Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest?
A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those same train tracks are Nana’s first childhood memory, a memory that forms how she views her birth mother, her foster father, and her own sense of self. Now an award-winning playwright in Paris, Nana receives an invitation to Seoul from an amateur filmmaker, who proposes a documentary on her adoption, a film that will revisit the fragmented scenes of her past.
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.
Author and journalist Fatima Bhutto reflects on how caring for her pet dog shed light on her own relationships in this tender and insightful memoir of a doomed love affair.
Intrinsic (Book 1 of The Intrinsic Trilogy) is a provocative (young adult) coming-of-age political saga that explores the fine line between dynasty and destiny.
The Myanmar-China border stretches for over 2,000 kilometres between China’s Yunnan Province and Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan States. The border has long been a site of migration, trade and cultural exchange, and became a particularly significant area of escape during periods of political and economic hardship. The impact of this border on individual lives is the focus of Wen-Chin Chang’s new book, Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants during the Cold War.
Can grammar function like a machine? Can a set of mechanical procedures, or rules, generate perfectly correct sentences in a given language? This is a question that preoccupies linguists, but not language users. It is natural to assume that language is too sloppy, too idiosyncratic, too human, in the end, to be generated by a machine. When we studied English grammar, we learned there was an exception to every rule. But in India, scholars uphold one monumental grammar as a model of perfect, generative power: that of Panini, who lived in the 4th century BCE. His 4,000 rules in verse are supposed to generate all the required forms of Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian civilization.
What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so politicized? In the new book Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present (India Allen Lane, 2025), Namit Arora and Romila Thapar discuss some of the challenges facing historians in India today, what it means to be an academic historian, and how ideas around gender, caste and religion may be getting distorted in India’s public history.
Keith Dalton was a journalist with foreign correspondent dreams. He had them as a 10-year-old. They never went away. Dalton was 25 when he crammed a typewriter in his backpack and set off from Australia to Southeast Asia, convinced he could be a self-made foreign correspondent. Writing as he went, Dalton took buses, trucks, trains, planes, passenger ferries, cargo ships, and canoes.
Jainism, an older contemporary of Buddhism, is rooted in the ideals of austerity. While Buddhism spread outside India, very little is known about Jainism worldwide. Similarly, in terms of art, it is subsumed within the larger Hindu and Buddhist traditions of rock-cut architecture. In terms of painting, the Kalpasutra and Uttaradhyaynasutra are two texts thought to date from at least 2000 years ago, have traditionally come with illustrations. However, beyond these examples, post-medieval Jain art has largely remained off the popular and scholarly radar. A recent set of essays looks at the ways in which this tradition developed new expressions.
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