India Books - Page 6

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

Mike Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Imperialism, famine and the weather 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

It has been known since the 1920'ies that the surface temperatures of the Eastern Pacific influences the rainfall in many parts of the world.
In this book the author describes this phenomena and also tells the story of the important famines caused by these weather patterns. In addition it is described how the famines were made worse rather than better by English imperialist and the "free market". Railways were of no use here because the colonial administrators and the grain merchants saw no reason to have the grain transported to where it was needed the most. It is a good read though the meteorological parts are heavy going for a layman.

Editorial Review:

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Taj Mahal (Wonders of the World)

Giles Tillotson

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Editorial Review:

An enduring monument of haunting beauty, the Taj Mahal seems a symbol of stability itself. The familiar view of the glowing marble mausoleum from the gateway entrance offers the very picture of permanence. And yet this extraordinary edifice presents a shifting image to observers across time and cultures. The meaning of the Taj Mahal, the perceptions and responses it prompts, ideas about the building and the history that shape them: these form the subject of Giles Tillotson’s book. More than a richly illustrated history—though it is that as well—this book is an eloquent meditation on the place of the Taj Mahal in the cultural imagination of India and the wider world.

Since its completion in 1648, the mausoleum commissioned by the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, has come to symbolize many things: the undying love of a man for his wife, the perfection of Mughal architecture, the ideal synthesis of various strands of subcontinental aesthetics, even an icon of modern India itself. Exploring different perspectives brought to the magnificent structure—by a Mughal court poet, an English Romantic traveler, a colonial administrator, an architectural historian, or a contemporary Bollywood filmmaker—this book is an incomparable guide through the varied and changing ideas inspired by the Taj Mahal, from its construction to our day. In Tillotson’s expert hands, the story of a seventeenth-century structure in the city of Agra reveals itself as a story about our own place and time.

(20080822)

My Family and Other Saints

Kirin Narayan

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1969, young Kirin Narayan’s older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone— especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.
A touching, funny, and always affectionate memoir, My Family and Other Saints traces the reverberations of Rahoul's spiritual journey through the entire family. As their beachside Bombay home becomes a crossroads for Westerners seeking Eastern enlightenment, Kirin’s sari-wearing American mother wholeheartedly embraces ashrams and gurus, adopting her son’s spiritual quest as her own. Her Indian father, however, coins the term “urug”—guru spelled backward—to mock these seekers, while young Kirin, surrounded by radiant holy men, parents drifting apart, and a motley of young, often eccentric Westerners, is left to find her own answers. Deftly recreating the turbulent emotional world of her bicultural adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, Narayan presents a large, rambunctious cast of quirky characters. Throughout, she brings to life not just a family but also a time when just about everyone, it seemed, was consumed by some sort of spiritual quest.
“A lovely book about the author's youth in Bombay, India. . . . The family home becomes a magnet for truth-seekers, and Narayan is there to affectionately document all of it.”—Body + Soul “Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy in Kirin Narayan's enchanting memoir of her childhood in Bombay.”—William Grimes, New York Times

The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (Oxford India Paperbacks)

Jim Corbett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Adventures dont get better than this. 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Corbett is a natural writer and combines his knowledge of the jungle with uncanny hunting skills to give us one of the best Indian adventures ever written.

Reading his books is not just following a maneater with a gun - it is a journey into the days of the British Raj where you will be transported into the remote jungles of Northern India, read about the simple people and their unsophisticated lifestyle. There are no villians, no suspicious characters lurking around and nobody to provide humour. You just have village folk trying to eke out a living which is sometimes interrupted by a feline with a taste for humans.

This particular book is about one leopard which terrorised a large region for many years and claimed about 420 lives. To understand what these people must have felt, it must be noted that in those days there were no high security fences, no guns or any kind of technology to track the leopard. Yet the people had to enter the forest to earn their daily bread. There is an unforgettable chapter in the book titled 'Terror' which starts something like this:

'During the day, people went about their lives as usual. Trade and commerce, transport and all other transactions went about their normal way. But as evening approached, there was a marked change in their behaviour. Pilgrims rushed towards their night shelters, businessmen closed shops abruptly and people scurried towards their homes for relative safety. No curfew was more strictly imposed. No orders to remain indoors were observed as faithfully.'

This is one of the books which shows that for writing adventure you don't need weapons or FBI investigations. All you need is a writer with a big heart who loves what he is doing and knows what he is talking about.

Editorial Review:

Most of Jim Corbett's books contain collections of stories that recount adventures tracking and shooting man-eaters in the Indian Himalaya. This volume, however, consists of a single story, often considered the most exciting of all Corbett's jungle tales. He gives a carefully-detailed account of a notorious leopard that terrorized life in the hills of the colonial United Provinces. This story represents Corbett's most sustained and unique effort.

Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945

William Slim

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A tribute to the common soldier by an uncommon general 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Field Marshall Slim, Viscount of Burma, never lets us forget that it is the soldiers in the field that win battles: not politicians in their ivory towers, or generals in their bunkers far behind the action. Slim's theory is that politicians give guidelines for the campaign, and generals provide the training and backup so that the soldiers can get on with their business. He should, when possible, not get in the soldiers way.
This is a marvellous account of how the Commonwealth managed to stem the Japanese tide in South-East Asia. The main part of the book describes how he managed to restore morale and discipline in the army that was so humiliatingly defeated in 1943. That part should be compulsory reading at any management school. His solution was simple: he accepted that the defeat was due to faulty planning of the general staff. He then set out to provide training and equipment to the front-line troops. Since he commanded a multi-ethnic international army, he saw that every unit was supplied according to its own special needs. He even put his own staff on half-rations if any field unit lacked provisions - which usually quickly solved the problem!
As few generals and politicians he understood that war is about individuals and small units - they just add up to something bigger.
Slim could really write, the book is full of small anecdotes and self-ironic humour. When he writes about the actions it is af we were really there in the midst of it.
Finally, and most importantly: the book is totally devoid of any racism or demeaning of the enemy, it is incredibly respectful of his own native soldiers and of the Japanese enemy.

Editorial Review:

An updated version of the classic, definitive account of the Burma campaign in World War 11.

India: An Illustrated History (Hippocrene Illustrated Histories)

Prem Kishore, Anuradha Kishore Ganpati

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An undistorted summary of the whole gamut of Indian History 5 out of 5 stars.
53 of 54 people found this review helpful.

Reading Prem Kishore and Anuradha Kishore Ganpati's book, India an Illustrated History, brought back to my mind the days when I started reading Indian History for a University degree many years ago. While carrying a burden of unusually heavy textbooks, I searched in vain for a simple and accurate introductory book like this, to serve as a first foundation for my studies.
Indian culture is an intricate mosaic, blending millions of variegated political and socio-economic elements into a living mandala. In presenting this procession of dramatic events, extending over 5000 years, in only 235 pages, without disturbing its vibrant harmony, the authors have demonstrated a very high level of erudition and a unique genius. Congratulations.

Dr. Lionel Maithri Perera
Ex-United Nations Consultant in Human Resources

Editorial Review:

India is a land of contrasts and diversity, Echoes of vanished empires exist alongside its natural wonders and teeming modern cities. Today, India covers over two million square miles and has the world's second-largest population, which shares fifteen national languages and six major religions. This volume succinctly recounts 45,000 years of Indian history, from the earliest Indus valley settlements to the twentieth century struggle against British imperial rule to the challenges facing the country today. Sections on cultural traditions, regional cuisine, dress, and religion bring the varied facets of this nation to life. The book is ideal reference for travellers, students, and anyone intrigued by one of the world's oldest surviving civilisations. Where the past is ever-present.

Provincializing Europe

Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Can European thought be dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place? What problems arise when we translate cultural practices into the categories of social science? Provincializing Europe is one of the first book-length treatments on how postcolonial thinking impacts on the social sciences. This book explores, through a series of linked essays, the problems of thought that present themselves when we think of a place such as India through the categories of modern, European social science and, in particular, history.

Provincializing Europe is a sustained conversation between historical thinking and postcolonial perspectives. It addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of the modern in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Chakrabarty argues, is built right into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and human sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Chakrabarty finds that "Nativism," however, is no answer to Eurocentrism, because the universals propounded by European Enlightenment remain indispensable to any social critique that seeks to address issues of social justice and equity. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought-categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Chakrabarty demonstrates, both theoretically and with examples from colonial and contemporary India, how such translational histories may be thought and written. Provincializing Europe is not a project of shunning European thought. It is a project of globalizing such thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.

Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Biocapital is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives.

Sunder Rajan’s ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad

Charles Allen

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In today's post-9/11 world, the everyday news shows us images of fanatic fighters and suicide bombers willing to die in holy war, martyrs for jihad. But what are the roots of this militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in the eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers--the Wahhabi--who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them, Moslems and pagans alike. As the Wahhabi teaching spread in the nineteenth century, first, to the Arabian peninsula, and then, to the region around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, their followers brought with them a vicious brand of political ideology and militant conflict. The Wahhabi deeply influenced the rulers of modern Saudi Arabia and their establishment of a strict Islamic code. A more militant expression of Wahhabism took root in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where fierce tribes have waged holy war for almost two hundred years. The ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda today are filled with young men who were taught the Wahhabi theology of Islamic purity while rifles were pressed into their hands for the sake of jihad. God's Terrorists sheds shocking light on the historical roots of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous theology lives on today.

Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India

Margaret Macmillan

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the nineteenth century, at the height of colonialism, the British ruled India under a government known as the Raj. British men and women left their homes and traveled to this mysterious, beautiful country–where they attempted to replicate their own society. In this fascinating portrait, Margaret MacMillan examines the hidden lives of the women who supported their husbands’ conquests–and in turn supported the Raj, often behind the scenes and out of the history books. Enduring heartbreaking separations from their families, these women had no choice but to adapt to their strange new home, where they were treated with incredible deference by the natives but found little that was familiar. The women of the Raj learned to cope with the harsh Indian climate and ward off endemic diseases; they were forced to make their own entertainment–through games, balls, and theatrics–and quickly learned to abide by the deeply ingrained Anglo-Indian love of hierarchy.

Weaving interviews, letters, and memoirs with a stunning selection of illustrations, MacMillan presents a vivid cultural and social history of the daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives of the men at the center of a daring imperialist experiment–and reveals India in all its richness and vitality.

“A marvellous book . . . [Women of the Raj] successfully [re-creates] a vanished world that continues to hold a fascination long after the sun has set on the British empire.”
–The Globe and Mail

“MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.”
–The Daily Telegraph

“MacMillan is a superb writer who can bring history to life.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Well researched and thoroughly enjoyable.”
–Evening Standard