I believe in an India of pluralism and diversity, not of religious bigotry and caste politics. I believe in an India that is secure in itself and confident of its place in the world, an India that is...
Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is ‘based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usua...
Everything is recycled in India, even dreams.
How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out to...
Education in India has made monumental progress since Independence but continues to face daunting challenges at multiple levels, particularly in terms of quality, infrastructure and dropout rates. We...
Hindu fundamentalism, because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less...
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly ha...
Flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic...
This British practice, previously unknown in India, caused long-lasting damage. The historian Jon Wilson has argued that India had a dynamic economic and political order—‘a society of little societies...
The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.
Minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Mus...
Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.
India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.
Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought...
By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servant...
Forget heaven and hell, yaar, he says as he leaves. It’s purgatory I’m concerned about. We call it Earth.
Britain is no longer ‘Thatcherite’, though in the aftermath of ‘Brexit’, it may even be worse. The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater.
The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squee...
Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.
When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who pos...
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