John Keay (born 1941) is an English journalist and author specialising in writing popular histories about India and the Far East, often with a particular focus on their colonisation and exploration by Europeans.

John Keay was born in Devon, England to parents of Scottish origin. He studied at Ampleforth College in York, before going on to read Modern History at Oxford University. Among his teachers at Oxford were the famous historian A.J.P. Taylor and the future playwright Alan Bennett. Keay was a resident of Magdalen College.

In 1965, he visited India for the first time. He went to Kashmir for a fortnight's trout-fishing, but liked it so much that he returned the following year, this time for six months. It was during his stay in Kashmir that Keay decided upon writing as a career. He joined the staff of The Economist magazine, and as their political correspondent, he returned to India several times to cover various elections and conflicts. He also started contributing stories to BBC Radio.

In 1971, he gave up his correspondent's job in order to write his first book. Into India was published in 1973. Keay followed it up with two volumes about the European exploration of the Western Himalayas in the 19th century: When Men and Mountains Meet (1977) and The Gilgit Game (1979). The two were later combined into a single-volume paperback by John Murray.

In the 1980s, he worked for BBC Radio as a writer and presenter, and made several documentary series for the Third Programme,[1] the highbrow BBC radio channel. He also made programmes for BBC Radio 4. During this time, he wrote India Discovered, the story of how British colonialists came to find out about the great artefacts of Indian culture and architecture.

The Recovery of a Lost Civilization Two hundred years ago, India was seen as a place with little history and less culture.Today it is revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity. How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book. The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as old as Rome, the realization that the Buddha was not a god but a historical figure, the glories of a literature as rich as anything known in Europe, the drama of encountering a veritable Sistine chapel deep in the jungle, and the sheer delight of categorizing ‘the most glorious galaxy of monuments in the world’ fell, for the most part, to men who were officials of the British Raj. Their response to the unfamiliar – the explicitly sexual statuary, the incomprehensible scripts, the enigmatic architecture – and the revelations which resulted, revolutionized ideas not just about India but about civilization as a white man’s prerogative.