Book picks similar to
My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir by Jagmohan
kashmir
history
india
non-fiction
The Arthashastra
Chanakya
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.
His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle Against Empire
Sugata Bose - 2011
Called Netaji ( leader ) by his countrymen, Subhas Chandra Bose struggled all his life to liberate his people from British rule and, in pursuit of that goal, raised and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II. His patriotism, as Gandhi asserted, was second to none, but his actions aroused controversy in India and condemnation in the West.Now, in a definitive biography of the revered Indian nationalist, Sugata Bose deftly explores a charismatic personality whose public and private life encapsulated the contradictions of world history in the first half of the twentieth century. He brilliantly evokes Netaji s formation in the intellectual milieu of Calcutta and Cambridge, probes his thoughts and relations during years of exile, and analyzes his ascent to the peak of nationalist politics. Amidst riveting accounts of imprisonment and travels, we glimpse the profundity of his struggle: to unite Hindu and Muslim, men and women, and diverse linguistic groups within a single independent Indian nation. Finally, an authoritative account of his untimely death in a plane crash will put to rest rumors about the fate of this deathless hero.This epic of a life larger than its legend is both intimate, based on family archives, and global in significance. "His Majesty s Opponent" establishes Bose among the giants of Indian and world history.
My Country My Life
L.K. Advani - 2008
K. Advani, an Indian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004, and was the Leader of the Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha. The book was released on 19 March 2008 by Abdul Kalam, the eleventh President of India. The book has 1,040 pages and narrates autobiographical accounts and events in the life of Advani. It became the best seller book in the non-fiction category and Advani joined Archer as a bestseller author. The book website claims the book sold an excess of 1,000,000 copies. The book alongside mentions the event in Indian politics and India's history from 1900 till date.
The Burma Spring: Aung San Suu Kyi and the New Struggle for the Soul of a Nation
Rena Pederson - 2015
Suu Kyi's party will be a major contender in the 2015 elections, a revolutionary breakthrough after years of military dictatorship. Using exclusive interviews with Suu Kyi since her release from fifteen years of house arrest, as well as recently disclosed diplomatic cables, Pederson uncovers new facets to Suu Kyi’s extraordinary story.The Burma Spring will also surprise readers by revealing the extraordinary steps taken by First Lady Laura Bush to help Suu Kyi, and also how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton injected new momentum into Burma’s democratic rebirth. Pederson provides a never before seen view of the harrowing hardships the people of Burma have endured and the fiery political atmosphere in which Suu Kyi’s has fought a life-and-death struggle for liberty in this fascinating part of the world.
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
Nadia Murad - 2017
A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia's brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade.Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.Today, Nadia's story - as a witness to the Islamic State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi - has forced the world to pay attention to an ongoing genocide. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war.
Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
Nathuram Godse - 1993
Book contains the original statement given by Nathuram Godse (Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi).Writer is real brother of Nathuram Godse himself and narrates his accounts of all the events and takes us through the day of assassination till the day Nathuram Godse was hanged.Writer also puts forward crucial accounts of public and political opinions and reactions which were stirred up by assassination itself and also by Nathuram Godse's official statement to court.
Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva
Anand Teltumbde - 2018
Anand Teltumbde identifies the watershed moments of its journey: from the adoption of a flawed Constitution to the Green Revolution, the OBC upsurge, the rise of regional parties, and up to the nexus of neoliberalism and hindutva in the present day. Joining the dots between a wide range of events on the ground and the prevailing structure of power, he debunks the pieties of state and Constitution, political parties and identitarian rhetoric, to reveal the pernicious energies they have unleashed and their dire impact on India’s most marginalised people, the dalits.The exclusion and disempowerment of dalits emerges as intrinsic to India’s republican system, whether expressed through state policies on education, agriculture and land ownership, or the tacit encouragement of caste embedded in both law and political practice. Here, the carrot of reservations comes with the stick of atrocities. As a politics of symbolism exploits the fissile nature of caste to devitalise India’s poorest whilst appropriating their votes, Teltumbde’s damning analysis also shows progressive politics a way out of the present impasse.Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist and a columnist with the Economic & Political Weekly. Among his many books are Dalits: Past, Present and Future, Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt and The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid. He teaches at the Goa Institute of Management.
Jahangir : An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal
Parvati Sharma - 2018
His father, Akbar, transformed the Mughal kingdom into an empire, and his reign is often considered an epoch in itself. Jahangir's son Shahjahan built the tomb that Tagore famously described as a 'teardrop on the cheek of time', and was sometimes upheld as Akbar's true heir. Jahangir, on the other hand, has the reputation of a weak man, at best: an alcoholic with an eye for art and greed for pleasure, controlled by a powerful wife. But far from being a disinterested prince and insignificant ruler, Jahangir showed tremendous ambition and strength throughout his life. When his succession was threatened, Jahangir set up a rebel court in the face of the mighty Akbar himself. While he made no conquests to match his father's, Jahangir was the first Mughal to win the allegiance of the fearsome Ranas of Mewar. And, for all his reputed frivolity, Jahangir was the emperor who won his dynasty its glorious association with things of beauty and splendour - and who wrote one of the most perceptive and entertaining imperial memoirs of all time. The man who is most often defined by his relationships is here presented holistically as a canny ruler and conscientious administrator, an astute observer of human society and a connoisseur with wide-ranging interests. In this marvellous work of popular history, Parvati Sharma tells a compelling story of one of the most fascinating and undervalued rulers of India.
A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes
Sam Miller - 2014
Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans - everyone really, except for Indians themselves - came to imagine India. His account of the engagement between foreigners and India spans the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire. It features, among many others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama, Babur, Clive of India, several Victorian pornographers, Mark Twain, EM Forster, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs. Interspersed between these tales is the story of Sam Miller's own 25-year-long love affair with India. The result is a spellbinding, 2500-year-long journey through Indian history, culture and society, in the company of an author who informs, educates and entertains in equal measure, as he travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers, exposes some of their fabulous fantasies and overturns longheld stereotypes about race, identity and migration. A tour de force that is at once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.
East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"
Philippe Sands - 2016
It begins in 2010 and moves backward and forward in time, from the present day to twentieth-century Poland, France, Germany, England, and America, ending in the courtroom of the Palace of Justice at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University, welcomed as the first international law academic to give a lecture there on such subjects in fifty years. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who’d moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author’s mother), and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy, with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered, clue by clue, the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather’s mysterious life and of his flight first to Vienna and then to Paris, and of his mother’s journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation, Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men—Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht—each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather’s birth, each of whom had come to be considered the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book, Sands looks at who these two very private men were, and at how and why, coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city, studying at the same university, each developed the theory he did, showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal concept—“genocide” and “crimes against humanity”—as a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together, in October 1945 in Nuremberg—Rafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice, with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command, prisoner number 7, Hans Frank, who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg, among them, the families of the author’s grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.
Strange Men Strange Places
Ruskin Bond - 1992
Soldiers, mercenaries, free-booters. Europeans all, braving the heat and dust of India. They fought for wealth, for glory, and for sheer fun. Their glorious and inglorious exploits are full of thrill, romance, and violence. Ruskin Bond has recreated the turbulent and colourful India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the soldiers of fortune strutting across the subcontinent. The saga of their lives and loves in Delhi, Jaipur, Aligarh, Sardhana, and Lucknow reads stranger than fiction.
India Moving: A History of Migration
Chinmay Tumbe - 2018
To understand how millions of people have moved-from, to and within India-the book embarks on a journey laced with evidence, argument and wit, providing insights into topics like the slave trade and migration of workers, travelling business communities such as the Marwaris, Gujaratis and Chettiars, refugee crises and the roots of contemporary mass migration from Bihar and Kerala, covering terrain that often includes diverse items such as mangoes, dosas and pressure cookers.India Moving shows the scale and variety of Indian migration and argues that greater mobility is a prerequisite for maintaining the country's pluralistic traditions.
Who'd be a copper?: Thirty years a frontline British cop
Jonathan Nicholas - 2015
Who’d be a copper? follows Jonathan Nicholas in his transition from a long-haired world traveller to becoming one of ‘Thatcher’s army’ on the picket lines of the 1984 miner’s dispute and beyond. His first years in the police were often chaotic and difficult, and he was very nearly sacked for not prosecuting enough people. Working at the sharp end of inner-city policing for the entire thirty years, Jonathan saw how politics interfered with the job; from the massaging of crime figures to personal petty squabbles with senior officers. His last ten years were the oddest, from being the best cop in the force to repeatedly being told that he faced dismissal. This astonishing true story comes from deep in the heart of British inner-city policing and is a revealing insight into what life is really like for a police officer, amid increasing budget cuts, bizarre Home Office ideas and stifling political correctness. “I can write what I like, even if it brings the police service into disrepute, because I don’t work for them anymore!” says Jonathan Nicholas. Who’d be a copper? is a unique insight into modern policing that will appeal to fans of autobiographies, plus those interested in seeing what really happens behind the scenes of the UK police."I HAVE BOUGHT YOUR BOOK." TW, Sir Thomas Winsor, WS HMCIC"A WEALTH OF ANECDOTES. FASCINATING." John Donoghue, author of 'Police, Crime & 999'"AN ILLUMINATING ACCOUNT OF LIFE AS A FRONT LINE OFFICER IN BRITAIN'S POLICE, A SERVICE OFTEN STRETCHED FOR RESOURCES BUT MIRED IN RED TAPE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS." Pat Condell, author of 'Freedom is My Religion'
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Suketu Mehta - 2004
He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks.
Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths: Civil Disobedience, Nonviolence, and Satyagraha in the Real World (Plus Why It's 'Gandhi,' Not 'Ghandi')
Mark Shepard - 1989
In this Annual Gandhi Lecture for the International Association of Gandhian Studies, Mark Shepard tackles some persistently wrong-headed views of Gandhi, offering us a more accurate picture of the man and his nonviolence.///////////////////////////////////////////////// Mark Shepard is the author of "Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths," "The Community of the Ark," and "Gandhi Today," called by the American Library Association's Booklist "a masterpiece of committed reporting." His writings on social alternatives have appeared in over 30 publications in the United States, Canada, England, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, and India. ///////////////////////////////////////////////// SAMPLE I suspect that most of the myths and misconceptions surrounding Gandhi have to do with nonviolence. For instance, it's surprising how many people still have the idea that nonviolent action is passive. It's important for us to be clear about this: There is nothing passive about Gandhian nonviolent action. I'm afraid Gandhi himself helped create this confusion by referring to his method at first as "passive resistance," because it was in some ways like techniques bearing that label. But he soon changed his mind and rejected the term. Gandhi's nonviolent action was not an evasive strategy nor a defensive one. Gandhi was always on the offensive. He believed in confronting his opponents aggressively, in such a way that they could not avoid dealing with him. But wasn't Gandhi's nonviolent action designed to avoid violence? Yes and no. Gandhi steadfastly avoided violence toward his opponents. He did not avoid violence toward himself or his followers. Gandhi said that the nonviolent activist, like any soldier, had to be ready to die for the cause. And in fact, during India's struggle for independence, hundreds of Indians were killed by the British. The difference was that the nonviolent activist, while willing to die, was never willing to kill. Gandhi pointed out three possible responses to oppression and injustice. One he described as the coward's way: to accept the wrong or run away from it.