The book, The Brink and Back, is an account of the events leading to the path-breaking economic liberalisation unveiled by Rao’s government with Manmohan Singh as the Union finance minister

    This book focuses on the third: the role of U.S. and European churches, academics, think-tanks, foundations, government and human rights groups in fostering separation of the identities of Dravidian and Dalit communities from the rest of India. The book is the result of five years of research, and uses information obtained in the West about foreign funding of these Indian-based activities. The research tracked the money trails that start out claiming to be for "education," "human rights," "empowerment training," and "leadership training," but end up in programs designed to produce angry youths who feel disenfranchised from Indian identity. The book reveals how outdated racial theories continue to provide academic frameworks and fuel the rhetoric that can trigger civil wars and genocides in developing countries. The Dravidian movement's 200-year history has such origins. Its latest manifestation is the "Dravidian Christianity" movement that fabricates a political and cultural history to exploit old faultlines. The book explicitly names individuals and institutions, including prominent Western ones and their Indian affiliates. Its goal is to spark an honest debate on the extent to which human rights and other "empowerment" projects are cover-ups for these nefarious activities. For more information, or to view videos about this book, visit www.breakingindia.com

    By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra.”It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the “ghost train” arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endured and transcends the ravages of war.Introduction by Arthur Lall

    These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. It is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.

    The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.

    But how are lawyers and the judicial system in India perceived today? It is no secret that the very thought of facing the courts in India leaves the common man with a sense of dread and despair; cases drag on interminably, and justice sometimes seems like an afterthought. Who or what is responsible for this situation? Where have we lost our way? It is at times good to see ourselves as others see us, and the picture is not a very flattering one, argues Fali S. Nariman, renowned constitutional expert, practising lawyer and president of the Bar Association of India. In this frank and thought-provoking book, he realistically appraises the performance of those in the profession and what they need to do in the years ahead, and addresses some home truths about our country's legal system.

      No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage.  India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines.  Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself.  Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims.  India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

    Author Sanjay Dixit delves deep into the past and traces the events, actions and their repercussions that finally led to the Union of India introducing these two measures. He looks at these events from all perspectives-historical, social and political.For Article 370, he traces the entire history of Kashmir from its pre-Islamic past and to the events that unfolded at the time of the Partition of India, leading to the initial inclusion of Article 370 in the Constitution of India. Dixit also studies in detail the legal and constitutional labyrinths, discussing the various Presidential Orders and case laws from the Constitutional Bench jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.For CAA, Dixit traces the constitutional history of India from the time of the partition of Bengal in 1905 to the unfortunate events of the Partition in 1947. His study relies heavily on Dr B.R. Ambedkar's analysis of the reasons for the Partition and the theology of a 'separate nation' that prevailed during the period. The author contends that this same theology has been staging a comeback now in the form of mazhabi pehchan which forms the crux of the anti-CAA protests.The informed position of the author, his lucidity of language and directness of approach lend clarity to his arguments and makes this an accessible and important read.

    While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary—and yet how typical—her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible life—how he became a famous poet, student, labor organizer, and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother’s battles with caste and women’s oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society.A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

    It discusses how and why the members of the Assembly wrote their constitution as they did. This new edition of Austin's classic work has a preface that brings it up to date with contemporary developments in constitutional law.

    It identifies its author by the names 'Kauṭilya' and 'Vishnugupta', both names that are traditionally identified with Chanakya (c. 350–283 BC), who was a scholar at Takshashila and the teacher and guardian of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan Empire. The text was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1904 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation was published in 1915.Roger Boesche describes the Arthaśāstra as "a book of political realism, a book analysing how the political world does work and not very often stating how it ought to work, a book that frequently discloses to a king what calculating and sometimes brutal measures he must carry out to preserve the state and the common good."Centrally, Arthaśāstra argues how in an autocracy an efficient and solid economy can be managed. It discusses the ethics of economics and the duties and obligations of a king. The scope of Arthaśāstra is, however, far wider than statecraft, and it offers an outline of the entire legal and bureaucratic framework for administering a kingdom, with a wealth of descriptive cultural detail on topics such as mineralogy, mining and metals, agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine and the use of wildlife. The Arthaśāstra also focuses on issues of welfare (for instance, redistribution of wealth during a famine) and the collective ethics that hold a society together.

    Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in riots. A cycle of street-fighting — targeting Hindus, then Muslims, then Sikhs — spun out of control. As the summer of 1947 approached, all three groups were heavily armed and on edge, and the British rushed to leave. Hell let loose. Trains carried Muslims west and Hindus east to their slaughter. Some of the most brutal and widespread ethnic cleansing in modern history erupted on both sides of the new border, searing a divide between India and Pakistan that remains a root cause of many evils. From jihadi terrorism to nuclear proliferation, the searing tale told in Midnight’s Furies explains all too many of the headlines we read today.

    The result is a country that, while managing incredible economic growth, has also begun to fully inhabit its role on the world political stage. In this far-ranging look at the central ideas that have shaped this young nation, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani offers a definitive and original interpretation of the country's past, present, and future. India's future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Imagining India traces the efforts of the country's past and present leaders as they work to develop new frameworks that suit India's specific characteristics and challenges. Imagining India charts the ideas that are crucial to India's current infrastructure revolution and quest for universal literacy, urbanization, and unification; maps the ideological battlegrounds of caste, higher education, and labor reform; and argues that only a safety net of ideas from social security to public health to the environment can transcend political agendas and safeguard India's economic future. As a cofounder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nandan Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise in the last fifteen years. In Imagining India, he uses the global experience and understanding he has gained at Infosys as a springboard from which to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant. A fascinating window into the future of India, Imagining India engages with the central ideas and challenges that face the country from within and as a part of the global economy and charts a new way forward for a nation that has proved itself to be young, impatient, and vitally awake.

    The issue of Kashmir still is a crucial issue discussed across forums in the global arena and is one of the major hindrances in improving relationship with India’s neighbour and kin of one time. Much has been written about Kashmir and the separatist movement in Kashmir. But the beautifully scripted account of the brutality with which the separatist movement is carried on till date has no precedence. The book, Curfewed Nights, gives an honest, crude, and truthful account of what goes on in the paradise of India which is under the spell of the separatist movement.The author of the book, Basharat Peer, being a Kashmiri himself has related to each and every detail provided in the book from the first hand experiences gathered by him. Since independence of India, many Kashmiri youths have been mesmerised by the terrorism to the extent that they want to join the terrorist organisations even without thinking about their families or themselves. They have illusioned godfathers in the leaders of such terrorist outfits. In fact, the author was sent out of Kashmir by his family, just to keep him away from these painful romances with the militants.The book, Curfewed Night, has a lot of heart-rending accounts of how a mother watches her son who is forced to hold an exploding bomb or how a poet discovers his religion when his entire family is killed or how the politicians are tortured inside the refurbished torture chambers or how villages have been rigged with landmines which kills innocent civilians, and how temples have converted into army bunkers while ancient Sufi shrines have been decapitated in bomb blasts.

    If they search in the right places and offer the appropriate price, there is always a facilitator who can get the job done. This book is a sneak preview of those searches, the middlemen who do those jobs, and the many opportunities that the fast-growing economy offers.'Josy Joseph draws upon two decades as an investigative journalist to expose a problem so pervasive that we do not have the words to speak of it. The story is big: that of treacherous business rivalries, of how some industrial houses practically own the country, of the shadowy men who run the nation's politics. The story is small: a village needs a road and a hospital, a graveyard needs a wall, people need toilets.A Feast of Vultures is an unprecedented, multiple-level inquiry into modern India, and the picture it reveals is both explosive and frightening. Within these covers is unimpeachable evidence against some of the country's biggest business houses and political figures, and the reopening of major scandals that have shaped its political narratives. Through hard-nosed investigations and the meticulous gathering of documentary evidence, Joseph clinically examines and irrefutably documents the non-reportable. It is a troubling narrative, but also a call to action and a cry for change. A tour de force through the wildly beating heart of post-socialist India, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the large, unwieldy truth about this nation.