The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread dedicated to the discussion of the country: India.

India (i/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bharat Ganrajya)[c], is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world.

Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.

Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history.

Four world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture.

Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.

The Indian economy is the world's tenth-largest by nominal GDP and third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies; it is considered a newly industrialized country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, inadequate public healthcare, and terrorism.

A nuclear weapons state and a regional power, it has the third-largest standing army in the world and ranks seventh in military expenditure among nations.

India is a federal constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system consisting of 28 states and 7 union territories. India is a pluralistic, multilingual, and multi-ethnic society. It is also home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats.

Remainder of Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

Suggested by abclaret.

Here are two very interesting books covering different aspects of India that I found enjoyable to read:

by William Dalrymple
Reviews:
"Dalrymple is an outstandingly gifted travel writer and historian who excels himself in his latest work." - Max Hastings, (Sunday Times)

"Vivid unmatched revolutionary humane No previous book has delved so deeply into the history of Delhi in those days, nor painted such a vivid portrait of the late Mughal court." - Sunday Telegraph

"Brims with life, colour and complexity outstanding one of the best history books of the year." - Evening Standard

"Magnificent shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers." - Spectator



by William Dalrymple
Reviews:
"Destined to become an instant classic." - Amanda Foreman

"William Dalrymple is that rarity, a scholar of history who can really write. This is a brilliant and compulsively readable book." - Salman Rushdie

"My favourite English book of the year, [an] irresistible masterpiece." - Philip Mansel, (Spectator Books of the Year)

"A remarkable achievement: illuminating, thought-provoking, moving -- and entertaining." - Tablet

"A bravura display of scholarship, writing and insight. Dalrymple manages the incredible feat of outpointing most historians and most novelists in one go. This is quite simply a stunning achievement." - Independent on Sunday

"Gorgeous, spellbinding and important, [a] tapestry of magnificent set-pieces." - Miranda Seymour, (Sunday Times)

"Enthralling!brilliant, as exhaustively researched as it is brilliantly written." - Mail on Sunday

Here are a few books covering the Indian Mutiny of 1857:


by Saul David
Description:
The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the bloodiest insurrection in the history of the British Empire. It began with a large-scale uprising by native troops against their colonial masters, and soon developed into general rebellion as thousands of discontented civilians joined in. It is a tale of brutal murder and heroic resistance from which innocents on both sides could not escape. This work covers the story of the mutiny. It challenges the accepted wisdom that a British victory was inevitable, showing just how close the mutineers came to dealing a fatal blow to the British Raj.

by Christopher Hibbert
Description:
'By far the best single-volume description of the mutiny yet written' - Economist A beautifully written and meticulously researched narrative history of the great Indian uprising of 1857 by one of our most acclaimed living historians. First published in 1978 and re-issued with a handsome new cover for the 2002 paperback edition.



I have a copy of this book but have not read it yet:

by Julian Spilsbury
Reviews:
"... a real page turner... based on shocking but compelling eyewitness accounts, this is a vivid recreation of the 'greatest crisis of Empire'." - Good Book Guide

"a lucid, readable account." - TLS

Thank you Aussie Rick for kicking this off. I hope to see some of abclaret's favorite choices here too which maybe you two can discuss.

From my University reading list;

by Akbar S. Ahmed أكبر صلاح الدين أحمد
Product info:
Every generation needs to reinterpret its great men of the past. Akbar Ahmed, by revealing Jinnah's human face alongside his heroic achievement, both makes this statesman accessible to the current age and renders his greatness even clearer than before.

Four men shaped the end of British rule in India: Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten and Jinnah. We know a great deal about the first three, but Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, has mostly either been ignored or, in the case of Richard Attenborough's hugely successful film about Gandhi, portrayed as a cold megalomaniac, bent on the bloody partition of India. Akbar Ahmed's major study redresses the balance.

Drawing on history, semiotics and cultural anthropology as well as more conventional biographical techniques, Akbar S. Ahmad presents a rounded picture of the man and shows his relevance as contemporary Islam debates alternative forms of political leadership in a world dominated (at least in the Western media) by figures like Colonel Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein.

by Sugata Bose
Product info:
Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of historical understanding of the politics, cultures and economies that shape the lives of more than a fifth of humanity. After sketching the pre-modern history of the sub-continent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries.
This new second edition has been updated throughout to take account of recent historical research. It includes an expanded section on post-independence with a completely new chapter on the period from 1991 to the present and a chapter on the last millennium in subcontinental history. There is a new chronology of key events.

by Judith M. Brown
Product info:
This second edition of this widely used text covers the last two centuries of Indian history, concluding with an epilogue written from the perspective of the 1990s. It thematically and analytically discusses the emergence of India as one of the world's largest democracies and one of the most stable of the states to emerge from the experience of colonialism. The foundations of this rare phenomenon in either Asia or Africa are seen in India's society, the ideas and beliefs of her people, and the institutions of government and politics which have developed on the subcontinent, in a process of interaction between what was indigenous to India and the many external influences brought to bear on the country by economic, political, and ideological contact with the Western world. Modern scholarship has shown how diverse and complex was India's socio-economic and political development; and this theme runs through the study which eschews any simple understanding of India's political development as a clash between `imperialism' and 'nationalism', or the making of a new nation. The complexity reflects many of the continuing ambiguities and inequalities in the subcontinent's life and suggests why the structures of the state, and indeed the very nature of the Indian nation, are now being questioned, often with unprecedented public violence. India's dilemmas are not hers alone: they also raise economic, political, and social issues of profound significance throughout the contemporary world.

by David Hardiman
Product info:
Gandhi was the creator of a radical style of politics that has proved effective in fighting insidious social divisions within India and elsewhere in the world. How did this new form of politics come about? David Hardiman shows that it was based on a larger vision of an alternative society, one that emphasized mutual respect, resistance to exploitation, nonviolence, and ecological harmony.

Politics was just one of the many directions in which Gandhi sought to activate this peculiarly personal vision, and its practice involved experiments in relation to his opponents. From representatives of the British Raj to Indian advocates of violent resistance, from right-wing religious leaders to upholders of caste privilege, Gandhi confronted entrenched groups and their even more entrenched ideologies with a deceptively simple ethic of resistance. Hardiman examines Gandhi's ways of conducting his conflicts with all these groups, as well as with his critics on the left and representatives of the Dalits. He also explores another key issue in Gandhi's life and legacy: his ideas about and attitudes toward women.

Despite inconsistencies and limitations, and failures in his personal life, Gandhi has become a beacon for posterity. The uncompromising honesty of his politics and moral activism has inspired such figures as Jayaprakash Narayan, Medha Patkar, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Petra Kelly and influenced a series of new social movements — by environmentalists, antiwar campaigners, feminists, and human rights activists, among others — dedicated to the principle of a more just world.

by Peter Robb
Product info:
A History of India explores the principal themes that unify Indian history and offers the reader a sophisticated and accessible view of India's dynamics from ancient times, the Mughal Empire, the British Raj through post-1947 India. The book examines Indian politics, religious beliefs, caste, environment, nationalism, colonialism, and gender, among other issues. The book also discusses long-term economic development, the impact of global trade, and the origins of rural poverty. Peter Robb's clear, fluent narrative explores the interplay between India's empires, regions of rule, customs, and beliefs, and is an ideal starting-point for those with an interest in India's past and present.

by Sumit Sarkar

Bentley wrote: "Thank you Aussie Rick for kicking this off. I hope to see some of abclaret's favorite choices here too which maybe you two can discuss."
A good text on the mutiny, the mughals or the Indian National Congress would be interesting.

Some good books there abclaret, I will have to check some of them out :)

A new book on Ghandi:

Joseph Lelyveld

Amazon:
With Great Soul, Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld accomplishes the difficult task of humanizing the fabled "Mahatma." Utterly unafraid of depicting Gandhi's less palatable tendencies--shameless self-promotion, inscrutable sexual mores, and an often narrow and ethnically specific application of his evolving political tenets--Lelyveld instead stands the man up against the myth. Comprehensively researched and confidently written, Lelyveld's exploration of Gandhi's politically formative years in South Africa, and the international profile he later secured in India, demonstrates laudable (if not unflinching) critical distance from his subject. It takes a brave biographer to pull this off respectfully. (See Christopher Hitchens’s book on Mother Theresa for a contrary and maudlin example.) Lelyveld is up to the job, delivering an ultimately indispensable take on the flesh-and-blood man who may have been his own best hagiographer. Everyone with an interest in Gandhi--from incurable skeptics to unabashed devotees--should find much to learn from one of the year’s best biographies to date.

Bryan wrote: "A new book on Ghandi:

Joseph Lelyveld

Amazon:
With Great Soul, Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld acco..."

Interesting looking book there Bryan, good post.

by John Keay

This book, first released in 2000, earned wide acclaim as the greatest. single-volume book about India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
I believe it may have been revised since the original release with new chapters covering most recent history.

Here are a few books that I have in my library that I am yet to read covering different aspects of India's history:

by Patrick French
Description:
On 14th August 1947, Britain's 300-year-old Indian Empire collapsed and mass migration occurred as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south. This text examines this event, analyzing the rise of India's freedom movement, the growth of Congress and the Muslim League, and the transfer of power into Indian hands. The book examines the disastrous mistakes made by politicians, and the interplay between figures such as Churchill, Mountbatten and Gandhi. The sources used range from newly declassified secret documents to the memories of refugees. The book has been published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of India's independence.

by Lawrence James
Description:
This is the brilliantly told story of one of the wonders of the modern world - how in less than a hundred years the British made themselves masters of India. They ruled it for another hundred, departing in 1947, leaving behind the independent states of India and Pakistan. British rule taught Indians to see themselves as Indians and its benefits included railways, hospitals, law and a universal language. But the Raj, outwardly so monolithic and magnificent, was always precarious. Its masters knew that it rested ultimately on the goodwill of Indians. This is a new look at a subject rich in incident and character; the India of the Raj was that of Clive, Kipling, Curzon and Gandhi and a host of lesser known others. RAJ will provoke debate, for it sheds new light on Mountbatten and the events of 1946-47 which ended an exercise in benign autocracy and an experiment in altruism.

by Alex von Tunzelmann
Description:
The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million people from the British Empire. With the loss of India, its greatest colony, a nation admitted it was no longer a superpower, and a king ceased to sign himself Rex Imperator.

It was one of the defining moments of world history, but it had been brought about by a tiny group of people. Among them were Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery Indian prime minister with radical plans for a socialist revolution; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who would stop at nothing to establish the world’s first modern Islamic state; Mohandas Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to get Britain out of India without delay. Within hours of the midnight chimes, the two new nations of India and Pakistan would descend into anarchy and terror. Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi and the Mountbattens struggled with public and private turmoil while their dreams of freedom and democracy turned to chaos, bloodshed, genocide and war.

Indian Summer depicts the epic sweep of events that ripped apart the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and saw one million people killed and ten million dispossessed. It reveals the secrets of the most powerful players on the world stage: the Cold War conspiracies, the private deals, and the intense and clandestine love affair between the wife of the last viceroy and the first prime minister of free India.

This book I read a few years back and found it quite interesting, covering one of India's icons:


by Diana Preston
Description:
In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant – she bore him fourteen children – Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign, in order that they might never be apart. But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. A gleaming mausoleum of flawless symmetry, the Taj Mahal was built from milk-white marble and rose sandstone, and studded with a fortune in precious jewels. It took twenty years to complete and involved over 20,000 labourers, depleting the Moghul treasuries. But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century’s most powerful empire into irreversible decline. The story behind the Taj Mahal has the cadences of Greek tragedy, the carnage of a Jacobean revenge play and the ripe emotion of grand opera. With the storytelling skills that characterize their previous books, in this compelling narrative history Diana and Michael Preston succeed in putting a revealing human face on the famous marble masterpiece.

Reviews:
"The Prestons' delightful and definitive book tells the monument's full, extraordinary story...Combines tremendous scholarship with a host of
cracking stories." - Sunday Telegraph

"A complex, monumental tale I doubt will ever be better told." - Mail on Sunday

"An enthralling history of extraordinary kings and their peerlessly cultured and opulent lives...truly unforgettable." - Daily Mail

"The Prestons tell the story engagingly and well, providing a lucid narrative sweep..." - Charles Allen, Literary Review

"A highly readable potted history of the Moghul empire that produced this extraordinary building . . . thoroughly enjoyable." - Financial Times

Thank you very much Aussie Rick for the add.

My pleasure :)

These looks interesting:

by Stanley Wolpert

Info:
Britain's precipitous and ill-planned disengagement from India in 1947--condemned as a "shameful flight" by Winston Churchill--had a truly catastrophic effect on South Asia, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead in its wake and creating a legacy of chaos, hatred, and war that has lasted over half a century.

Ranging from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, Shameful Flight provides a vivid behind-the-scenes look at Britain's decision to divest itself from the crown jewel of its empire. Stanley Wolpert, a leading authority on Indian history, paints memorable portraits of all the key participants, including Gandhi, Churchill, Attlee, Nehru, and Jinnah, with special focus on British viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Wolpert places the blame for the catastrophe largely on Mountbatten, the flamboyant cousin of the king, who rushed the process of nationhood along at an absurd pace. The viceroy's worst blunder was the impetuous drawing of new border lines through the middle of Punjab and Bengal. Virtually everyone involved advised Mountbatten that to partition those provinces was a calamitous mistake that would unleash uncontrollable violence. Indeed, as Wolpert shows, civil unrest among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs escalated as Independence Day approached, and when the new boundary lines were announced, arson, murder, and mayhem erupted. Partition uprooted over ten million people, 500,000 to a million of whom died in the ensuing inferno.

Here then is the dramatic story of a truly pivotal moment in the history of India, Pakistan, and Britain, an event that ignited fires of continuing political unrest that still burn in South Asia.

by Yasmin Khan

Info:
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.

Some more good books Bryan!

Here is a new and very interesting book on a long-forgotten subject:


by Charles Allen
Description:
India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived, and the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found and in the process India's ancient history was itself recovered. In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as much about Britain's entanglement with India as it as about India's distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.

I strongly recommend and by William Dalrymple, as also suggested by Aussie Rick in message 2.

White Mughals in particular is one of those extraordinary books that completely change your view of global history. If I could award this book "10 stars" instead of the usual maximum of five, I would.

The Last Mughal is also brilliant and is effectively a sequel, focusing on the war of 1857 (known in Britain as the "Indian Mutiny"). As Dalrymple discusses, you may be surprised to find out who was actually "mutinying" against whom and (from a legal perspective) exactly who was committing treason. It's not who you may think.

You'll need to read both books to get the full picture, especially when it comes to understanding the real nature of historical European attitudes towards India until the dawn of the 19th century, and the specific reasons that the situation subsequently deteriorated. Dalrymple's research has been outstanding, and he methodically details the exact sequence of events involved, including the dramatic changes in the East India Company's policies.

Details:

White Mughals

From Amazon:

William Dalrymple's White Mughals is destined to become one of the great non-fictional classics of Anglo-Indian history. Dalrymple is steeped in India, having lived there for six years, and written a series of remarkable travel books chronicling its past and present, including City of Djinns and The Age of Kali. Having already earned comparisons with great travel writers like Chatwin and Theroux, Dalrymple has now produced a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical narrative on one of the most colourful but neglected aspects of British colonial rule in India.

Set in and around Hyderabad at the beginning of the nineteenth century, White Mughals tells the story of the improbably romantic love affair and marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a rising star in the East India Company, and Khair-un-Nissa, a Hyderabadi princess. Pursuing Kirkpatrick's passionate affair through the archives across the continents, Dalrymple unveils a fascinating story of intrigue and love that breaches the conventional boundaries of empire. As Kirkpatrick gradually goes native (adopting local clothes and enduring circumcision) he becomes a secret agent working for his wife's royal family against the English, as he tries to balance the interests of both cultures.

However, White Mughals is by no means just an exotic love story. It is a vehicle for Dalrymple's understanding of the complex legacy of the English Empire in India, that he defines more in terms of exchange and negotiation than dominance and subjugation. It is a powerful and moving plea by Dalrymple to understand the cultural intermingling and hybridity that defines both eastern and western cultures, and a convincing rejection of religious intolerance and ethnic essentialism. Elegantly written and at a pace that belies its length, White Mughals confirms Dalrymple's status as one of the most important non-fiction writers of his time.


The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857

From Amazon:

On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, “No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.”

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.

Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops, thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: one of the most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the city — securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety years — tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including all but two of Zafar’s sixteen sons. By the end of the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth century.

Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work — the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi — and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

by Madhusree Mukerjee

Details:

From Amazon:

A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for numerous successes, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined.

As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with total contempt for native lives. A series of his decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably resulted in the deaths of some three million Indians. The streets of Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.

Combining close research with a vivid narrative and riveting accounts of personality and policy clashes within and without the British War Cabinet, Churchill's Secret War places this oft-overlooked tragedy into the larger context of the Second World War, India's fight for freedom and Churchill's enduring legacy. Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell devastated India, and ultimately set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.

From The Telegraph:

"Just occasionally...a book really does alter your view of the world, so much so that you insist others read it and sometimes foist it on them as a gift. This has just happened to me with Madhusree Mukerjee's account of the Bengal Famine, titled Churchill's Secret War. I've been absorbed and shaken by it. I don't think anyone who reads it can ever see Churchill in the same light again...

[Mukerjee's] research has been scrupulous and wide-ranging, from the oral testimony of survivors in Midnapore to papers in the Whitehall archive...Hers is a book that makes the best case for books. Hundreds of thousands of new titles are published across the world every year in the English language alone...a few of them really do matter -- they are, you might say, necessary books. Mukerjee's is one of these."

From The Independent:

"I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," Winston Churchill famously declared in 1942. That passion for empire did not, however, entail the duty of protecting the lives of the King's distant subjects, especially Indians, "a beastly people with a beastly religion." In 1943, as millions were dying of starvation in 1943 in Bengal, the birthplace of the Raj, Churchill not only refused to help but prevented others from doing so, commenting that Indians "bred like rabbits." The Churchill industry, more interested in the great man's dentures than in his war crimes, has managed to keep this appalling story fairly quiet.

Much has been written on the Bengal famine in India and America, but mostly concentrating on local factors. Madhusree Mukerjee's Churchill's Secret War, however, sets the disaster in its imperial context, showing how the story of the famine was interwoven with the history of Gandhi's "Quit India" movement and the attitudes and priorities of Churchill and his war cabinet. It establishes how Churchill and his associates could easily have stopped the famine with a few shipments of foodgrains but refused, in spite of repeated appeals from two successive Viceroys, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the United States.

...In London, Churchill's beloved advisor, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), was unmoved. A firm believer in Malthusian population theory, he blamed Indian philoprogenitiveness for the famine – sending more food would worsen the situation by encouraging Indians to breed more. The prime minister was of the same opinion and expressed himself so colourfully that Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, exploded at him, comparing his attitudes to Hitler's.

The Churchill industry has always denied that their idol could have done anything to relieve the Bengal famine. Shipping, they claim, was scarce and it just wasn't possible to send food to Bengal. Mukerjee nails those "terminological inexactitudes" with precision. There was a shipping glut in summer and autumn 1943, thanks to the US transferring cargo ships to British control. Churchill, Lindemann and their close associates simply did not consider Indian lives worth saving.

Mukerjee has researched this forgotten holocaust with great care and forensic rigour. Mining an extensive range of sources, she not only sheds light on the imperial shenanigans around the famine, but on a host of related issues, such as the flowering of nationalism in famine-hit districts, Churchill's fury about the sterling credit that India was piling up in London, or the dreadful situation in the villages even after the famine was technically over. Her calmly phrased but searing account of imperial brutality will shame admirers of the Greatest Briton and horrify just about everybody else.

Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia

Details:

From the Financial Times:

Empires of the Indus is a magnificent book, a triumphant melding of travel and history into a compelling story of adventure and discovery. Alice Albinia has taken her obsession with the great river and wrought a captivating account of her explorations through Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, taking us hundreds of miles upstream and back in time to the earliest days. She begins in Karachi in Pakistan, close to where the Indus enters the Arabian Sea. By the time she reaches the source of the river in Tibet, we have been drawn through an array of peoples, cultures, landscapes and stories.

The book is deftly structured: the further upriver we journey, the deeper into history we go. This approach does not, however, tie Albinia narrowly to the river itself, and she branches off on numerous adventurous diversions around the cultural watershed of the Indus. These forays, and her evident determination to track down little-known rock carvings or tribal villages, are enlightening. I was especially taken by her burqa-clad and highly illegal journey through the tribal badlands of Waziristan, for which she surely deserves a medal.

Elsewhere, we follow her as she walks the path of Alexander the Great as he arrived at the Indus, and - clad in a piece of plastic sheet against the rain - tramping through snowy Tibetan mountains.

These exploits serve to illuminate or uncover rich historical evidence. Most notable is the deeply varied nature of the cultures and religions that grew or coalesced around the river: we learn of Sufi saints, river cults and Kalash practices besides Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism. There are some surprising tales of collaboration between Muslims and Hindus and between Muslims and Sikhs - reminders that religions do not have to divide us - and many curious cultural fusions.

From Goodreads.com:

One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains, flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistan's fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in India's most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders -- Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj -- made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a center of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.

by Christy Campbell

Details:

From Waterstones:

The colourful narrative history of Duleep Singh, the last Emperor of the Sikhs and protege of Queen Victoria, and his attempts to regain his kingdom of the Punjab from the British Empire in the late 19th century. In July 1997 the Swiss Bankers' Association, under international pressure to atone for wartime compliance with Hitler's Germany, published a list of over 1,700 'dormant accounts', untouched for over fifty years. The names were supposedly those of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but among them was an Indian princess, 'last heard of in 1942 living in Penn, Bucks'.

Intrigued, Christy Campbell, a journalist on the Sunday Telegraph, started to search the records, and so uncovered the remarkable story of how Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last Emperor of the Sikhs, was made by the British -- as a nine-year-old in 1849 -- to sign away his kingdom of the Punjab and give Queen Victoria the Koh-i-Noor diamond (the most celebrated diamond in the world, and the jewel in Britain's Crown).

Duleep Singh, a virtual prisoner of Queen Victoria in England, began to dream of regaining his kingdom, and so embarked on a series of adventures (involving Russia and the 'Great Game' of Central Asia) before finally begging Victoria's forgiveness. He had six children and died in 1893. Today the Sikhs still claim their inheritance, including the Koh-i-Noor and the now-divided Punjab.

(I'm including this book because the historical events it discusses heavily involve India, especially the Sikhs along with the British colonial authorities in India at the time. Afghanistan actually has a very long and frequently turbulent overlapping history with India).

by William Dalrymple

Details:

From Waterstones:

In the spring of 1839 British forces invaded Afghanistan for the first time, re-establishing Shah Shuja on the throne, in reality as their puppet, and ushering in a period of conflict over the territory still unresolved today. In 1842, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad against the foreign occupiers, and the country exploded into violent rebellion.

In what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the West in the East, more than eighteen thousand cold and hungry British troops, Indian sepoys and camp followers retreated through the icy mountain passes, and of the last survivors who made their final stand at the village of Gandamak, only one man, Dr Brydon, made it through to the British garrison at Jellalabad. An entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world was utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen.

The West's first disastrous entanglement in Afghanistan has clear and relevant parallels with the current deepening crisis today, with extraordinary similarities between what NATO faces in cities like Kabul and Kandahar, and that faced by the British in the very same cities, fighting the very same tribes, nearly two centuries ago.

History at its most urgent, The Return of a King is the definitive analysis of the first Afghan war. With access to a whole range of previously undiscovered sources, including crucial new material in Russian, Urdu and Persian, and contemporary Afghan accounts including the autobiography of Shah Shuja himself, prize-winning and bestselling historian William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful and important parable of neo-colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris, for our times.

by John F. Richards

Details:

From Amazon:

The Mughal empire was one of the largest centralised states in pre-modern world history. It was founded in the early 1500s and by the end of the following century the Mughal emperor ruled almost the entire Indian subcontinent with a population of between 100 and 150 millions. The Mughal emperors displayed immense wealth and the ceremonies, music, poetry, and exquisitely executed paintings and objects of the imperial court created a distinctive aristocratic high culture. In this volume, Professor John Richards traces the history of this magnificent empire from its creation in 1526 to its breakup in 1720. He stresses the dynamic quality of Mughal territorial expansion, their institutional innovation in land revenue, coinage and military organisation, ideological change and the relationship between the emperors and Islam. Professor Richards also analyses institutions particular to the Mughal empire, such as the jagir system, and explores Mughal India's links with the early modern world.

[Jai's note: This highly-respected book is regarded as one of the definitive academic overviews of India's Mughal Empire.

[book:A Teardrop On The Cheek Of Time: The Story Of The Taj Mahal|1726521] by Diana and Michael Preston, recommended earlier by Aussie Rick, is also excellent if you want to read a shorter book on the "Great Mughal" era, from Babur to the start of Aurangzeb's reign. It mainly focuses on the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan followed by the fight for power between his sons Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, but the first 100 pages discuss the previous members of the Mughal dynasty and include a huge amount of fascinating information about them too.

Apparently William Dalrymple is planning to write a multi-volume series on the major Mughal emperors too. I'm sure his books will be superb as usual].

Two final recommendations.


by India

Gives you a thorough overview of India and its history.


by Lindsay Brown

Very good if you're particularly interested in India's Mughal era, since this book covers the Mughal Empire's main centres of power. Packed with historical information.

Thanks so much Jai, good stuff.

Go ahead and cite the two books found on message 18 for us.

No problem, Bryan. I've modified message 18 to include links to the relevant pages on Goodreads for those two books.

Jai wrote: "No problem, Bryan. I've modified message 18 to include links to the relevant pages on Goodreads for those two books."

Almost there, Jai. The citations need a bookcover, author photo, and author link:

by William Dalrymple

Try again on number 18 and thanks :-)

Sorry not read all through this thread yet but I love William Dalrymple's books just finished listening to ' 'Nine Lives' recently on audio. White Mughals is on my to be read list.

Karen

and by

Bryan wrote: "Almost there, Jai. The citations need a bookcover, author photo, and author link...Try again on number 18 and thanks :-)"

Done, Bryan.

Thanks Jai for the recommendations

Retribution: The Story of the Sepoy Mutiny


by William Fitchett

Synopsis

To many Indians, it was their First War of Independence. To the British, it was a military mutiny. Either way, neither country would be the same by the time it was over. In 1857, the soldiers (sepoys) belonging to the army of the British East India Company were issued new rifles. To load them, the soldiers had to bite off the tops of paper cartridges, which the men thought were greased with either pig fat or beef tallow. These substances were anathema to the Muslim and Hindu soldiers, and they refused. This was the spark that set off a rebellion that spread throughout much of the army and eventually the civilian population. Before it ended, thousands of British troops and hundreds of thousands of Indians lay dead. "William Henry Fitchett brings this incredible chapter in British military history alive as only he can in this amazingly readable volume."

Sounds like an excellent book Jill.

For the past several months I have been working my way through books on the history of India. I'm nearing the end of by Dalrymple, and am looking for a good book on the British Raj. It seems most that I have found only give the British perspective and just gloss over how Indians themselves felt about it. Can anyone recommend a book that is a bit more even-handed?

by William Dalrymple

The above is the way that the citation should be posted: bookcover, author's photo when available and always the author's link. You started out fine with the bookcover, but then did not add the last two segments.

I think that the history of India is very interesting as I think you have found with Dalrymple book.

Here is one:

by Lawrence James

Synopsis:

In less that one hundred years, the British made themselves the masters of India. They ruled for another hundred, leaving behind the independent nations of India and Pakistan when they finally withdrew in 1947. Both nations would owe much to the British Raj: under its rule, Indians learned to see themselves as Indians; its benefits included railways, roads, canals, schools, universities, hospitals, universal language and common law.

None of this, however, was planned. After a series of emergencies in the eighteenth century transformed a business partnership-the East India Company-into the most formidable war machine in Asia, conquest gathered its own momentum. Fortunes grew, but, alongside them, Britons grew troubled by the despotism that had been created in their name. The result was the formation of a government that balanced firmness with benevolence, and had as its goal the advancement of India.

But the Raj, outwardly so monolithic and magnificent, always rested precariously on the goodwill of Indians. In this remarkable exploration of British rule in India, Lawrence James chronicles the astonishing heroism that created it, the mixture of compromise and firmness that characterized it, and the twists and turns of the independence struggle that ended it.

Hi Christina, this book below may give you a very good perspective from the Indian side of the Raj:


by Susanne H Rudolph

Although this book is written from the British perspective, it offers some interesting concepts about the overall effect of British rule in India.

The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj

by Denis Judd

Synopsis

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, after a series of titanic struggles against the French and various local rulers during the eighteenth century, Britain had gained mastery of the subcontinent. This period, and the century and a half that followed, saw two powerful cultures locked in an often bloody battle over political control, land, trade and a way of life.
In The Lion and the Tiger, Denis Judd tells the fascinating story of the British impact upon India, capturing the essence of what the Raj really meant both for the British and their Indian subjects. Judd examines virtually every aspect of this long and controversial relationship, from the first tentative contacts between East and West, the foundation of the East India Company in 1600, the Victorian Raj in all its pomp and splendor, Gandhi's revolutionary tactics to overthrow the Raj and restore India to the Indians, and Lord Mountbatten's "swift surgery of partition" in 1947, creating the independent Commonwealth states of India and Pakistan. Against this epic backdrop, and using many revealing contemporary accounts, Judd explores the consequences of British rule for both rulers and ruled. Were the British intent on development or exploitation? Were they the "civilizing force" they claimed? What were Britain's greatest legacies--democracy and the rule of law, or cricket and an efficient railway system?
Vividly written, based on extensive research, with many new and colorful documentary extracts and literary sources to illustrate the story, The Lion and the Tiger provides an engaging account of a key moment in British Imperial history.

Thanks, those last two look really interesting. I will have to go hunting for them.

I actually picked up a copy of Reversing the Gaze today and it does look interesting.


by Susanne H Rudolph
Description:
Amar Singh, a Rajput nobleman and officer in the Indian Army, kept a diary for 44 years from 1898, when he was twenty, until his death in 1942. In it he writes about the Jodhpur court, the Imperial Cadet Corps, and the British Expeditionary Force in China during the Boxer rebellion. A century before hybridity, he constructs a hybrid self, an Edwardian officer cum gentleman and a martial Rajput cum manor lord. With the diary acting as alter ego and best friend, Amar Singh resists becoming "a coolie for the raj" when he finds the British to be racist masters as well as friends. He writes and reads extensively "to keep himself amused," he says, and to avoid the boredom of princedom and raj philistinism. Here the authors focus on the first eight years of Amar Singh’s diary (1898-1905), offering a rare and intimate glimpse into British colonialism from the point of view of a colonial subject. Illustrated with fifty photographs and facsimiles from Amar Singh’s readings.

Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division


by Patrick French

Synopsis
At midnight on August 14, 1947, Britain's 350-year-old Indian Empire cracked into three pieces. The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, over a million being massacred on the way. Britain's role as world power came to an end and the course of Asia's future was irrevocably set. Patrick French offers a reinterpretation of the events surrounding India's independence and partition, including the disastrous mistakes made by politicians and the bizarre reasoning behind many of their decisions. Exploring the interplay between characters such as Churchill, Mountbatten and Gandhi, it reveals a tale of idealism and manipulation, hope and tragedy. With sources ranging from newly declassified secret documents to the memories of refugees, Patrick French gives an account of an epic debacle, the impact of which reverberates across Asia to this day.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions! I am definitely checking out that last one, though. It seems exactly what I was looking for.

Written by the daughter of Louis, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, this book describes the political and social environment as India became independent of Great Britain.

India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power

by Pamela Mountbatten (no photo)

Synopsis:

In March 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten became the last Viceroy of India, with the mandate to hand over "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire within one year. Mountbatten worked with various leaders to devise a plan for partitioning the empire into two independent sovereign states. During the remainder of his term, his daughter Pamela kept a diary recounting this remarkable time—from trips to Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Orissa, and Assam to the exotic palaces of Indian rulers and the Rajputs in Central and Western India, and the imperial palace-cities built by the mughals. With anecdotes from her writings and a collection of atmospheric photographs, this account paints a clear picture of an extraordinary transitional period in history.

This is a great book:

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

by Alex von Tunzelmann

Synopsis:

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the British Empire withdrew from India, inviting in all the exhilaration and turmoil of a newly free society. In this vivid, atmospheric popular history, Alex von Tunzelmann chronicles these times through the most prominent figures: Dickie Mountbatten, Britain's dashing, inept last viceroy; Dickie's savvy, glamorous wife, Edwina, who found the love of her life in Jawaharlal Nehru, India's new prime minister; Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi. Tunzelman's thrilling chronicle "removes the veil from the colorful personalities and events behind India's independence and partition with Pakistan" ("The Washington Post").

Thanks, Chrissie, this might go on my TBR pile.

Bryan, I absolutely loved it. I don't give that many books five stars, but that one got five. You really got to know the people. Never dry!

The biography of the man, who was an "untouchable" himself, and his role in breaking the Indian caste system.

Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System

by Christophe Jaffrelot(no photo)

Synopsis;

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891--1956) rose from a community of "untouchables," to become a major figure in modern Indian history. Christophe Jaffrelot's biography reconsiders Dr. Ambedkar's life and thought and his unique combination of pragmatism and idealism. Establishing himself as a scholar, activist, journalist, and educator, Ambedkar ultimately found himself immersed in Indian politics and helped to draft the nation's constitution as law minister in Nehru's first cabinet. Ambedkar's ideas remain an inspiration to India's Dalit community.

Chrissie wrote: "Bryan, I absolutely loved it. I don't give that many books five stars, but that one got five. You really got to know the people. Never dry!"

Same here. I thought it was a very, very good book. I learned an awful lot. I also recommend it highly.

This thread couldn't come at a worse time, though. I have so much to read and yet I want to read more about India. I'll just add the books to my TBR list...

The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World

by Manu Bhagavan

Synopsis:

The Peacemakers is the gripping story of India’s quest to create a common destiny for all people across the world based on the concept of ‘human rights’. In the years leading up to its independence from Great Britain, and more than a decade after, in a world torn asunder by unchecked colonial expansions and two world wars, Jawarharlal Nehru had a radical vision: bridging the ideological differences of the East and West, healing the growing rift between capitalist and communist, and creating ‘One World’ that would be free of empire, exploitation and war.

Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, would lead the fight in and through the United Nations to turn all this into a reality. An electric orator and outstanding diplomat, she travelled across continents speaking in the voice of the oppressed and garnering support for her cause. The aim was to lay the foundation for global governance that would check uncontrolled state power, address the question of minorities and migrant peoples, and put an end to endemic poverty. Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy would go global. All that stood between the Indians and success was their own fallibility, diplomatic intrigue, and the blinding haze of mistrust and overwhelming fear engendered by the Cold War.

As Manu Bhagavan recounts the story of this quest, iconic figures are seen through new eyes as they challenge all of us to imagine a better future. Based on seven years of research, across three continents, and written in a crisp and riveting style, this is the first truly international history of newly independent India.

What an interesting topic to cover. All of this looks fascinating.

Sophie I think you will find what many of us have discovered here - your to-read list will rapidly spin out of control. We all love reading, history, and exploration. Start anywhere, just don't stop! :-) Glad you are finding topics and books of interest.

Yes, Sophie, G, Christina, Chrissie, Jill - make sure to join the India Challenge which will start out October 1st but you can sign up now: