Tag Archives: History

In My Hands Today…

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Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia – Sam Dalrymple

A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.

It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas

And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.

Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.

Sam Dalrymple’s stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.

In My Hands Today…

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India, Bharat and Pakistan: The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation – J. Sai Deepak

India, Bharat and Pakistan, the second book of the Bharat Trilogy, takes the discussion forward from its bestselling predecessor, India, That Is Bharat. It explores the combined influence of European and Middle Eastern colonialities on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation, and on the origins of the Indian Constitution. To this end, the book traces the thought continuum of Middle Eastern coloniality, from the rise of Islamic Revivalism in the 1740s following the decline of the Mughal Empire, which presaged the idea of Pakistan, until the end of the Khilafat Movement in 1925, which cemented the road to Pakistan. The book also describes the collaboration of convenience that was forged between the proponents of Middle Eastern coloniality and the British colonial establishment to the detriment of the Indic civilisation.

One of the objectives of this book is to help the reader draw parallels between the challenges faced by the Indic civilisation in the tumultuous period from 1740 to 1925, and the present-day. Its larger goal remains the same as that of the first, which is to enthuse Bharatiyas to undertake a critical decolonial study of Bharat’s history, especially in the context of the Constitution, so that the religiosity towards the document is moderated by a sense of proportion, perspective and purpose.

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How to Stand Up to a Dictator – Maria Ressa

What will you sacrifice for the truth?

Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte.

Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for—while she stands trial for speaking the truth.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars, to America’s Capitol Hill, to Britain’s Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes.

Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa’s urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late.

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Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America – Russell Shorto

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan.

Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an the result not of an English military takeover but of clever negotiations that led to a fusion of the multiethnic capitalistic society the Dutch had pioneered to the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. Taking Manhattan shows how the paradox of New York’s origins—boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement—reflect America’s promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as “astonishing” (New York Times) and “revelatory” (New York magazine), has once again mined newly translated sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings.

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Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline – Paul M.M. Cooper

Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztecs of Central America; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui.

With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these ancient civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time to witness the end of their world.