Showing titles in South Asia

Arundhati Roy examines the persistent inequality in India through an extensive critique of Gandhi's views on race, caste and imperialism.

It begins to dawn on the nine-year-old Sambhaji that his father has fled from the clutches of the Mughal badshah Aurangzeb and left him behind. He must now find his way back home with the help of strangers . . . Under the shadow of an illustrious father, Sambhaji finds himself thrust into the...

When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of 23, he was glorified by the Indians as a martyr for his youth, his defiance and his reckless bravery. It was only many years later, after Independence in 1947, that his writings came to light. Today, it is these that set Bhagat Singh apart and reveal him as not just a hot-headed revolutionary who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

தேசமெங்கும் எத்தனையோ பல மதக்கலவரங்களின் பின்னணியில் ஆர்.எஸ்.எஸ்ஸின் பெயர் தொடர்ந்து அடிபட்டு...

This shocking exposé of a true-life Orwellian plot of nightmarish proportions reveals the chilling events of November 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the cover-up by the Indian government. For more than three days, armed mobs systematically butchered, torched and raped members of the Sikh community in Delhi and other places, unchecked. The sheer scale of the killings exceeded the combined civilian death tolls of other conflicts such as Tiananmen Square and 9/11.

Dara Shukoh - the emperor Shah Jahan's favourite son, and heir-apparent to the Mughal throne prior to being defeated by Aurangzib - has sometimes been portrayed as an effete prince, incompetent in military and administrative matters. But his tolerance towards other faiths, and the myths and anecdotes surrounding him, continue to fuel the popular imagination. Even today, over 350 years after his death, the debate rages on: if this 'good' Mughal had ascended the throne instead of his pugnacious younger brother, how would that have changed the course of Indian history?

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train", she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.

Il paese che comunemente conosciamo come Birmania ha ripreso il suo antico nome, Myanmar, nel 1990, in corrispondenza con la decisione dei militari al potere di chiudere il paese a ogni influenza straniera. Questo paese magnifico era sembrato uscire in punta di piedi dalla storia mondiale, deciso a custodire la ricchezza e i misteri ancestrali di un intero continente. Fu allora che il Myanmar si trasformò involontariamente in uno dei segreti meglio custoditi del sudest asiatico.

The British Raj refers to the time from 1858 to 1947 when the British Crown directly ruled the Indian subcontinent. During those 90 years, India saw enormous social, political, and cultural upheaval. New systems of education were introduced, and increasing industrialization brought societal change. The British administration also united large numbers of indigenous people, though they were often united mainly by their opposition to the British and their desire for independence.

Twenty-first century India is a culture on fast forward, a society which is changing at breakneck speed, where two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These young men and women grew up with the internet, smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love, the weight of thousands of years of tradition cannot so easily be set aside. An extraordinary work of reportage, The Newlyweds is a portrait of modern India told through the stories of three young couples, who defy their families to pursue love. 

The British East India Company served as one of the key players in the formation of the British Empire. From its origins as a trading company struggling to keep up with its superior Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish competitors to its tenure as the ruling authority of the Indian subcontinent to its eventual hubristic downfall, the East India Company serves as a lens through which to explore the much larger economic and social forces that shaped the formation of a global British Empire.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 CROSSWORD JURY AWARD FOR NON FICTION* More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India's millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. In a world that's marked...

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of postcolonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This audiobook makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence - or ignored altogether. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement.

When one thinks of the world’s first cities, Sumer, Memphis, and Babylon are some of the first to come to mind, but if the focus then shifts to India, then Harappa and Mohenjo-daro will likely come up. These cities owe their existence to India’s oldest civilization, known as the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization, which was contemporary with ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt and had extensive contacts with the former, making it one of the most important early civilizations in the world.

Gandhi. The name conjures the image of a man, unimpressive in appearance, simple in his lifestyle, who spent his life pursuing independence for India. Months after the country achieved that independence from Great Britain, Gandhi’s life ended when an assassin killed him. But Gandhi’s legacy lives on. Gandhi’s rise to political and spiritual leadership is the incredible saga of a man who, in his youth, showed no signs of greatness but who became one of the most influential men of all time.

La Compañía Británica de las Indias Orientales fue uno de los factores clave en la formación del Imperio Británico. Desde sus orígenes como compañía comercial luchando por mantenerse a la altura de sus superiores competidores holandeses, portugueses y españoles, a su ejercicio como la autoridad gobernante del subcontinente indio a su espectacular caída final, la Compañía de las Indias Orientales sirve como un lente a través del cual se puede explorar las fuerzas económicas y sociales que moldearon la formación del Imperio Británico global.

A Letter to a Hindu (also known as "A Letter to a Hindoo") was a letter written by Leo Tolstoy to Tarak Nath Das on 14 December 1908. The letter was written in response to two letters sent by Das, seeking support from the Russian author and thinker for India's independence from colonial rule. In A Letter to a Hindu, Tolstoy argued that only through the principle of love could the Indian people gain independence from colonial rule.

In this deeply researched book, Patrick Olivelle draws on Ashoka's inscriptions and on the art and architecture he pioneered to craft a detailed picture of Ashoka as a ruler, a Buddhist, a moral philosopher, and an ecumenist who governed a vast multiethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious empire.

Written by the leading historian of modern Kashmir, this is a comprehensive portrayal of one of the most enigmatic politicians in modern South Asia, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, known as the Lion of Kashmir.

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his...