Gazing Eastwards by Romila Thapar
THE START OF THE RETURN JOURNEY VIA YUMEN We are journeying back. I am sitting in a hotel room in Yumen, drinking cup after cup of jasmine tea….
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THE START OF THE RETURN JOURNEY VIA YUMEN We are journeying back. I am sitting in a hotel room in Yumen, drinking cup after cup of jasmine tea….
Read MoreThey had come to Amritsar from Lahore after seven-and-a-half years. Attending the hockey match was an excuse, they were more interested in seeing those houses and bazaars that had become…
Read MoreOF CASTE AND AMBEDKAR Perhaps no one was personally closer to Gandhi than his English friend Charlie Andrews, whom he first met in South Africa in 1912. In August 1942,…
Read MoreAt first sight, Palanpur is as dull a place as its name suggests. I’m not talking of the hill station called Palampur in Himachal Pradesh, or of the headquarters of…
Read MoreThe Colonial Indian Self-image An ancient civilization with amazing wealth of philosophical, literary and scientific treatises and unparalleled continuity of ‘the life of the mind’, India nonetheless was not at…
Read MoreThree days before India played England at Lord’s in the first of the four Test series in July 2011 a dinner was held in honour of Mahendra Singh Dhoni at…
Read MoreWhen the Buddha was eighty years old and knew he wasn’t going to live much longer, he offered the practice of the ‘island of self ’ to his students. He…
Read MoreWhen we suffer, we tend to think that suffering is all there is at that moment, and happiness belongs to some other time or place. People often ask, ‘Why do…
Read MoreAt an interaction with students at a university near Delhi, in the winter of 2015, I asked the audience what the year 1991 meant to them. A young man replied…
Read MoreOn the evening of 6 August 1947, with the partition of the subcontinent looming, a party to bid farewell to officers assigned to the Pakistan Army was in full swing…
Read MoreThis treaty of 1842 settled the boundary between Ladakh and Tibet in unequivocal terms leaving no cause for any kind of border dispute in this region. * Arguments and counter-arguments…
Read MoreWhat Next? If we seek with trepidation to avoid the pitfalls of history, the key questions we must ask are: how do global governance frameworks that were shaped in the…
Read MoreRanjit Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab* by Khushwant Singh *Ranjit Singh, the greatest monarch of the Sikhs, was born in 1780 and died in 1839. This extract is taken from…
Read MoreTREE TIME At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras. Then it had to do with the spectre of violence….
Read MoreBut oft some shining April morn Is darkened in an hour, And blackest griefs o’er joyous home, Alas! unseen may lower. —Rev. J. H. Gurney ‘Rebati! Rebi! You fire that…
Read MoreFor some Dalits, Ambedkar is an actual prophet who changed the course of their history and future. But despite his outstanding political career and invaluable contribution to Dalit rights, Ambedkar’s…
Read MoreTHE MEMORY–KEEPERS ‘Write down whatever you know of the doings of (Babur) and (Humayun)’. This ordinary phrase sounded innocuous enough and gave no indication of the seismic rumble it actually…
Read MoreThe House of the Ghoshals The river lay ahead. A blue current. A densely-wooded hill sloped upwards on the left. A boy of thirteen or fourteen lay on the ground,…
Read MoreAs a rule, the last speaker of a language no longer uses it. Ethnographers show up at the door with digital recorders, ready to archive every declension, each instance of…
Read MorePATALIPUTRA I would not have turned to writing if I was able to draw. When I was thirteen or fourteen, and attending school in Patna, I had not yet given…
Read MorePOSTOMONI, THE OPIUM GIRL There was a rishi who lived alone by the Ganga. His only companion was a mouse that he had found in his palm-tree hut and had…
Read MoreBUSINESS AND POLITICS: THE LAY OF THE LAND ‘And that we keep an Extraordinary lookout…’ The eighteenth century, when the nawabs of Bengal and John Company came into their own,…
Read More‘Someone turned on a tap’ Dear Angel Ears, Outside the window, a Marathi manus is asking mournfully if anyone would like to buy salt. Or at least that’s what I…
Read MoreI Angela was killed in front of her children. Her husband was the killer. He thrust the knife deep into her fair-skinned, well-rounded belly again and again. She writhed like…
Read MoreA HORSE AND TWO GOATS R. K. NARAYAN Of the seven hundred thousand villages dotting the map of India, in which the majority of India’s five hundred million live, flourish,…
Read MoreTHE SHROUD by Munshi Premchand Outside the hut, father and son sat in silence in front of the firepit already gone cold. Inside, Budhya, the son’s young wife, kept thrashing…
Read MoreTIPU (1750–1799) Shorter than his father, darker in the skin and possessing larger eyes, Tipu wore (Wilks informs us) ‘a plain unencumbered attire, which he equally exacted from those around…
Read MoreONE For months, the front pages had warned of imminent doom. Bombay was reeling under an explosion of ‘pollution, crowds and noise’, noted one pessimist. Predicted another, ‘The urban landscape…
Read MoreMy grandmother, like everybody’s grandmother, was an old woman. She had been old and wrinkled for the twenty years that I had known her. People said that she had once…
Read MoreJacintha was angry with the world for making her what she had become. In particular, it was a few individuals she held responsible. Sons of whores, daughters of bitches, may…
Read MoreBeing a ‘Woman Director’ Up until a few years ago, the label of being a ‘woman director’ used to upset me. When asked, “How is it to be a woman…
Read MoreKnowledge as Heritage It is repeatedly said that education is critical to the making of a civilization. In its different forms through the centuries it has been and is…
Read MoreIntroduction Once upon a time there was a boy called Shravan-kumar who travelled with a bamboo sling on his shoulders. On either side of this sling were two baskets….
Read MoreChapter 1 1.1 ‘You too will marry a boy I choose,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great…
Read MoreBlood-red, the fallen blossoms lay on the snow, even more striking when laid bare. On the trees they blended with the foliage. On the ground, on those patches of recent…
Read MoreAfter a long crawl, through a narrow cave, in the hills of Jammu, you finally arrive at Vaishnodevi, embodied as three outcroppings of rock, draped with red cloth with gold…
Read MoreTHE LOOTING OF INDIA Durant’s outrage – the conquest of India by a corporation – the East India Company – the deindustrialization of India – destruction of Indian textiles…
Read MoreIt’s been many years since Sher Singh, of village Solti, came to my rescue. At the time I was living right at the top of the Landour hill, in a…
Read MoreIn the summer of 2009, I trekked to the Gangotri glacier, the rapidly melting source of the Bhagirathi—one of the two glacial streams that join to form the Ganga….
Read MoreMany decades ago, back in 1948, when Gandhi was killed by an assassin’s bullets, the world responded with shock, grief and tribute. Today, seventy years later, he continues to be…
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There is a vast cultural movement emerging from the Global South and sweeping all before it. India’s Shah Rukh Khan, after all, is the most popular actor in the…
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7 August 2019 India is battling an educational crisis of unprecedented proportions. Half of the country’s Standard 5 students cannot read a Standard 2 level text in their native language….
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Walking the Roadless Road: Exploring the Tribes of Nagaland is a comprehensive history of the Naga tribes who live within the borders of Nagaland. Starting with an overview of migration…
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