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).
The island of Sri Lanka resembles a teardrop, also the title of Sue Amos’s latest novel, set in 1953 when the country was still called Ceylon. Teardrop is a murder mystery that weaves in both folklore and the beauty of the island.
Electrification is likely not the first thing that comes to mind when reflecting, as it were, on Hong Kong. But in Let There Be Light, a history of China Light & Power (CLP), Mark Clifford convincingly makes the case for the centrality of electricity in the Hong Kong story. Electricity not only made Hong Kong’s success possible, but it also serves as an illuminating prism through which to look at and rethink much conventional wisdom about Hong Kong. Intertwined with this narrative of political and economic development is the larger-than-life persona of Lawrence Kadoorie, who headed CLP for five decades.
The Mesopotamian high priestess Enheduana lived over 4,000 years ago, but her words ring down to the present: “I am Enheduana.”
Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China.
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.
Museums are not having the best press at the moment. In addition to long-running disputes over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and Benin Bronzes, there have a been a recent spate of “returns” of items deemed to have been looted or stolen, ranging from a 2700-year-old gold and carnelian necklace in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from Turkey to a bevy of Khmer sculptures that had pride of place at such leading museums as the Metropolitan Cleveland Museum of Art. Although Justin M Jacobs’s recent Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (with a telling question mark) deals with controversies regarding acquisitions of a more historical vintage, it is hard not to draw a line between them and these more recent developments.
Now merely one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups in the People’s Republic of China, for almost a millennium the Uyghurs were among Central Asia’s most dominant political, economic and cultural forces.
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.
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