Tag Archives: History

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The Incredible History of India’s Geography – Sanjeev Sanyal

Maps and mountains, lions and tigers, rivers and oceans-all sorts of things you didn’t know about India’s geography

Could you be related to a blond Lithuanian? What if ostriches once roamed in India? Did you know that India is the only country that has both lions and tigers? Who found out how tall Mt Everest is?

If you’ve ever wanted to know the answers to questions like these, this is the book for you. In here you will discover various things you never expected, such as the fact that we still greet each other like the Harappans did or that people used to think India was full of one-eyed giants. And sneakily you’ll also know more about India’s history and geography by the end of it. Full of quirky pictures and crazy trivia, this book takes you on a fantastic journey through the incredible history of India’s geography.

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Kampong Spirit – Gotong Royong: Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 to 1965 – Josephine Chia

Kampong Spirit brings to life the colourful characters with whom the author, Josephine Chia, grew up at a kampong in Potong Pasir.

But life was anything but simplistic. The book also chronicles Singapore’s struggles toward nationhood and through the eyes of Josephine Chia, we get to discover the social and political events that took place during this turbulent time.

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The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State – Declan Walsh

On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a crusading lawyer risking death for her beliefs, among others. Through these “nine lives” he describes a country on the brink—a place of creeping extremism and political chaos, but also personal bravery and dogged idealism that defy easy stereotypes.

Unbeknownst to Walsh, however, an intelligence agent was tracking him. Written in the aftermath of Walsh’s abrupt deportation, The Nine Lives of Pakistan concludes with an astonishing encounter with that agent, and his revelations about Pakistan’s powerful security state. Intimate and complex, attuned to the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith, The Nine Lives of Pakistan offers an unflinching account of life in a precarious, vital country.

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The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India – edited by Suvir Kaul

Echoes of the traumatic events surrounding the Partition of India in 1947 can be heard to this day in the daily life of the subcontinent, each time India and Pakistan play a cricket match or when their political leaders speak of “unfinished business.” Sikhs who lived through the pogrom following the assassination of Indira Gandhi recall Partition, as do, most recently, Muslim communities targeted by mobs in Gujarat.

The eight essays in The Partitions of Memory suggest ways in which the tangled skein of Partition might be unraveled. The contributors range over issues as diverse as literary reactions to Partition; the relief and rehabilitation measures provided to refugees; children’s understanding of Partition; the power of “national” monuments to evoke a historical past; the power of letters to evoke more immediately poignant pasts; and the Dalit claim, at the prospect of Partition, to a separate political identity. The book demonstrates how fundamental the material and symbolic histories of Partition are to much that has happened in South Asia since 1947.

Contributors:
Mukulika Banerjee, Urvashi Butalia, Joya Chatterji, Priyamvada Gopal, Suvir Kaul, Nita Kumar, Sunil Kumar, Richard Murphy, and Ramnarayan S. Rawat.

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder – David Grann

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death–for whomever the court found guilty could hang.