In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East…
Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave, should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so….
India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that…
Anita Agnihotri’s newest novel, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, traces the trajectory of salt from its use as a symbol of resistance against the British Empire in the 1930s to the exploitation of salt farmers in modern-day India. Spanning generations and juggling various points of view, A Touch of Salt is an ambitious novel…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a…
Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions….
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War…