Indian history - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

THE GOLDEN ROAD by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Publishers. If I call this a real feelgood book and you ask why, I shall offer you the subtitle: How ancient India transformed the world, it says. And before you raise that skeptical eyebrow, let me remind you that this author could write the manual for the innards…

Book review: The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin by Manu S Pillai

History in sixty takes An absorbing collation of historical tales from across India Manu S Pillai, our desi Dalrymple, gives us another round of Indian history, this time in a collection of essays touching upon one interesting character after another, some well-known, some not, one or two quite obscure. The book is a compilation of…

Book review: A Strange Kind of Paradise by Sam Miller

A Foreign View One peculiar idiosyncrasy of this reviewer is to read the Acknowledgements page first. In A Strange Kind of Paradise, Sam Miller has an ‘Apologies and Acknowledgements’ page, wherein he apologises to fans of many real-life as well as fictional Indians, and there is mention of Padma and Parvati Patil, last met in…