What does a company do when it stops growing and turns stagnant? It retires debt, sheds flab, invites technological upgradation, undergoes financial reconstruction and regains its market share. A similar pattern is noticeable in the rise, decline, fall and revivification of civilisation, which too are organic entities like us and our institutions. How and why do nations, and civilisations, rise, decline and fall with such regularity and clock-wise precision? Return of the Infidels is a book about how ancient cultures and civilisations achieved this. Since India, due to its proximity to West Asia, had to struggle the hardest in ejecting both Christianity and Islam from the subcontinent, the book explains it in greater detail; but the story of China and Japan, and that of many other nations, is similar and waiting to be told. Japan, India and China used Christianity and Islam only as catalysts to revive their contemporary stagnating civilisations, and slowly made these guests retreat when they overstayed their welcome. Since our heroes, like our gods, are crystallisation of our societies’ collective consciousness and aspirations, these Asian nations gradually produced leaders like Tojo, Gandhi and Mao who led their anti-colonial countries to push out the former catalysts. Christianity and Islam viewed these ancient Asian giants as ‘infidels’—and they are Returning now!