Tag Archives: History

In My Hands Today…

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Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel – Shahnaz Habib

A playful personal and cultural history of travel from a postcolonial, person-of-color perspective, Airplane Mode asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?

For Shahnaz Habib, an Indian Muslim woman, travel has always been a complicated pleasure. Yet, journeys at home and abroad have profoundly shaped her life. In this inquiring and surprising debut, Habib traces a history of travel from pilgrimages to empires to safaris, taking on colonialist modes of thinking about travel and asking who gets to travel and who gets to write about it.

Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, expressways, the idea of wanderlust. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism—but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

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Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire – Anirudh Kanisetti

The great empire of the Cholas was unexpected. It sprouted out of the blue in the Kaveri floodplain around 850 CE. Till then, the region had for centuries been dotted by self-governing village assemblies. From here, the Cholas established a vast empire, the first – and only – time an empire based in coastal South India was the dominant power of the a perch usually occupied by the Deccan or northern India.

The Cholas were as creative and imaginative as they were unexpected. They built stupendous temples – the tallest freestanding structures on earth after the pyramids of Egypt. Chola queens popularized new forms of gods and worship, such as the iconic Nataraja and the singing of Tamil poems to deities. And they were spectacularly daring, raiding not just the powerful Deccan and North India but also Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. For a dynasty that was so influential – and is so loved today – its actual historical achievements were surprisingly forgotten by the late nineteenth century, for they had faded into myth and legend.

In this book, the award-winning historian Anirudh Kanisetti brings to life the world of the Cholas. Not just the world of kings and queens attended by generals and ‘service retinue’ women – but the stories of the ‘little people’, whose lives were buffeted by big events. What was life like on board a merchant vessel making its way from the Tamil coast to Southeast Asia and China? What kind of food was served at temples to devotees and to soldiers in times of war? What became of a landless peasant who murdered his brother in a fit of rage? Why did a noble woman commit sati holding a lemon over her head? Based on thousands of inscriptions and hundreds of secondary sources, this deeply researched book is not just a procession of dazzling kings and queens but also a portal that transports us to the peasant settlements of over a thousand years ago. In this book, Kanisetti crucially separates fact from fiction and tells us one of the most extraordinary stories in human history.
Genres
History
Nonfiction
Indian Literature

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The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan – Yasmin Cordery Khan

The partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody.

In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake.

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Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States – John Zubrzycki

On 25 July 1947, India’s last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, stood before the Chamber of Princes in New Delhi and prepared to deliver the most important speech of his career. He had just three weeks to convince more than 550 sovereign princely states–some the size of Britain, some so small that cartographers had trouble locating them–to become part of a free India. Once Britain’s most faithful allies, the princes could choose between joining India or Pakistan, or declaring their independence.

This is a saga of promises and betrayals, of brinkmanship and intrigue. Mountbatten worked with two of independent India’s founding fathers–the country’s most senior civil servant, V.P. Menon, and Congress strongman Vallabhbhai Patel–to save the subcontinent from self-destruction. What India’s architects described as a ‘bloodless revolution’ was anything but, as violence engulfed Kashmir and Indian troops put an end to Hyderabad’s dreams of independence.

Most states accepted the inevitable, giving up their kingdoms in exchange for guarantees that their privileges and titles would be preserved in perpetuity. Instead, they were led to their extinction–not by the sword, but by political expediency, leaving them with little more than fading memories of a glorified past.

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The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won.

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women’s rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women’s equality a reality by fighting—house by house, street by street, city by city—the men who bought and sold women.

Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, The Daughters of Kobani is the unforgettable story of the women of the Kurdish militia that improbably became part of the world’s best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews, bestselling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon introduces us to the women fighting on the front lines, determined to not only extinguish the terror of ISIS but also prove that women could lead in war and must enjoy equal rights come the peace. In helping to cement the territorial defeat of ISIS, whose savagery toward women astounded the world, these women played a central role in neutralizing the threat the group posed worldwide. In the process, they earned the respect—and significant military support—of U.S. Special Operations Forces.

Rigorously reported and powerfully told, The Daughters of Kobani shines a light on a group of women intent on not only defeating the Islamic State on the battlefield but also changing women’s lives in their corner of the Middle East and beyond.