Category Archives: History

Why Gandhi Still Matters: An Appraisal of the Mahatma’s Legacy

OF 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 More

Many Indians have not been told who the architect of India’s economic reforms really was

At 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 More

Blanks on the Map – An Excerpt from Shiv Kunal Verma’s ‘1962: The War that Wasn’t’

This 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 More

‘The Book of Indian Kings’ – Olio Series

Ranjit 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 More

‘Akbar’ by Ira Mukhoty

THE 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 More

‘Plassey: The Battle that Changed the Course of Indian History’ by Sudeep Chakravarti

BUSINESS 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

‘Modern South India’ by Rajmohan Gandhi

TIPU (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 More

‘Indian Cultures as Heritage’ by Romila Thapar

Knowledge 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 More

‘An Era of Darkness’ by Shashi Tharoor

  THE 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 More

WHY GANDHI STILL MATTERS

Many 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…

Read More

The Legacy of Gandhi

The year 2019 marks the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. Whether or not you agree with all his views and whether you hail him as a mahatma or not, his…

Read More

This Unquiet Land: The Cost Of War

The Kargil conflict had exposed a woeful moment of under-preparedness—both in the intrusions going undetected for as long as they did and the damage that years of neglect and miles…

Read More