In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process…
Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other…
You come across them in used book stores, with their fading, cloth covers, their saccharine prose, with black and white photos of palaces and tennis courts. These are the memoirs of princesses from the house of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, of Zog of Albania, or the Dogras of Kashmir. It’s easy to forget that behind…
Best-known for her award-winning novels, Anuradha Roy’s first work of non-fiction Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, is a well-written book that goes beyond the boundaries of memoir and travelogue to examine the shifting life of a Himalayan valley through both anthropological and social lenses. The author and her partner retreat from…
Awarded Japan’s Yomiuri Prize for Literature, The Summer House is Masashi Matsuie’s debut novel. Also published as Summer at Mount Asama, the 2012 work reaches English readers through Margaret Mitsutani’s expert translation. Matsuie constructs the story just as his character Sensei, architect Shunsuke Murai designs buildings: with deceptive ease, creating spaces that beckon people to…
Indian epics seem to have an endless supply of characters for those who wish to retell the narrative from different angles. In Bhima’s Wife, Kavita Kané keeps Hidimbi at the centre to show the Great War unfolding that brings death and destruction to everyone.
Studio Ghibli’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies has been described as the greatest film someone will only watch once. Deeply emotional, director Isao Takahata’s tale of two Japanese war orphans struggling and failing to survive in the closing days of World War II is almost too painful to bear. But the story isn’t Takahata’s—Grave…
Ringed by a snow-coated massif, the Dal Lake shimmers under the bright sun as the shikara canoes skim over its iridescent waters: this snapshot of Srinagar is almost ubiquitous on the Internet. Millions of vacationers who visit this place every year to unwind probably imagine this city as little more than a summer retreat.
The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38 has long been a shadowy footnote in Japanese history: an uprising of poor farmers and hidden Christians, crushed with such ferocity that 37,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered at Hara Castle. In most textbooks it garners a brief mention, a prelude to the closing of Japan, when the Tokugawa…
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…
In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a…
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…
I was born in Bombay and lived there, not far from the Gateway of India, for the first sixteen years of my life. I left the city by the bay soon after turning sixteen. When I returned decades later, I barely recognised it. The city and I had both gone through dramatic changes in the…