It’s the early 2000s in Bombay. The air is damp, the streets are crowded, and hedonism abounds. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, published long after the Betty Trask-winning A Speck of Coal Dust. It’s a propulsive, character-focused study of the growth of Indian liberalism that unwittingly sets a middle-aged woman, Maya, down a…
Sikhism, born in India, about six centuries ago, is not a religion that has travelled far and wide the way Buddhism did in ancient times, and Hinduism continues to do even today through concepts of yoga, karma and so on. As the Sikh diaspora in the West struggles with its identity in contemporary times, there…
“Where does one begin unravelling the history of India and its peoples,” asks Alan Machado (Prabhu) in the first paragraph of his new book Discovering India Anew. At the beginning, he says.
There is much about the way international relations is framed—from the so-called rules-based order to the nation-state itself—that has its origins in the Western history, philosophy and experience. It stands to reason that the traditional view might not map very well onto two non-Western countries an order of magnitude larger than almost any other in…
Through the concept of “Romantic nationalism”, this interdisciplinary global historical study investigates cultural initiatives in (British) India that aimed at establishing the nation as a moral community and which preceded or accompanied state-oriented political nationalism. Drawing on a vast array of sources, it discusses important Romantic nationalist traits, such as the relationship between language and…
This volume is a comprehensive and critical introduction to Subaltern Studies. It offers a detailed discussion of all major perspectives of the Subaltern Studies Collective and a panoramic view of the twelve volumes published by the Collective.
Part memoir, part documentary, and part travel reportage (in no clear proportion), publisher and bookseller Akshaya Bahibala’s debut book Bhang Journeys tells tales of malady and well-being, all tied to the same source: cannabis.
Vikramjit Ram’s novella Mansur re-imagines life amongst artists working in the imperial atelier of Mughal India. The emperor Jahangir had a deep interest in flora and fauna and dispatched agents far and wide to acquire exotic creatures that may delight him. It was the imperial painter, Mansur who was credited with capturing the sensitivity of…
In the 1920s, amidst the upheaval of the Indian national movement, Mohandas K. Gandhi and the prominent Indian nationalist and feminist, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, communicated with each other for over a year via letters that were both politically charged and personally insightful.
Long unavailable, Rohit Manchanda’s newly reissued A Speck of Coal Dust won the Betty Trask Award when it was first published (under a different titles) a generation ago. It takes place in the kingdom of childhood, not however to be confused with that of innocence. In this world, everything can be—and is meant to be—explored…
“Historians are stuck with the evidence, novelists can describe what actually happened,” says the French writer, Jean-Félix de la Ville Beaugé. In Firestorm in Paradise, historian Rana Safvi switches roles from the constraints of the former to the imagination of the latter. In her history of Mughal Delhi, Shahjahanabad, published in 2019, she meticulously retraces…
Almost a hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published an Hercule Poirot mystery, Death in the Air, which takes place on a flight from Paris to London. It may not be her most famous, but debut author Ram Murali has recycled the title for his whodunnit set mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh—where…
Running and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern India before rapidly declining in the 18th century. But how did the Mughals get their money? Often, it was through wealthy merchants, like the Jhaveri family, who willingly—and then not-so-willingly–funded the empire’s activities.
Where does one begin to tell a story that spans many thousands of years, a story whose origins are obscured by stubborn mists that will not lift and enduring myths that will not shift under the weight of ages of telling Discovering India Anew reconstructs the history of Indian peoples, taking off from where the…
If India is a woman’s body, her arms outstretched to hold her billion babies, Kashmir is the unruly forelock above her right temple. Or at least, that’s what I thought as a child, when my Nanaji took out his historical maps, pre-Partition and post- , to show me how we had been carved up. Since…