The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.
Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many India...
Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the consid...
In Indian culture, the woman of the house — the embodiment of the family’s honor — treasures her gold jewelry both as her soundest asset and as the symbol of her status.
If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.
If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong togethe...
History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.
Hinduism’ is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism a...
He leaned towards the young man, his eyes, mouth and face all round in concentration. ‘There was a banned crow,’ he intoned sonorously. ‘There was a cold day. Not bad, eh? I learned those on the boat....
Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English ‘of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little E...
But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes...
Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.
At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with n...
As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were ‘compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads the...
All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes.
Agood part of the British case for having created India’s political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy’s building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipien...
Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.)
We cannot blame the British for saddling us with this system, though it is their ‘Mother of Parliaments’ our forefathers sought to emulate. First of all, the British had no intention of imparting demo...
One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they’ve filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the f...
As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.