History reproduces columns that analyse interesting or important events and controversies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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. [...]
Delhi is a city deeply layered in time, with the juxtaposition of the centuries manifest in styles of architecture, in the names of roads and buildings, in the dress of the city’s inhabitants and—not least—in the languages they speak and read. I am told that Delhi has as many as twelve daily newspapers printed in English, [...]
Many years ago, while doing research on the life of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, I found myself in the library of the great old publishing house of John Murray, on Albemarle Street in central London. Elwin had once been a Murray author; and so had been some far more distinguished people. One such was the poet [...]
Many years ago, the anthropologist Triloki Nath Pandey told me a story featuring Jawaharlal Nehru and the poet Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’. The Prime Minister had just returned from a visit to the People’s Republic of China. He was addressing a public meeting in his home town, Allahabad, where Nirala then lived and where Triloki Pandey then [...]
While Mahatma Gandhi was alive, not many intellectuals would willingly identify themselves as ‘Gandhian’. Writers and thinkers treated him, at best, with a kindly indulgence; and, at worst, with unremitting hostility. The first group admired the Mahatma’s asceticism and personal integrity and, were they Indian, his ability to move the masses and draw them into the [...]