Outlook | July 26, 2010 While still in college, I read Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The social history of Bengal portrayed in it left a powerful impression on me. Now, I have come across another memoir by a Bengali intellectual, Ashish Bose. A distinguished scholar, Bose spent a life-time at the Institute…

Outlook | March 22, 2010 I am impressed with what Sujit Saraf, from IIT and Berkeley, has achieved in this book. Sultana Daku lived and died long before I was born. He was hanged on July 7, 1924. Amazingly, as children we’d somehow heard this magical name. How it had filtered from the UP Terai…

Outlook | November 3, 2008 Empire’s marionette, Duleep Singh could only align his life with an idle absurdity. Maharaja Ranjit Singh ruled the Punjab for forty years, 1799-1839. For six years after his death, his sons, the Sikh sardars, the Dogra rajas of Jammu, and the Brahmin generals of Meerut, all his creations, fought and…

Outlook | March 5, 2007 Meticulously researched and produced, it gives the entire history of India’s one-day matches. This will be manna for all schoolboys. Indians love a tamasha. With so many religions, and gods, 365 days are too few for celebrations. The entry of one-day cricket two decades ago has added to it. In…

Outlook | September 18, 2006 Good for a long train or air journey. The tale is interesting and amusing, and describes a period which, thank God, can never be again. When they took over India, the British strangely allowed 600 oddballs to rule with absolute authority, and total irresponsibility, over principalities from a few villages,…

Outlook | January 30, 2006 Classic reissue, of import to both those from the Punjab and those whose lives it shaped. For 50 years, Khushwant Singh has towered over Indian writing like a colossus. Novelist, short story writer, historian, editor and journalist, above all an agent provocateur par excellence, he is impossible to ignore. The History…

For Outlook | March 21, 2005 There are minor errors of dates and facts, which OUP shouldn’t have allowed. But it’s a small blemish on a fine farewell offering. The world has seen many empires, but among them the empire of the Great Mughals stands out like the North Star, ever visible, and the most glorious.…

Outlook | November 1, 2004 In a way, the little book is a serious history of elections, and our ways with democracy. Talented cartoonists, like good doctors, are necessary to maintain the social health of a society. Unless we can laugh at ourselves, and not just in the park, we cannot be a stable people.…

Outlook | February 14, 2004 Privy to political intrigues and personalities’ quirks, this autobio is a say-some if not a say-all. A public servant rarely writes his autobiography because he is hoping to be recalled till his last day. I have seen ministers from Nehru’s days remaining silent for decades in the hope even of…

Outlook | February 9, 2004 A brave attempt to present 150 years of India’s social, political and cultural history through photographic images This is a brave attempt to present 150 years of India’s social, political and cultural history through photographic images. Images do linger for long in the national psyche but their overuse blunts the…

Outlook | December 29, 2003 Every graduate course prescribes a book of essays. This book deserves to be there. I once chanced upon Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. I read the essays again and again, always with profit and pleasure. Churchill’s prose and his perceptive observation of the great and famous, whom he saw at close range, surprised…

Outlook | April 28, 2003 The whole world uses fingerprinting, do they know the footprints lead to Nadia? Shakespeare said of rulers, “The evil lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” We love to talk of the wrongs done by the British. Yet it would be churlish not to accept their…

Outlook | April 7, 2003 In a well-researched book, Cheema resurrects the six major padshahs of the period 1707-1857. We all grew up on Mughal history. Babar, Ibrahim Lodi and Panipat; Akbar and Fatehpur Sikri; Shahjahan and the Taj; and, of course, the austere, pious but narrow-visioned Aurangzeb. This great drama was played out from…

For Outlook | June 25, 2001 Lives of an inimitable people, documented in inimitable Khushwant style If I am not mistaken, Khushwant and Raghu had done a small book on the Sikhs as an introductory primer long ago. This is a much more ambitious effort for the coffee tables, away from the Punjab, particularly beyond India.…

The Tribune, Chandigarh | June 17, 1981 RETURN TO PUNJAB, 1961–1975, by Prakash Tandon. Vikas, Delhi. PP 227. Rs. 50. Prakash Tandon is a remarkable and lucky Punjabi. Born near the Bullokee headworks, within hearing of the music of “Ravi dian chhallan”, he spent his childhood in Punjab. His father worked as an irrigation engineer,…

The Tribune, Chandigarh | May 16, 1981 Delhi Between Two Empires, 1803-1931 by Narayani Gupta. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Pp 260. Rs. 90. This is an absorbing book, of excellent and meticulous scholarship, something one does not come across often in our publications. I had seen the young Cambridge historians, men like Baker and…

For The Tribune, Chandigarh | December 8, 1979 INDIAN MOUNTAINEER SPRING NUMBER, 1979. Indian Mountaineering Foundation. Pp 135. Rs 6. The Himalayas are nature’s greatest gift to the subcontinent. Indians in the past, apart from a limited amount of pilgrimage travel, largely ignored them. It was the Europeans, particularly the British, who went out to…

For The Tribune, Chandigarh | June 9, 1979 PORTRAIT OF A POLITICAL MURDER by H. S. Bhatia. Deep & Deep Publications, New Delhi; Pp 178. Rs 35. The sleek Boeing 707 came to a halt. The yellow Presidential flag, embossed with a scimitar fluttered, outside the pilot’s window. Soon the door opened and a tall…

The Tribune, Chandigarh | April 16, 1978 FACES OF EVEREST by Major H. P. S. Ahluwalia. Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi. Pp. 238, Rs. 225. Since it was pinpointed on a map in the middle of the 19th century, Everest, the highest point on this little earth of ours, has continued to fascinate man.  The…