, and built India's free press and its argumentative, pluralistic spirit along the way.

The country's first railway line set a nation in motion here, and one first kept begetting another, from the first cotton mills to the first nuclear reactors. The result: a crucible of cosmopolitanism, a magnet for the world. An economic force to reckon with.

Gift of the Sahyadris is the story of the land that made it possible. Narrated with the pace of a storyteller and the rigour of a historian, it is a celebration of 2,000 years of a state that refuses to stop writing itself.