Some myths take longer to die than others. For students of equine history, the passion that these animals inspire in their owners and breeders often act as a veil, impenetrable for scientists and historians trying to get to the facts. In Horses, Ludovic Orlando, who has been gathering the facts jaw bone by jaw bone for two decades, deploying the latest technology, appears to have pierced the veil, finally, though with many a surprising turn to keep the readers on edge, as though enjoying a detective novel.
This new collection with an unbeatably eye-catching title opens with the eponymous novella. “Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers” takes more than a few (albeit short) chapters to get to the heart of the story: the red-light district in Kashi (also referred to as Varanasi or Banaras in the novella) is slated to be shut down to make way for new construction. This wasn’t the first time the city had tried to drive out women and girls.
Although no longer as true as it was, East Asian trade in the early-modern period is often presented from the perspective of one more Western nation or another: the Spain’s Manila Galleon trade, the Portuguese spice trade and unique base in Macau, the Dutch East India Company, and latterly, the British via Canton and Hong Kong.
While war is a perennial subject for historians, stories of friendships and exchanges, especially when set aside in the dustier corners of contemporary memory, make equally memorable material for history. A case study is the story of India and Egypt, the subject of East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars in which Erin MB O’Halloran recounts the relationship between the leaders and movements of the two countries between 1919 and 1939, a particularly interesting period that witnessed events such as the abolition of the Caliphate, the Abyssinian crisis, and the partition of Palestine.
At a demolition site in modern-day Osaka, workers unearth an old air raid shelter, sealed for decades. Inside, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, The Tragedy of the Funatomi by Yu Aoi, and other classic mystery novels are wrapped in a faded cloth, embroidered with “House of Omari” and the merchant’s long-forgotten temari-ball logo. Once the glamorous face of the cosmetics industry, the Omari family saw their fortunes decline with the onset of the second world war—and then the murders begin.
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple.
On a recent warm evening in August, I settled into the lush gardens of the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud, in Bali’s hill country, for screenings of two remarkable films: “Island of Demons” from 1933 and “Headhunters of Borneo” from 1936. Directed by Friedrich Dalsheim with Victor Baron von Plessen and, for the first, Walter Spies, these works capture Bali and Borneo under Dutch colonial rule, a decade before Indonesia’s independence in 1945.
“Untranslatable”, concluded the erudite, 17th-century Jesuit missionaries, referring to the glorious corpus of Chinese poetry. While they acknowledged that poetry played an outsized role in Chinese civilization, they limited their translations to histories and scientific texts. They knew of but didn’t try to tackle the Book of Songs or the Tang dynasty anthologies. We can explain their reluctance by recalling that in their era, Latin and Italian poetic forms shaped their tastes just as strictly as ancient Chinese forms limited that of their hosts. They could not translate Chinese poetry into Petrarchan sonnets or Horacian odes, so they didn’t.
After learning of his wife’s affair with his best friend and business partner, divorced and unemployed MindTech entrepreneur Dr Harry Coulson arrives in the idyllic English town of Freebourne, looking to start a new life. But any hopes of quietly picking up the pieces of his broken world are shattered when he steps off the train to discover the body of a young woman lying in the snow. It’s almost as if she’d been left there for him to find.
The Louvre Museum’s recent major exhibition on the Mamluk Sultanate explores the dynasty’s rich legacy in terms of the art and architecture of Egypt and Syria. The exhibition—a first for Europe—comes more than forty years after a touring exhibition in the United States curated by Dr Esin Atil. “Mamluks (1250-1517)” brings together 260 works from the Louvre’s own collections, alongside national and international loans.
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