History reproduces columns that analyse interesting or important events and controversies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In an interview given recently by the Pakistani cricketer-politician Imran Khan to Newsweek magazine, he said: ‘My vote bank is increasing’. To whom do we owe the term ‘vote bank’? I wager few readers of this column can answer the question. Nor can Imran Khan, although—like the rest of us, its use comes naturally to him. [...]
One of my all-time favourite places is the temple of Somanathapura. It is less visited than other famous Hoysala shrines such as Belur and Halebidu, in part because it lies off the beaten track. The words ‘beaten’ and ‘track’ need to be taken literally. For two-thirds of the way one drives along the (now fairly decent) [...]
The Indian public in general, and the Indian press in particular, has shown a keen and perhaps excessive interest in the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. That they were intimates is not to be doubted–but did the bonds ever move from the merely emotional to the tellingly physical? That one was the Prime Minister [...]
In the last days of 1884, an English politician named Randolph Churchill landed in Bombay. Then in his mid thirties, he was a rising star of the Conservative Party, who had made his name by a series of withering attacks on the policies in Africa of the great Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Churchill was [...]
On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known as the Quakers. Now, in 2007, the entry to the premises is through the garden at the side; but when Mahatma [...]
‘India lives in her villages’, said Mahatma Gandhi. This is an injunction that the environmental movement in India has taken very seriously indeed. Thus scholars and activists have argued about such matters as the commercial bias in forest policy, the disappearance of species, the drying up of village tanks, and the displacement of adivasis by large [...]
Among the minor figures of modern Indian history, one who has long intrigued me is the civil servant and journalist A. D. Gorwala. Born in 1900, Gorwala studied in Bombay and England before joining the Indian Civil Service in 1924. He served in rural Sindh and in the Secretariat, acquiring a high reputation for efficiency and [...]
Some months ago, I wrote in these columns about Nirmal Kumar Bose, the anthropologist who worked with Mahatma Gandhi and also wrote about him. That piece attracted the attention of a resident of Bangalore named Biren Das, whom I knew of as a patron of classical music and as the great-grandson of the inventor of the [...]
In a delicious paradox that can only be Indian, the man who best embodied the spirit of the holy Hindu city of Banaras was a Muslim. Although he was born in Bihar, Bismillah Khan moved to Banaras as a young man, and lived there until he died, spending some seven decades in an old, crumbling haveli, [...]
John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently, was an economist of capacious interests and controversial views. His many works of scholarship were widely read, acclaimed by some and dismissed by others. I am not an economist, and thus not in a position to judge the merits of Galbraith’s writings on the modern corporation or the free market. [...]