A new book and exhibition on the controversial ruler separate the monarch from the myth ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. A few years ago, Delhi Art Gallery acquired a seminal work, “The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultan”, painted in England after the death in 1799 of the Tiger of …
Aanchal Malhotra examines how the subcontinent remembers Partition ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. In this monumental archive of Partition, Aanchal Malhotra turns from recounting the history of that rupture through objects and material memory, as she did in her previous book Remnants of a Separation, to reflecting on “the inheritance of …
Anuradha Kumar’s book about early South Asian immigration to America is as compelling as her subjects ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. Identity and immigration history, race, revolution and Hollywood come together in this fascinating book, which grew out of a series author Anuradha Kumar wrote on early South Asians in America …
One Man, Many Lives: Bhagwan Singh and the Early South Asians in America Read More »
In Indranee Ghosh’s memoir, food becomes a metaphor for inclusion ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. In the introduction to her food memoir “placed in the east of India”, Indranee Ghosh astutely notes that when everything else has changed “what we as a family have not lost is the food we ateperhaps the only …
Irwin Allan Sealy’s Trotter-Nama comes alive for the third time. ♦ Originally published in India Today. It’s hard to imagine that the author of a book as gargantuan, complex and exuberant as The Trotter-Nama ever suffered such a crisis of faith in his creation — which had been out of print for an extended period — that …
William Dalrymple discusses his new book on the rise of the East India Company ♦ Originally published in Mumbai Mirror. “At the dawn of the nineteenth century all seemed dark; the stars were paling, and it was not by any means plain what the day was likely to be,” wrote orientalist historian HG Keene in …
From feuding queens to rebel sultans, the dead are alive in Manu Pillai’s books. ♦ Originally published on VICE India. When Manu S. Pillai (“the S is important”) and I sat down to talk, gossip was at the top of the table. We were at a mutual friend’s apartment, our chat getting progressively boozy as …
The Arabian peninsula’s maritime history comes alive in Oman. ♦ In 1979, British adventurer and maritime explorer Tim Severin wandered the west coast of India, the country of his birth, looking for rope. Severin had already voyaged across the Atlantic in an open boat, approximating the journey of a sixth-century monk. Now he wanted to …
A Conversation With: Literary Critic and Novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi ♦ India’s literary establishment is abuzz about the recently published novel “The Mirror of Beauty,” a 984-page fictional account about the life and times of Wazir Khanam, the mother of the famed Urdu poet Daag Dehalvi, set mostly in Delhi and its environs during the …
William Dalrymple on researching Return of a King, his history of the First Afghan War ♦ In Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, William Dalrymple’s third book set during the decline of Mughal rule, the Scottish historian and adoptive Dilliwala chronicles the first British military foray into the land of Khurasan, between 1839 and …