Tag Archives: politics

In My Hands Today…

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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.

In My Hands Today…

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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.

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The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World – William Dalrymple

For most of its modern history, India was fated to be on the receiving end of cultural influence from other civilisations. But this isn’t the complete story.

A full millennium earlier, India’s major cultural exports – religion, art, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature – were shaping civilisations, travelling as far as Afghanistan in the West and Japan in the east. Out of India came pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, surgeons and sculptors, as well as holy men, monks and missionaries.

In The Golden Road, legendary historian William Dalrymple highlights India’s oft-forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of the ancient and early medieval history of Eurasia. From Angkor to Ayutthaya, The Golden Road traces the cultural flow of Indian religions, languages, artistic and architectural forms and mathematics throughout the world. In this groundbreaking tome, Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to reinstate India as the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.

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The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017 – Rashid Khalidi

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.