They 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 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 MoreAt the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, India won her independence from the British empire and a nation was born.Over the past seventy-three years, our country has struggled…
Read MorePremchand (Dhanpat Rai Srivastav, 1880-1936) was one of India’s greatest writers. He wrote in Hindi and published over a dozen novels and nearly 300 short stories.
Read MoreDuring bewildering times such as the present, the divide between fiction and reality is increasingly blurry and we turn to stories to make sense of our predicament. With our brand-new…
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 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 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 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 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 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 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…
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Guru Nanak, the first of the ten Sikh Gurus, was a sixteenth-century reformer and the founder of Sikhism. He challenged ritualism and shows of piety and attacked the citadels…
Read MoreWhat do your reader friends expect on Diwali (or any other occasion or no occasion actually)?
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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…
Read MoreOne of the meanings of the word ‘olio’ is ‘a miscellany’. The books in the Aleph Olio series contain a mélange of the finest writing to be had on a variety…
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