In the early 1990s, the veteran Gandhian Dr Sushila Nayar, was in the temple town of Ayodhya, on a mission to promote communal harmony. At an inter-faith prayer meeting she led the singing of a hymn much beloved of the Mahatma, ‘Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram’. When she came to the line ‘Ishwar Allah Tero Naam’, a [...]
A term greatly beloved of the Modi Government is ‘surgical strike’. It was first invoked in September 2016, after a cross-border raid undertaken by the Indian Army on camps in Pakistan. In November of the same year, the Prime Minister’s sudden, catalysmic, withdrawal of the Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currrency notes was also termed a [...]
On 13th April 1919—exactly a hundred years ago—a British Brigadier-General named Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a crowd gathered in a place called Jallianwala Bagh, not far from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Close to five hundred people were killed in the firing. Folklore has magnified the figure to a thousand, and more. [...]
In the last week of March 1959—exactly sixty years ago—the Dalai Lama fled to India, after a rebellion by his fellow Tibetans had been brutally crushed by the Chinese military. He entered what is now Arunachal Pradesh, and was then known as the North East Frontier Agency. He was riding a yak, and suffering from acute [...]
In 1992, I published a book on India’s favourite sport. One reviewer, a Mumbaikar named Rajdeep Sardesai, commented in exasperation that ‘Guha’s sometimes excessive love for the cricketers of Karnataka may lead to another Cauvery dispute’. A decade later, in an article in a national newspaper, I wrote that ‘I do not care whether India wins [...]
In February 1959, Dr Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta arrived in India on a three week visit. The American civil rights leader’s pilgrimage to the land of Gandhi has been extensively written about. However, while working in the papers of Dr King at Boston University, I found a fascinating footnote that deserves rehabilitation. Among [...]
In 1932, a young Christian priest named Verrier Elwin was thrown out of his Church. Educated at Oxford, Elwin made his home among the Gonds of central India. He sought to bring education and health care to the adivasis, but refused to take the Gospel to them, out of respect for their own spiritual traditions. For [...]