In few countries is the contrast between buried riches and visible squalor as great as in Afghanistan. Ancient towns like Balkh and Ghazna present scenes of desolation which belie the wonderful objects and architectural elements that archaeologists have recovered from them. Other rich sites, like Ai Khanum, lie below the surface of a featureless plain….
India’s development story has been told many times, but A Sixth of Humanity makes a compelling case that the familiar narratives no longer suffice. Authors Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian seek to reinterpret India’s extraordinary, idiosyncratic, and often paradoxical economic journey over a 75-year arc as a single, interconnected developmental experiment whose successes and failures…
Of all the examples of Cool Japan’s global reach—from sushi to Hello Kitty to anime and manga—perhaps the most iconic of all is Hokusai’s print, The Great Wave. The huge curving wave has taken on a life of its own, reproduced and recreated on coffee mugs and tea towels and across the internet in the…
The Ganges may be more famous, but the Brahmaputra is arguably a far more geopolitically important river. By the time it reaches Bengal, it forms the largest delta in the world, having crossed through Tibet, India and Bangladesh. This river, and the people who live along its banks, are the subject of River Traveller, the new…
In Western collective memory, Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, Havana and Hanoi are remembered as centres of socialist revolution during the tense decades of the Cold War. Yet another Asian capital is often overlooked: Jakarta. After all, Indonesia was home to the largest non-ruling communist party in the world, and the country’s left-nationalist President Sukarno was a…
Over the past decade or so, Indian popular history publishing has seen a welcome trend. After a run of strong biographies on the great Mughal emperors, writers have begun to explore the lives of secondary figures, from the formidable empress Nur Jahan and the powerful princess Jahanara to the philosopher-prince Dara Shukoh and the chronicler-princess…
Not as well-known as the classic poets of the Tang era, Xie Lingyun (385-433) stands at a turning point in Chinese literature. The long-ruling Han dynasty had a conservative view of culture. Scholars of that dynasty cultivated old fashioned poetic forms and adhered to a tradition-bound Confucian ethic. With the downfall of the Han and…
If, as is commonly supposed, Sanskrit is the mother of a multitude of Indian languages (first the prakrits whence emerged modern Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali) who—or what—then was the father? In her recent book Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia, renowned linguist Peggy Mohan offers a narrative in…
In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been…
Wars are always replete with tragedies, and the World War II Battle of Manila, fought between 3 February and 3 March 1945, is one of history’s greatest tragedies. An entire city was destroyed, millions of people were made homeless, and more than 100,000 civilians were killed as Allied forces liberated the Philippine capital from Japanese…
Silk Mirage is veteran Central Asia correspondent Joanna Lillis’s compelling and deeply reported account of a nation in flux—one emerging from decades of suffocating authoritarianism yet still struggling to define what freedom means. The book centres on the turbulent period following the 2016 death of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet president and one of the…
When we think of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, it is first and foremost the excesses of the British East India Company and the pomp of the Raj that come to mind. The legacies of Vasco da Gama and the Estado da India might be added as an afterthought. Outside the small circle of specialists,…
The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, never one to shrink from a challenge, visited Gobustan in Azerbaijan for two decades to prove his theory that the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians left behind the mysterious rock carvings near Baku. Uncanny similarities between petroglyphs showing the long, oared boats of Caspian seafarers and those of the Vikings, and…
Dahlia Abraham-Klein’s grandfather Haim Abraham lived to 102. She was fortunate to have gotten to know him when she was younger, but it wasn’t until Haim passed away in 1999 that Abraham-Klein learned more about his life thanks to a journal he had left behind. This journal chronicled not just Haim’s life but that of…
In Silk Roads, food writer Anna Ansari connects areas and cuisines not typically associated in English-language cookbooks, traveling from Beijing, to Baku in Azerbaijan. The closest author/chronicler would perhaps be Paula Wolfert, who is known for her Mediterranean cookbooks spanning France, Morocco, and the “eastern Mediterranean” to include Turkey. Ansari’s food memories originate from her…