Archives: Press Reviews

‘Being the capital of a country is a matter of prestige and honour for a city – though it holds only when the government is stable, and the country is safe and secure. In such circumstances, prosperity prevails, and people enjoy all sorts of luxuries. But once things go awry and the glory of a regime declines, pride gives way to humiliation. The victorious turn

Just finished reading a wonderful book by a great man who I’m proud to call a friend today. I met and got to know him and his lovely wife Priscilla at a literary festival in Goa where we both featured our respective books some months ago. His gives an insight into the workings, the courage, the discipline, the camradarie, the trust and the inter-dependency across

‘Farewell, Mother. I shall go to the gallows with a smile. The people of India will see this. One bomb can kill a man. There are a lakh of bombs in our homes. Mother what can the English do?’

Cardozo’s stories about his training at the JSW and later the Indian Military Academy constitute the building blocks of a compelling meta narrative. The army succeeds as an institution because it is patient with recruits, allows them to grow, understands that people can succeed at different enterprises, and emphasises camaraderie over competition. It is well known that people from the army eventually become raconteurs. Constant

A nation’s 75th anniversary of independence naturally presents itself as a significant moment to look back and examine the journey of becoming, for in looking back, we may perhaps understand our present better. Vinay Lal’s weighty tome is such a step back in time to modern India’s most tumultuous moments during its freedom struggle from 1857 to 1948. Through this volume that combines reproduced artwork,

In 1946, ratings (non-commissioned officers or sailors) of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) staged a mutiny, posing arguably the greatest challenge to the British Raj since the 1857 uprising. A saga of indomitable courage, dashed hopes and, perhaps, betrayal, it shook the British empire to the point of hastening its departure from India, and rubbed almost everyone else that mattered in the Subcontinent’s political hierarchy

As always with Nandita, author of three bestselling books, this is so much more than a book with recipes. She analyses what makes India’s communities vegetarian, detailing how geography, cropping patterns, influences from migrations, invasions, trade and colonialism have all worked to enrich the cuisine, starting 2,500 years ago. “A thali,” she writes in the introduction, “is a coming together of thousands of years of civilizations, societies,

After his debut book — the semi-fictional historical chronicle Surat: Fall of a Port, Rise of a Prince – Defeat of the East India Company in the House of Commons — Moin Mir has come out with his first proper novel. The Lost Fragrance of Infinity, subtitled A Novel Glowing with the Essence of Sufism, is a beautifully written story with multiple tiers. The narrative

Pramod Kapoor’s insightful book on the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) Mutiny of 1946 is a work of tremendous importance. It sheds light on a largely forgotten episode in the storied history of India’s Freedom Movement during which 228 people died, mostly civilians, and 1048 were injured. The book lays out the role played by the heroic naval ratings (non- commissioned sailors, the lowest rung of

Pushpamala’s recreations of colonial ethnographic photographs, popular prints, and commercial films “dismantle” the original image as an “ideological project” of a capitalist economy promoted by the nation-state. Her amazing embodiment of Abanindranath Tagore’s painting Bharat Mata is a “politico-ethical resuscitation” of an ascetic-looking mother figure from an early moment of nationalism that was “crowded out” a hundred years later by a more muscular form of