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Category: Books

  • Glimpses of World History

    Between 1930 and 1933, while serving prison sentences for his part in the civil disobedience movement, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a long series of letters to his daughter Indira, then in her early teens. Collected and published in 1934, they form a history of humanity from ancient civilisations to the rise of fascism and the Great Depression.

    Nehru deliberately avoids a Europe-centred story. He gives substantial attention to China, Persia, the Arab world, Southeast Asia and India alongside Greece, Rome and modern Europe, and he treats empires, revolutions, economic systems and ideas such as nationalism, democracy and socialism. His sympathies are clear: he is anti-imperialist, critical of capitalism's excesses and excited by scientific progress.

    Because the letters are addressed to a child, the tone is conversational and explanatory, though the scope is vast. Some facts and judgements have dated, but the book remains a remarkable feat of memory under confinement and a revealing portrait of a nationalist's worldview. It also offers an intimate picture of a father trying to educate a daughter he could not see.

    Book details

    AuthorJawaharlal Nehru
    First published1934
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistory
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)1000
    SettingWritten in British Indian prisons, 1930-1933; covers world history from antiquity to the 1930s

    Themes

    • World civilisations
    • Anti-imperialism
    • Letters to a child
    • Rise and fall of empires
    • Socialism and democracy

    Who should read it

    Curious readers who want a sweeping, non-Eurocentric overview of history in a warm, personal voice.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Discovery of India
    • A Little History of the World
    • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

  • The Story of My Experiments with Truth

    Gandhi wrote his autobiography in Gujarati as weekly instalments in his journal Navajivan between 1925 and 1929, and his secretary Mahadev Desai translated it into English. It covers his life from childhood in Porbandar and Rajkot to about 1921, and Gandhi presents it not as a political history but as an account of his spiritual and moral experiments.

    He describes, with striking frankness, his child marriage, adolescent rebellions, guilt over his father's death, student years in London grappling with vegetarianism and English manners, and his faltering start as a lawyer. In South Africa, being thrown off a train becomes the turning point that leads to his community work, the Phoenix settlement, Tolstoy Farm and the first satyagraha campaigns against discriminatory laws.

    The final sections cover his return to India, the Champaran and Kheda struggles and the Ahmedabad mill strike. Throughout, Gandhi experiments with diet, celibacy, nursing, simple living and religious ideas, and he records failures as readily as successes. The book is essential for understanding the man behind the movement, including views that later readers find troubling.

    Book details

    AuthorMahatma Gandhi
    First published1927
    Original languageGujarati
    Translated byMahadev Desai
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)450
    SettingPorbandar, Rajkot, London, South Africa and India, 1869-1921

    Themes

    • Truth
    • Non-violence
    • Self-discipline
    • Spiritual experimentation
    • Racial injustice

    Who should read it

    Anyone who wants Gandhi's own account of how his ideas formed, in his own humble and searching voice.

    If you liked this, try

    • Gandhi Before India
    • Wings of Fire
    • Long Walk to Freedom

  • India After Gandhi

    Published in 2007, India After Gandhi tells the story of the world's largest democracy from 1947 onwards. Ramachandra Guha begins with the trauma of Partition, the integration of the princely states and the framing of the Constitution, and asks how a country so poor, divided and diverse managed to stay united and democratic when many observers predicted collapse.

    The narrative covers the Nehru years, linguistic reorganisation of states, wars with China and Pakistan, Indira Gandhi's rise, the Emergency, insurgencies in Punjab, Kashmir and the Northeast, the Mandal and Mandir upheavals, and economic liberalisation. Guha weaves in social movements, popular culture and cricket, and gives voice to dissenters and regional figures as well as prime ministers.

    Written for general readers and grounded in archival research, the book combines narrative energy with balanced judgement, and it quickly became the standard single-volume history of modern India. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2011 and has been revised in later editions to extend the story. It is long but highly readable.

    Book details

    AuthorRamachandra Guha
    First published2007
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistory
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)900
    SettingIndia from 1947 to the early twenty-first century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 2011

    Themes

    • Democracy
    • National unity
    • Partition and integration
    • Political leadership
    • Social movements

    Who should read it

    Anyone who wants one authoritative, engaging book on how independent India came to be what it is.

    If you liked this, try

    • Freedom at Midnight
    • The Discovery of India
    • Gandhi Before India

  • Gandhi Before India

    Gandhi Before India, published in 2013, covers the first forty-five years of Mohandas Gandhi's life, ending with his departure from South Africa in 1914. Guha argues that this period, often treated as a prelude, is where Gandhi's ideas about non-violence, religious harmony and political organising were actually formed.

    Using a wealth of new sources, including papers of Gandhi's associates and contemporary newspapers, Guha reconstructs his childhood in Kathiawar, his student years in London, and his work as a lawyer in Natal and the Transvaal. He gives prominent attention to the friends who shaped him, such as Hermann Kallenbach, Henry Polak and Millie Polak, and to the Indian traders, indentured labourers and Tamil hawkers who joined his campaigns.

    The biography is sympathetic but critical, discussing Gandhi's early attitudes towards Africans, his demands on his wife Kasturba and his sons, and his idiosyncrasies alongside his courage. Detailed yet readable, it was followed by Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, which takes the story to his death in 1948.

    Book details

    AuthorRamachandra Guha
    First published2013
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreBiography
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)670
    SettingPorbandar, Rajkot, London, Durban and Johannesburg, 1869-1914

    Themes

    • Formation of satyagraha
    • Racial discrimination
    • Friendship across cultures
    • Family sacrifice
    • Diaspora politics

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a deeply researched, balanced account of the young Gandhi and his South African years.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Story of My Experiments with Truth
    • India After Gandhi
    • Great Soul

  • The Argumentative Indian

    Published in 2005, The Argumentative Indian collects and expands essays by the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen on Indian history, culture and identity. Its central claim is that India has a long, often neglected tradition of argument, scepticism and tolerance of dissent, visible in the Upanishads and the epics, in Buddhist councils, in the debates at Akbar's court and in the writings of Tagore and Gandhi.

    Sen uses this tradition to contest narrow religious nationalism, which he argues misrepresents India's past as uniformly Hindu and spiritual. He also challenges Western stereotypes of India as mystical and irrational. Later essays address gender inequality, caste, poverty, the nuclear question, the relation between India and China, and the calendars and scientific achievements that reveal cultural exchange.

    The book is learned but accessible, written in Sen's characteristic patient, carefully qualified style. It is as much a defence of reasoned public debate as a reading of history, and it has been widely discussed as a statement of a liberal, pluralist idea of India. Readers should expect essays rather than a single continuous argument.

    Book details

    AuthorAmartya Sen
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenrePhilosophy
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)410

    Themes

    • Public reasoning
    • Pluralism and secularism
    • Indian identity
    • Heterodoxy
    • Social justice

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in a liberal, historically grounded case for Indian pluralism and democratic debate.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Discovery of India
    • Identity and Violence
    • India After Gandhi

  • Annihilation of Caste

    In 1936 the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, a Hindu reformist group in Lahore, invited B. R. Ambedkar to deliver the presidential address at its annual conference. When the organisers read his text in advance, they asked him to remove passages attacking Hindu scriptures. He refused, the conference was cancelled, and Ambedkar published the speech himself as Annihilation of Caste.

    The text argues that caste does not simply organise work but ranks the workers themselves by birth, permanently and unequally, which destroys public spirit, charity and any sense of a shared society among Hindus. Ambedkar dismantles the defences of caste, criticises reformers who sought to eliminate untouchability while keeping the varna system, and concludes that real change requires rejecting the religious authority of the shastras themselves.

    Later editions include Gandhi's reply in his journal Harijan and Ambedkar's rejoinder, a sharp exchange between two founders of modern India. Concise, uncompromising and closely argued, the book remains central to anti-caste movements and to debates about religion, equality and democracy, and has been reissued with extensive annotations in recent years.

    Book details

    AuthorB. R. Ambedkar
    First published1936
    Original languageEnglish
    GenrePolitics
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)110

    Themes

    • Caste oppression
    • Religious authority
    • Social reform
    • Equality
    • Ambedkar-Gandhi debate

    Who should read it

    Everyone who wants to understand caste in India from its most rigorous critic, in his own words.

    If you liked this, try

    • Who Were the Shudras?
    • The Argumentative Indian
    • Why I Am Not a Hindu

  • Ponniyin Selvan

    Ponniyin Selvan was serialised in the Tamil weekly Kalki from 1950 to 1954 and later published in five volumes. It is set in the Chola kingdom of the tenth century, when the ailing emperor Sundara Chola's succession is uncertain. Vandiyathevan, a charming young warrior from a fallen clan, carries a secret message from the crown prince Aditha Karikalan and is drawn into conspiracy after conspiracy.

    The large cast includes Princess Kundavai, sharp-witted and politically shrewd; her brother Arulmozhi Varman, the beloved prince of the title who will become Rajaraja Chola; Nandini, a beautiful and mysterious queen of the powerful Pazhuvettarayar family; the comic Vaishnavite spy Azhwarkadiyan; and plotting remnants of the defeated Pandya dynasty. Journeys by land and sea, disguises, shipwrecks and palace scheming keep the story moving.

    Kalki mixed documented history with invention, and his lively, cliffhanger-driven narration created a reading craze across Tamil Nadu that has never quite ended. The novel is still reprinted constantly and has been adapted for stage and radio, and Mani Ratnam's two-part film of 2022 and 2023 introduced it to a new national audience.

    Book details

    AuthorKalki Krishnamurthy
    First published1955
    Original languageTamil
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)2400
    SettingThe Chola kingdom of South India and Sri Lanka, late tenth century

    Themes

    • Royal succession
    • Court intrigue
    • Loyalty and betrayal
    • Love
    • Tamil heritage

    Who should read it

    Readers who love long, twisting historical adventures full of spies, princes and palace plots.

    If you liked this, try

    • Sivagamiyin Sabatham
    • Parthiban Kanavu
    • The Last Mughal

  • Pinjar

    Pinjar, meaning skeleton, was published in Punjabi in 1950. Puro, a young Hindu woman engaged to a man she has barely met, is abducted by Rashid, a Muslim from a family that nurses an old grievance against hers. When she escapes and returns home, her parents, fearing the community's judgement, turn her away, and she must make a life within the marriage forced upon her, renamed Hamida.

    Puro's inner world is the centre of the book: her anger, her sense of being reduced to a body without a self, and her slow, complicated understanding of Rashid, who is both her wrongdoer and capable of remorse. As Partition violence engulfs Punjab, she sees other women abducted, raped and abandoned, and her own experience becomes a lens on theirs.

    Amrita Pritam wrote with stark economy and fierce sympathy for women whose bodies became battlegrounds of family honour and communal revenge. Khushwant Singh translated it into English as The Skeleton, and Chandraprakash Dwivedi's 2003 film brought it to a wide audience. It remains one of the most important literary works on women and Partition.

    Book details

    AuthorAmrita Pritam
    First published1950
    Original languagePunjabi
    Translated byKhushwant Singh
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)120
    SettingVillages of Punjab, 1930s to 1947

    Themes

    • Abduction of women
    • Family honour
    • Partition
    • Identity and renaming
    • Resilience

    Who should read it

    Anyone seeking a woman's perspective on Partition in a brief, powerful novel.

    If you liked this, try

    • Tamas
    • Train to Pakistan
    • Ice-Candy-Man

  • Aadha Gaon

    Aadha Gaon, meaning half a village, was published in 1966 and is set in Gangauli, the author's own village in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. It portrays the Shia Muslim zamindar families of one half of the village, their feuds, marriages, scandals and Muharram mourning rituals, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

    There is no single hero; the village itself is the protagonist, observed by a narrator who grew up there. When the Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan reaches Gangauli, most villagers cannot see why their home should be anywhere else. Partition divides families nonetheless, and then the abolition of zamindari strips the landowners of their status, leaving them adrift in the new republic.

    Written in Hindi but full of the Bhojpuri and Urdu of everyday speech, the novel was controversial for its frank language and its insistence that Indian Muslims belong to their soil. It is now recognised as one of the great Hindi novels about Partition from a Muslim village's perspective. Gillian Wright translated it as A Village Divided.

    Book details

    AuthorRahi Masoom Raza
    First published1966
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGillian Wright
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)360
    SettingGangauli village, Ghazipur district, Uttar Pradesh, late 1930s to early 1950s

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Belonging and homeland
    • End of zamindari
    • Shia Muslim culture
    • Village community

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a rarely told Muslim village view of Partition and its aftermath in North India.

    If you liked this, try

    • Tamas
    • Raag Darbari
    • Basti

  • Gunahon Ka Devta

    Gunahon Ka Devta, published in 1949, is set in Allahabad among university people. Chandar is a brilliant research student who owes much to his professor, Dr Shukla, and spends his days in the professor's house. The professor's daughter Sudha is playful, affectionate and utterly devoted to Chandar, and everyone around them senses a love that neither will name.

    Chandar has built an ideal of pure, almost worshipful love and refuses to let it become ordinary romance or marriage, partly out of loyalty to his mentor and partly out of fear of his own feelings. His choices draw in other women: Pammi, an Anglo-Indian divorcee who offers a frank physicality he both craves and despises, and Binti, Sudha's cousin. The cost of his idealism falls hardest on Sudha.

    The novel's lush, emotional prose made it a phenomenon among young Hindi readers, and it has gone through a vast number of reprints. Read today, it is also a critique of a hero whose high-mindedness masks cowardice and whose purity damages those he claims to adore. An English translation by Poonam Saxena appeared as Chandar and Sudha.

    Book details

    AuthorDharamvir Bharati
    First published1949
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byPoonam Saxena
    GenreRomance
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)280
    SettingAllahabad, 1940s

    Themes

    • Platonic versus physical love
    • Sacrifice
    • Idealism and hypocrisy
    • Duty to mentors
    • Youth

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intense, bittersweet love stories and want a Hindi classic that defined a generation's idea of romance.

    If you liked this, try

    • Devdas
    • Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda
    • Pinjar