Historical books from India
Recommended historical books (10)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into historical here are some historical books from India for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
1.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth EN
Description:
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of l... continue
2.
Churchill's Secret War : The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee EN
Description:
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 his achievements, 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 a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill's decisions between 1940 and 1944 dir... continue
3.
Connected History : Essays and Arguments by Sanjay Subrahmanyam EN
Description:
A collection of essays that span many regions and cultures, by an award-winning historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history - in his case, not longue durée or micro-history, but 'connected history': connected cross-culturally, and spanning regions, subjects and archives that are conventionally treated alone. Not a research paradigm, he insists, it is more of an oppositionswissenschaft, a way of trying to constantly break the moulds of historical objects. The essays... continue
4.
Description:
A young District Collector is posted to one of the furthest outposts of rural Rajasthan. As he becomes more and more involved with the lives and troubles of the common people in his district, he finds himself sucked deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the desert.
5.
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom by Tariq Ali EN
Description:
Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world-and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human- rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the last two decades alone, over seventy thousand people have died. Ignored by its own corrupt politicians, abandoned by Pakistan and the West, which refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally, India, the Kashmiri people's on... continue
6.
Pakistan in an Age of Turbulence by Masuma Hasan EN
Description:
A detailed and graphic personal and family history within a national and international context. It mirrors and brings to life the modern and contemporary history of the Indian sub-continent and of India and Pakistan, and the dramatic birth-struggles of both major nation states dominating South Asia. And the complex racial, religious and ethnic mix was central to turbulent politics and Islamic identity is a factor in international politics. The overshadowing influence of the British Indian Empire was a constant factor and sets the context. The huge upheaval and tragedy of Partition is at the he... continue
7.
Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh EN
Description:
Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family―the climax of a yearslong project. When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smok... continue
8.
The Jaguar Smile : A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie EN
Description:
In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, harboring no preconceptions of what he might find. What he discovered was overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets; a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions. His perceptions always heightened by his special sensitivity to “the views from underneath,” ... continue
9.
The Storyteller's Secret by Sejal Badani EN
Description:
Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family's past.
10.
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand EN
Description:
The powerful story of an Untouchable in India’s caste system, now with a new introduction With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India’s Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in Untouchable what it was like to live on the fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India’s caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of his status so that he will not pollute them with his presence. In this urgent 1935 re-creation of one day in the ... continue