Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science, or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology, and the state.

    In 2003, he returned to his birth country for good, eager to be part of its exciting growth and modernization. What he found was a nation even more transformed than he had imagined, where the changes were fundamentally altering Indian society, for better and sometimes for worse.To further understand these changes, he sought out the Indians experiencing them firsthand. The result is a rich tapestry of lives being altered by economic development, and a fascinating insider's look at many of the most important forces shaping our world today. Much has been written about the rise of Asia and a rebalancing of the global economy, but rarely does one encounter these big stories with the level of nuance and detail that Kapur gives us in India Becoming.Among the characters we meet are a broker of cows who must adapt his trade to a modernizing economy; a female call center employee whose relatives worry about her values in the city; a feudal landowner who must accept that he will not pass his way of life down to his children; and a career woman who wishes she could "outsource" having a baby.Through these stories and many others, Kapur provides a fuller understanding of the complexity and often contradictory nature of modern India. India Becoming is particularly noteworthy for its emphasis on rural India-a region often neglected in writing about the country, though 70 percent of the population still lives there. In scenes reminiscent of R. K. Narayan's classic works on the Indian countryside, Kapur builds intimate portraits of farmers, fishermen, and entire villages whose ancient ways of life are crumbling, giving way to an uncertain future that is at once frightening and full of promise. Kapur himself grew up in rural India; his descriptions of change and modernization are infused with a profound-at times deeply poignant- firsthand understanding of the loss that must accompany all development and progress.India Becoming is essential reading for anyone interested in our changing world and the newly emerging global order. It is a riveting narrative that puts the personal into a broad, relevant and revelational context.

    It discusses recent Constitutional Amendments, socio-economic changes and educational experiments.About the AuthorR C Majumdar - Former Vice-Chancellor, Dacca University. H C Raychaudhauri - Former Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture, Calcutta University. Kalikinkar Datta - Former Vice-Chancellor Patna University.Table of Contents Part I: Ancient India Part II: Medieval India. Book I: The Muslim Conquest and the Delhi Sultanate. Book II: The Mughul Empire Part III: Modern India. Book I: The Rise and Growth of the British Power. Book II: Modern India Appendices Genealogical Tables to Part III Bibliography to Part III List of Governors-Generals, List of Prime Ministers and Presidents Chronology Index

    A week passed. President Amin then summoned the minister and asked, 'Did you carry out my orders?' He replied saying that there was a problem. 'What problem?' the president inquired. 'Your Excellency, there is a country called Cyprus.The people are called Cypriots. If Uganda were to be called Idi, we would be called Idiots.' There are few leaders that K. Natwar Singh, in a diplomatic career spanning more than three decades, has not known -and fewer still about whom he has no story to tell. In Walking with Lions: Tales from a Diplomatic Past, Singh puts together fifty episodes that entertain, inform and illuminate.Featured here is Indira Gandhi as a statesman and friend, alongside other renowned figures such as Fidel Castro, Haile Selassie and Zia-ul-Haq. Singh analyses some personalities with disarming candour, among them Morarji Desai and Lord Mountbatten; at other times, his admiration for leaders like C. Rajagopalalchari and Nelson Mandela shines through. In these pages you will also find a rare, fascinating glimpse of Godman Chandraswami and his cohort Mamaji, and their interaction with a surprisingly submissive Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. Besides, there are short tributes to artists, writers, cricketers and film stars, like M.F. Husain, Nadine Gordimer, Don Bradman and Dev Anand. Recounted with empathy and humour, this collection of stories from contemporary history is a warm, unaffected and reassuring reminder that the great too can be as fallible as the rest of us.

    Maxwell has written a masterpiece on an event of great historical importance. He has shattered many myths and proved that there are no black and whites but only greys in the world of politics. "

    Abdul Kalam, our most distinguished scientist, and close associate Y.S. Rajan examine India's strengths—and weaknesses—to offer a vision of how India can be among the world's first five economic powers in the year 2020. They cite growth rates and develoent trends to show that the goal is not an unrealistic one. Past successes, too, bear them out. For example, we were able to launch the green revolution at a time when experts had all but given up on India ever becoming self-sufficient in food. Similarly, in the field of space technology we started from scratch to have today a system of satellite-based communication linking remote regions of the country. The same sense of purpose can lead us to success in many other areas crucial to achieving the goal of a prosperous, strong nation, assert Kalam and Rajan.

    After India gained independence in the year 1947, she decided to adopt a political system that was democratic in nature and involved the existence of several political parties and many political rights. The end of the colonial era saw the disappearance of the continual famines that were striking India. Instead of stagnation, India began to witness growth in her economy, making her eventually rank at number two in the list of fastest growing economies in the world. Even now, though India's economy has dipped slightly, it still has one of the highest growths in the world. An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions is a book that has the opinions of two of India's leading economists, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, who highlight the major problems that the country faces at present. These two experts stress on the need to have sound knowledge concerning the deprivations of humans in India.

    Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People's Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes--all despised minorities--shaped the constitutional culture.The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state's own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist's contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders' challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers' petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers' battle to protect their right to practice prostitution.Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People's Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

    Carter would participate in a number of expeditions against the Comanche and other tribes in the Texas-area. It was during one of these campaigns that he was brevetted first lieutenant and awarded the Medal of Honor for his "most distinguished gallantry" against the Comanche in Blanco Canyon on a tributary of the Brazos River on October 10, 1871. He became a successful author in his later years writing several books based on his military career, including On the Border with Mackenzie (1935), as well as a series of booklets detailing his years as an Indian fighter on the Texas frontier. Carter writes: "IT IS nearly fifty years since these tragedies occurred. There are few survivors. The writer is, perhaps, the only one. This is written in the vague hope that this chronicle of the events of that period may possibly prove of some lasting and, perhaps, historical value to posterity. "The country all about the scene of these tragical events—the Texas Panhandle—was then wild, unsettled, covered with sage brush, scrub oak and chaparral, and its only inhabitants were Indians, buffalo, lobo wolves, coyotes, jack-rabbits, prairie-dogs and rattlesnakes, with here and there a few scattered herds of antelope. The railroad, that great civilizing agency, the telegraph, the telephone, and the many other marvelous inventions of man, have wrought such a wonderful transformation in our great western country that the American Indian will, if he has not already, become a race of the past, and history alone will record the remarkable deeds and strange career of an almost extinct people. With these miraculous changes has come the total extermination of the buffalo—the Indians' migratory companion and source of living—and pretty much all of the wild game that in almost countless numbers freely roamed those vast prairies. Where now the railroads girdle that country the nomadic redman lived his free and careless life and the bison thrived and roamed undisturbed at that period— where are now the appliances of modern civilization, and prosperous communities, then nothing but desolation reigned for many miles around. "In the expansion and peopling of this vast country, our little Army was most closely identified. In fact, it was the pioneer of civilization. The life was full of danger, hardships, privations, and sacrifices, little known or appreciated by the present generation. "Where populous towns, ranches and well-tilled farms, grain fields, orchards, and oil "gushers" are now located, with railroads either running through or near them, we were making trails, upon which the main roads now run, in search of hostile savages, for the purpose of punishing them or compelling them to go into the Indian reservations, and to permit the settlers, then held back by the murderous acts of these redskins, to advance and spread the civilization of the white man throughout the western tiers of counties in that far-off western panhandle of Texas."

    This is a volume meant for all those who want a masterly, lucid, yet eminently readable introduction to, and overview of, India's early history by one of the master-scholars of Indian history---be it students, tourists, or the interested lay reader.

    But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country's top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India's new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.James Crabtree's The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world's most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

    Known collectively as Henry Lawrence's young men, each had distinguished himself in the East India Company's wars in the Punjab before going on to make his name as a political on the Frontier - Herbert Edwardes, who pacified Bannu; John Nicholson, a forebear of the author, who became the terror of the Sikhs as Nikkal Seyn; Uncle James Abbot of Hazara, and many others.

    Critiquing the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation it shows how even secular minds remain imprisoned within the Brahmanical vision. It looks at the alternative traditions nurtured within Dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and history. Written in a lucid and readable style, the author elucidates how Dalit politics and the Dalit vision require going beyond even the term Dalit and how it has contributed to being symbolic of the most oppressed and exploited sections within the graded hierarchies of caste. Alongside the ascendance of Hinduism, the book traces the invasive trends of resistance and revolt in the tenets of Buddhism and radical bhakti, in the anti-patriarchal stands of early feminists, in the pervasive radicalism of the Dalit activists from Phule and Periyar, Ramabai and Tarabai, to Kabir, Tukaram and Ambedkar, even for that matter Buddha himself. This book brings to the reader the failures and triumphs of the many efforts that have aimed to dissolve the oppressive facets of Hinduism and its caste ideology, and continue to organise in newer ways for 'another' possible world where equality and human freedom reign supreme. It also makes visible the logic of Dalit politics and the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, as a major alternative to the rise of Hindutva. This important and essential reading will be an invaluable primer on the subject to students of Dalit and caste studies and politics.

    Neither of those works, however, undertakes to give a detailed account of the great Anarchy that marked the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the dark time that came before the dawn of British power in the land of the Moghul.

    Historical novel that explodes all the myths that surround Mastani who was the second wife of Peshwa Baji Rao I in Central India in the 1700s.