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Vikramdeep Johal One of Asia’s youngest nations, Bangladesh had a blood-soaked birth in 1971. A genocide by the Pakistani military claimed an estimated 30 lakh lives and displaced crores of people; lakhs of women were reportedly raped. It took a...

Debashish Mukerji Rupa & Co is a book distribution and publishing pioneer which — almost alone among such pioneers, at least in the English language — has successfully adjusted to the enormous changes the industry has undergone across the decades...

China Betrays Again by Maj Gen (Dr) Ashok Kumar (Retd). Sabre & Quill. Pages 283. Rs 1,295 This book is a compilation of more than 50 articles written by the author on China from time to time. He casts a...

This isn’t an attempt to capture a city in a book. Instead, editors Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto have simply compiled a list of stories they have read on Mumbai and loved. And it turns out to be a rich...

Rekha Chowdhary The first volume of Harbans Singh’s trilogy on the modern history of Jammu and Kashmir focused on the troubled years of Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh. The second volume is focused on his son Karan Singh. Appointed as the...

Manisha Gangahar Neither vehemently rebellious nor highly censorious, but subtly feminist, the novels of Manju Kapur contour women’s mindscapes as they navigate through their very ordinary, at times even mundane, existence. ‘The Gallery’ is yet another novel in the line...

Salil Misra The history of Bengal as a region has had some very distinctive features. Islam entered Bengal as early as in the 13th century. Vaishnavism developed as a dominant strand here since the 15th century. The British rule was...

Sunbirds in the Morning, Grey Hornbills at Duskby Bulbul Sharma.Speaking Tiger.Pages 179. Rs 399 Delhi, says author Bulbul Sharma, is the only capital in the world where, right in the middle of a traffic jam, you can see a handsome...

Rajiv Dogra The first known leap, though mythical, at ‘swallowing the sun’ was made by baby Hanuman. He had mistaken the sun for a fruit, but his audacious flight was cut short by the God Indra. Lakshmi Puri’s allegorical leap...

Aradhika Sharma Narayana Murthy, who was usually conservatively dressed and mild-mannered, decided to wear a red shirt, a symbol of communism, when he went to meet Sudha’s father for the first time. He responded defiantly to Dr Kulkarni’s question about...

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi Prakruti was in her mid-80s when Arun Ezhuthachan met the former Devadasi in Puri, Odisha. Till half-a-decade earlier, her job was to put her husband to sleep. By that she meant dancing before the deity at the Jagannath...

Pradip Phanjoubam Drawing largely from interviews with former as well as active functionaries of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), Rajeev Bhattacharyya’s ‘ULFA: The Mirage of Dawn’ is a virtual autobiography of the secessionist organisation told through someone who...

Narayan Gangaram Surve was brought up by mill workers but left to fend for himself once again at the age of 12 in the chawls of Mumbai. He eventually became a teacher and a celebrated revolutionary poet, with an abiding...

Shelley Walia “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one” — John Berger Ever since the Nakba in 1948, which, in the words of Pierra Nora (1996), “has become the key Palestinian site...

The late Hazara Singh Cheema started working on this novel in 1927 as a law student and finished it a decade later. Busy in his legal practice, he could not publish it. He thought he had lost the manuscript when...

Sandeep Sinha Tarlochan Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India in 2021. It was in recognition of his contribution to public life, through service not just to his community but to the nation as such. Public...

KP Nayar S Jaishankar’S new book, ‘Why Bharat Matters’, is a four-dimensional work on the evolution of India’s foreign policy in the last decade. One dimension of the book constitutes an unemotional, dispassionate picture of the world today, a neutral...

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its DiasporasEdited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, Shash Trevett.Penguin Random House.Pages 424. Rs 599 The first-ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry written after the country...

M Rajivlochan This interesting book documents the efforts by Sheikh Abdullah to use Muslim separatism for crafting a kingdom for himself and his failure to do so in the face of pushback from Indian leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira...

Parbina Rashid It starts with a simple question: ‘Ami kun (Who are we)?’ It brings on more questions. ‘Who am I when I say I am Assamese?’ True, identity consciousness has been a salient feature of the Assamese society. After...

Purushottam Agrawal The volume under review contains some unpublished essays and travelogues by Dr Karan Singh, a respected scholarly proponent of Hinduism. Even though he does not directly respond to “some highly unfortunate and derogatory comments made recently about Sanatana...

Sarika Sharma After his victory over Humayun, Sher Shah Suri planted the chausa variety in celebration. Mango flowers are used for worshipping Goddess Saraswati. Legend has it that the god of love, Manmadan, used mango flowers as arrows to...

Sandeep Dikshit Though a memoir by a development economist and social scientist, the book’s title may not prompt impulsive, off-the-shelf purchase. It would be better to tabulate what the book is not about. As Pranab Bardhan says, ‘Charaiveti’ is...

Aunindyo Chakravarty ThiS is a book full of data, and there’s always a danger that such a book might get mired in technical jargon, graphs, and percentages. Swati Narayan skillfully avoids that trap. She tells us a story through...

Salil Misra In its long history, India has always attracted a large number of outsiders, not just rulers and conquerors, but also traders and travellers. Some of them left important accounts of Indian society and polity. It all started...