India Memoir

There are not many Indian heroes whose lives have been as dramatic and adventurous as that of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. That, however, is an assessment of his life based on what is widely known about him. These often revolve around his resignation from the Indian Civil Service, joining the freedom movement, to be exiled twice for over seven years, throwing a challenge to the Gandhian leadership in the Congress, taking up an extremist position against the British Raj, evading the famed intelligence network to travel to Europe and then to Southeast Asia.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

Jawaharlal Nehru remains a towering figure in Indian politics, a man who left an indelible stamp on the history of South Asia. As a leading light of the nationalist struggle and as India's first and longest-serving prime minister, his ideas shaped the political contours of the country and left an imprint so deep that his legacy continues to be debated furiously today. This book illuminates four encounters that Nehru had with contemporaries from across the political spectrum that are critical to understanding his ideas and his long afterlife.

An army medic who went beyond the call of duty amid a frenzy of treacherous bloodletting in Ladakh’s Galwan while his fellow soldiers fought the Chinese to death; the crew of an Indian Navy destroyer that put everything on the line to rescue hundreds from Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea; an Indian Air Force pilot who ejected from his doomed fighter less than two seconds before it hit the ground, only to find he was missing a leg.

No Indian spymaster has, until now, written a memoir. A.S. Dulat is the first to do so, and in A Life in the Shadows he does it with considerable elan. He is one of India's most successful spymasters, his name synonymous with the Kashmir issue. His methods of engagement and accommodation with all people and perspectives from India's most conflicted state are legendary.

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of 26. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary - and yet how typical - her family history truly was.

Nariman Karkaria, a young Parsi from Gujarat, had always wanted to see the world. So he left home as a teenager with fifty rupees in his pocket to do just that. After working in Hong Kong and Peking for a few years, in 1914, when war was in the air, he decided to volunteer for the British Army. Passing through China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia, he reached London early in 1915 and managed to register as a private with the 24th Middlesex Regiment. He was now a Tommy.

In 2010, just as the Indian government was stepping up its counterinsurgency operations in the country's Naxal-affected areas, Alpa Shah set out on a seven-night march with a guerrilla platoon across 250 kilometres of the same territory. An anthropology professor, she wanted to understand why, against the backdrop of a shiny new India, the country's poor had shunned the world's largest democracy and united with revolutionary ideologues.

Never Cheat a Holy Man is my memoir about the three enlightening adventure-filled years in the mid-60s when my family and I lived in East Pakistan. As "memsahib", my job was to supervise a Muslim all-male household workforce. When the cook warmed the toast in his armpits and chilled the chicken in the refrigerator - still alive, I realized I was not communicating adequately. I acquired new skills mediating between cook and laundryman who were at constant odds.

Kristin Dickerson left her 15-year career as a TV journalist to answer a divine calling heard in the middle of a newscast: “You’re doing this wrong.” In that moment, she realized she had a platform to share the best of humanity, but on that day, she was sharing the worst. Seven months later, she and her husband, Peter, left their jobs and donated most of their belongings to go on a pilgrimage to some of the holiest places in the world. This book is the journal Kristin wrote during their travels. It is also her testimony, which shares stories about her journey back to God.

India, the land of rickshaws, rajas, roti, and more. It's both a wonderful and in some cases, challenging and stressful country to visit. In spite of some harrowing experiences there, India occupies a place near to my heart. I wrote this book to help foreign tourists to India have a safe and enjoyable trip that is so wonderful that they'll have a deep desire to return to India, either physically, or through fond memories of the journey.

Decades after his death, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar continues to uniquely influence India's political scenario. An optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in his treatise on the 1857 War of Independence, what was it that transformed him into a proponent of "Hindutva"? A former president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar was a severe critic of the Congress's appeasement politics.

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a revolutionary who sought Indian independence, but as many would contend, he ended up on the wrong side of history. In order to shake off the British yoke, Bose enlisted aid from Germany and Japan during World War II. This has led some to roundly condemn Bose as nothing more than a fascist cast in the same mold as Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, and Benito Mussolini. But is there more to this complicated figure than meets the eye?

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

This is the story of the voice of a generation, the legend—Kishore Kumar. Beginning with his time spent in Khandwa, Bhagalpur and Indore and going on to Bombay where Kishore moved to try his luck in cinema, this new biography by Parthiv Dhar and Anirudha Bhattacharjee tells it all. A product of over thirty years of research, it goes beyond Kishore's nearly three thousand songs and his varied contributions to cinema, and reveals unknown facts about his four marriages, his run-ins with the government in the 1970s, and his health issues.

The audio edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.

Mumbai, 2008. On the night of November 26, Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists attacked targets throughout the city, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, one of the world's most exclusive luxury hotels. With a deep understanding of the region and its politics and a narrative flair reminiscent of Midnight in Peking, journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy vividly unfold the tragic events in a real life thriller filled with suspense, tragedy, history, and heroism.

Dr Kalam, who was India's 11th president and has been a scientist and a teacher, has written more than 20 books. Ranging from inspirational and spiritual thoughts, to autobiographical reflections, to his vision statements for a developed India, these works bear the imprint of a mind that is deeply reflective. For the first time, some of the most thoughtful, inspiring and educative of these writings have been compiled in one place in The Righteous Life.

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family. They were Kashmiri Pandits—the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was by 1990 becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of 'Azaadi' from India. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the story of Kashmir, in which hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were tortured, killed and forced to leave their homes by Islamist militants and to spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.