Nehru’s Bandung by Andrea Benvenuti. Speaking Tiger. Pages 384. Rs 750 Drawing on Indian, western and Chinese archival sources, ‘Nehru’s Bandung’ sheds light on a neglected aspect of India’s Cold War diplomacy. It starts with the role of Prime Minister...
Popular interest in Delhi’s rich historical remains continues to grow, leading to a lively market for books on monuments and their histories. Not surprisingly, this has led to a steady stream of such publications over the last few years. The...
Memories, heart-wrenching and happy, of the dead and of the living, of the mundane and the sublime, criss-cross Neha Bansal’s latest bunch of poems, ‘Six of Cups’. Like travellers traversing familiar terrain, the readers recognise the places she takes us...
‘Missy’ presents the convoluted reality of a migrant, whose every struggle is not merely a challenge, but a formative experience that contributes to a richer but complex, multifaceted new identity — it is a story of her ‘being’ and ‘becoming’....
She picked the skull nearest her and held it up like Hamlet. “Logic and reason don’t belong to any particular group of people either,” she said out aloud. ‘Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve’ by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago...
For two years, Saurabh Mukherjea and Nandita Rajhansa criss-crossed the country and interviewed over 50 leading minds in business, policymaking, media and academia. The result is this book, which portrays how 1.5 billion Indians are creating a range of unprecedented...
Stephen Alter is no newcomer to nature, wildlife and mountains of India as a writer, but this is a tour de force by any stretch. While much of wildlife writing is focused on the mega fauna, such as the tiger,...
Blending fiction, non-fiction and verse, ‘Our Stories, Our Struggle’ celebrates women’s resilience and their capacity to transcend victimhood. It amplifies voices of women across South Asia — from India to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka — and challenges deep-rooted...
Manto’s writing has a conspicuous unfinishedness, as if he was reluctant to clean up after the act. The images have an unassimilated excess, a kind of subconscious overspill. Perhaps it is a sign of cultivated negligence, maybe a trace of...
The master storyteller that he is, Dalrymple is able to fit together pieces of a vast puzzle and create a wonderful narrative
All empires in human history have been formed and sustained by conquest, violence and bloodshed. They can survive only by expansion. After some time, the same expansion becomes a liability for the empire and a catalyst for its decline and...
Seated on a park bench in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende, Bonita, a young language student from India, savours the scene: children playing around the bandstand, a wandering balloon seller, and the pigeons strutting and bowing to...
Here is a book which, as the author has rightly said, “pieces together fragments of history to bring the present into focus”. The intensity of intellectual labour that has made a work of this kind possible is simply amazing. In...
Little known in the history of Indian Independence and the subsequent integration of territories into the Union is the chapter on the liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli that lies on the western coast. What makes the episode remarkable is...
‘Hum Dono’ brings out the creative relationship between brothers Dev Anand and Vijay Anand
The protagonists in ‘Aunties of Vasant Kunj’ are united in their struggle to define their identities
Geetanjali Shree’s 'Our City, That Year', translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, is her “most political book”
An excerpt from ‘A Wonderland of Words’ by Shashi Tharoor
In his new book, Shashi Tharoor takes readers on a tour of the words, concepts and particularities that constitute the wonderland of the English language. He demystifies punctuation, guides through the arcane rules of spelling and grammar, and explains a...
The wonderful new book by violin maestro L Subramaniam may be titled ‘Raga Harmony: Harmonic Structures and Tonalities in Indian Classical Music’, but it is as much about the differences between western and Indian classical music. The most prominent difference...
Reading Avinash Shrestha’s poetry is a mixed experience. The poet clamours to express the ineffable, yet he falters to redeem poetry from the black hole of metaphysics or theology. The inordinate desire to speak without making sounds is inherently impossible....
Three years at Aligarh Muslim University and addressing a senior as Aapa (elder sister) becomes a cultivated habit. One that continued when I shifted to Jamia Millia Islamia. So, the suffix even with a Jewish name like Gerda would not...
AT the reading of his play ‘Sabse Udaas Kavita’, organised by the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi in 2002, Swadesh Deepak asked his audience, “If a play doesn’t relate to society, what use is it?” Only a few weeks earlier,...
Ravichandran Ashwin, intelligent and articulate, has produced an honest, deeply engaging book. The story of how a cricketer becomes a club cricketer — then a state and an India cricketer, a great match-winner — is never less than fascinating, and...
Even before you start reading the book, Sunitha Krishnan’s credentials and her work, listed on the backflap of her memoir, ‘I Am What I Am’, are quite impressive. Diminutive but fearless, Sunitha, a relentless crusader against sex trafficking, is the...
Life’s but a play of contrasts. Evil lurks around the good, apathy sours the taste of empathy and concern, trust is shattered by deceit and a bustling, glittering city can hide hideous secrets in its underbelly. It is around these...
Puran Devi was 19 years old and pregnant with her first child when her husband Lala Wasoo Mal was killed at the Jallianwala Bagh. In order that her pregnancy did not become a scandal, the fact that she was carrying...
Love the Dark Days by Ira Mathur. Speaking Tiger. Pages 246. Rs 599 Growing up in Bangalore, Poppet unconsciously imbibes the prejudices of class and race of her maternal grandmother. When the family migrates to the multicultural Trinidad, she encounters...