Wars produce confusion and panic that often result from fears—rational and otherwise—among government officials and populations subject to war’s vicissitudes. During World War II, British officials in India and their colonial subjects feared a Japanese invasion of the sub-continent that never occurred. Krea University philosophy professor and former editor of The Hindu Mukund Padmanabhan tells…
From the temples of Angkor Wat and Borobudur to images of Ganesh and references to the Ramayana, anyone who visits Southeast Asia cannot fail to be struck by the influence of centuries-old Indian culture, an influence that seems more profound and deeply rooted than that of China. Yet in today’s Southeast Asia, the situation is…
Memoirs from Cambodian and of Cambodians remain rare, at least in English. A Cambodian Odyssey by Haing S Ngor came out almost forty years ago and became a bestseller a few years after the Oscar-award winning film, The Killing Fields. It is hard to think of many since. Until now with Chantha Nguon’s new memoir,…
While not exactly lost to history, Mughal Princess Gulbadan (with an extensive Wikipedia page and a biography by the prolific Rumer Godden), is not nearly as well-known as her father Babur, (half) brother Humayun and nephew Akbar nor even Nur Jahan, the subject of self-styled feminist historian Ruby Lal’s previous book. But Gulbadan, uniquely among Mughal…
There’s a popular folk hero in Puebla, Mexico—Catarina de San Juan, who Mexicans hailed as a devoted religious figure after her death in 1688. She’s credited with creating the china poblana dress, a connection of dubious historical veracity made several centuries after her death. But Catarina is one of Mexico’s most famous “chinos”—despite the fact…
One cannot help wonder whether the number of “China books” is a lagging or leading indicator of the country’s importance in world affairs. While some of these books communicate more about the author than China, Jeremy Garlick’s Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption is more realpolitik than politics, more about…
As current events in Palestine, Iraq, and the Red Sea attest, the Middle East is a region with much unrest, instability and conflict. However, the region is undergoing a new era of turmoil and transition, headlined by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf States. As a journalist and author with decades of experience in covering…
In an interview with Pierre Andre Boutang in 1989, Satyajit Ray, the Academy Award winning director, declared that India has “a fairly backward audience” adding that this “unsophisticated audience” is largely “exposed to the commercial Hindi cinema, more than anything else.” In Rays’ account, the exposure to commercial Hindi cinema is the cause of Indian audiences’…
First looks at China, or some aspect of it, at least those that have impinged on the broader consciousness, have often been travelogues. Think Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze or Tim Clissold’s Mr China. Over the years, these books have covered expats, farmers, millennials, businessmen, but despite China’s ever deeper involvement…
One of the objectives of the historians of the formerly colonized world is to rewrite history from the perspective of the colonized. Yet, such historians have arguably created a historiographic tradition that is lopsided. These are at best works that expose the unfair and oppressive means through which the European powers came to power and…
India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale in his new book Crosswinds offers a fascinating account of India’s diplomacy in four specific events during 1949 through 1959: the formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Indochina War, and the two Taiwan Strait crises. India’s diplomatic role was encouraged by…
This large photobook offers a detailed visual portrayal of the ecology, history, and cultural diversity of the largest of India’s seven North Eastern states. Mountains of Dawn: A Portrait of Arunachal Pradesh was originally published in 2009; this updated 2023 edition includes over 100 photos. The visual portrayal of the land, “a belt of green…
Although the Ottoman Empire nominally extended along the North African coast as far as the borders of Morocco, much of it, especially the Westernmost reaches, were largely autonomous much of the time. By the turn of the 19th century, control by Istanbul of the so-called Barbary States was nominal; the dey of the Regency of…
Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a memoir about a project—or perhaps even an experiment—by Shoji Morimoto. Morimoto’s wife encountered a blog post by therapist and self-help writer Jinnosuke Kokoroya that insisted that “people have value even if they do nothing”. Morimoto began to wonder if that is really true. And, if it is true,…
Anthropologist Tom Barfield’s field work in the steppes of northern Afghanistan in the 1980s inspired a lifelong curiosity for the ancient empires that once arose in this frontier region. In an earlier work, The Perilous Frontier (Wiley Blackwell, 1992), he examined the relationship between the steppe pastoralists and sedentary states, concluding that the emergence of…