India has inspired William Dalrymple for well-on thirty years, resulting in a number of eminently readable books, including White Mughals—an analysis of east-west inter-cultural conflicts), Return of a King (a portrait of military disaster); and The Anarchy, an exposé of colonial exploitation. In his latest book, The Golden Road, Dalrymple for the first time tackles a big, civilizational theme: what world history owes to the subcontinent.
India
From Pashas to Pokemon (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024), Maaria Sayed’s first novel, is a coming-of-age story. Aisha grows up in the Muhammad Ali Road neighborhood of Mumbai in the ’90s—a time when India was starting to grapple with liberalization, globalization, and polarization. In Mumbai and London, Aisha tries to learn what it means to grow up, as an Indian, a daughter, a woman, and a Muslim.
The Partition of India has inspired cinema, some of which has reached audiences outside South Asia, especially when produced or directed by the Indian diaspora: for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (based on the Booker winner by Salman Rushdie) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House. However, there are more films that draw from partition as setting, theme, entertainment and history in art as well as commercial traditions of film-making in India, and to an extent, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of the individual films in this substantial body of work have been brought together by John W Hood in Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India. By Hood’s own admission, the book is not an exercise in film criticism but a way of exploring the use of Partition, “a gold mine of stories for filmmakers”, as an idea and as a theme.
Among the epic and stories of great battle, the Mahabharata has certain sections where smaller stories and myths exist to illustrate the larger point about origins of something or explain why things are the way they are. Some characters might seem familiar from other myths or the fables bring to mind other fable texts such as the Panchatantra or the Jataka Tales. Outside of the specialists who read and research the epic, no one has probably heard of them. In her latest book The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales from the Mahabharata, Wendy Doniger brings together stories from the relatively unexplored sections in which the dying Bhishma responds to questions from Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas. The stories Bhishma narrates relate to esoteric things such as tigers, jackals, dogs, sages (and their wives and disciples).
It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and center in his new book The Battle for the Soul of Islam.
Indian literature has tended to mythologize Delhi as a majestic and contentious land, filled with the rebellious fervor of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and the soul of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi. Prayaag Akbar’s newest novel, Mother India, revitalizes the city by placing it at the centre of contemporary issues, namely the growing use of social media to polarize society.
After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse—not oil—has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neighbors. Persia, India and China all burned cash trying to sustain their own herds of horses–-with little success.