A narrative history reminds us of the exceptional Westerners who, during the high noon of Empire, went against the tide to engage with India and fight for the country's freedom.
The first biography of George Fernandes sparkles in places where the author’s access to the socialist leader’s private papers pays off. But it falls short, with gaps in understanding and inadequate…
The rise and fall of a business empire of colonial Bombay is a story about global capitalism on the one hand, and diasporas and minority identity, on the other.
There is a quality of honesty in Akshaya Mukul's biography of Agyeya, a willingness to lay bare the messy complexities of actual lives, which is a welcome break from the tradition of producing…
The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 brought the miseries of the region’s peasants to official notice. A volume of 165 testimonies of peasants translated into English is revealing of their wretched lives…
A biography of Srinivasa Sastri, long considered an irrelevant figure in colonial India, highlights his contribution to the making of the modern liberal international order and to putting Indian…
The first two volumes of 'Letters to Gandhi', covering 1889-1910, trace a fine-grained texture of Gandhi’s life in the initial decades of public life. They offer vignettes of a rapid rise…
‘How a family lived in their ordinariness for three centuries, and the mode of telling this story throws light on the "big events" in France from the pre-revolutionary era to the French…
Delhi's rapidly changing relationship with its ecology has privileged the middle class. The city's transformation into an inequitable and exclusive place increasingly makes it a harder…
