Chetan Bhagat occupies a distinct and highly influential space in contemporary Indian letters in English. While his previous work 11 Rules for Life nudged Bhagat into self-help, 12 Years reverts to his signature formula—romantic disillusionment as middle-class catharsis. His phenomenal commercial success from his 2005 debut novel Five Point Someone to this latest, eleventh work…
Arundhati Roy’s much-awaited memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, tackles Roy’s writing career, India’s sweeping political instability, and most of all, a reckoning with an exhilarating character: her mother, Mary Roy. From Roy’s village, fictionalised even here as “Ayemenem”, to the chaotic urban sprawl of Delhi, the book covers Roy’s rocky childhood, her brief architectural…
Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued…
Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on…
Tipu Sultan, known as the “Tiger of Mysore”, ruled the southern Indian kingdom of Mysore from 1782 to 1799. Born in 1750 to Haidar Ali, a military leader who gained power through strategic alliances, Tipu inherited a strong state during colonial upheaval. He led Mysore to prominence, fighting the British East India Company in the…
Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of…
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations, rather than colonies subject to the control of London. Sometimes, these thinkers found refuge and common cause in others elsewhere in the Empire—such as between India and Egypt, as Erin…
Through the meddling of her older sister, Janavi, a young woman from Varanasi, India, a city on the Ganges, stumbles into an arranged marriage with Sagar. Sagar is a hydraulic engineer about to emigrate to Custer County, Montana (the “Indian Country” of the title of Shobha Rao’s new novel); he has been hired to remove…
In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcutta. These were the Young Bengal, the proteges of Henry Derozio of Hindu College. These thinkers, according to Rosinka Chaudhuri, were India’s first radicals, trying to reshape Indian politics as it came…
“All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center.” These exquisite personal essays trace the orbit of Pakistani-American author Samina Najmi as she reflects on events, people, and places that shape her traditional childhood in Pakistan and continue to inspire her as she pursues her dreams of education and travel, enlarging…
Harini Nagendra brings the vibrancy of 1920s India to life in the “Bangalore Detectives Club” series, tightly-plotted mysteries interweaving themes of colonialism, women’s empowerment and the environment. In the latest, Into the Leopard’s Den, her fearless sleuth Kaveri Murthy—now pregnant with her first child—travels to the verdant forests and sprawling coffee plantations of Coorg to…
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…
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…
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.
Cities and villages are not binaries but exist on a continuum. In Reformatting Agrarian Pasts: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India, urban historian William J Glover traces the events and infrastructure projects that intertwine rural and urban spaces through specific administrative policies formulated and implemented by the British government. For Glover, the importance…