In September 2025, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) completed a hundred years. Founded in 1925 by Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar with a small group of handpicked young men, the Sangh sought to reinvigorate Hindu society through sangathan (organization) and seva (service).
What sustains the RSS a hundred years on? Who are the individuals who animate this vast and enduring organization? Are they conservative or modern, privileged or marginal, urban or rural? Swayamsevak explores these questions in depth.
At its heart are ten compelling life stories of nine swayamsevaks and one sevika. Through these intimate portraits, the book foregrounds the everyday experiences, moral worlds, and motivations that shape their journeys, revealing the discipline, commitment to service, and quiet conviction that sustain the Sangh’s remarkable continuity and expansion.
By restoring the swayamsevak to the centre of the narrative, this book opens up a rich and largely unexplored terrain and offers a nuanced and deeply human window into the RSS.
Even as the movement for Indian independence gathered momentum at the national level in the 1930s and ‘40s, a different kind of mobilization and struggle was unfolding in the Telangana region. Led by the Communist Party, the Telangana armed struggle swept through the Nizam’s dominions, targeting the exploitative practices of the doras, or landlords. Hundreds of men and women, from a wide spectrum of social locations, participated in the movement, and pictures of women wielding rifles have today become iconic.
Among the many women in the movement was Mallu Swarajyam, who joined the armed squads of the movement and also became a cultural activist. Her extraordinary story, as told to three women, is captured here. In her words: “I also worked in the Kothagudem coal mines. Our informants were tribal women who went into the forest to gather mahuva flowers. On one occasion, we received information that the police were travelling in a bus along the route. I stormed onto the road, stopped the bus and punctured its tyres with my pistol.”
Samuel P. Huntington, one of the world’s most influential thinkers, argues in this seminal book that conflicts between different cultural ‘civilizations’ are the greatest threat to world peace. He suggests that the world is comprised of not two opposite but eight diverse groups, based on religion, and how international cooperation between them is the best safeguard against war. Global events in the twenty-first century have proved his foresight and sagacity. Huntington’s provocative thesis that a struggle for supremacy among dominant cultures—like the Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Islamic—is inevitable is turning into reality. In the end, people’s decision to coexist or to make war in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world will determine the course of humanity.
The city is breathing, but it is not alive.
India’s metropolitan dream is turning into a suffocating reality—choked skies, endless traffic, mounting waste, and infrastructure that promises relief but delivers more chaos. What looks like growth from afar feels like collapse from within. At the heart of this crisis lies the unending urban expansion paradox: every new flyover brings more cars, every expansion multiplies the density it was meant to ease. Our cities are not expanding to serve us—they are expanding to consume us.
But this is not a story of despair. It is a bold roadmap for change.
India’s Urban Expansion introduces the concept of the global readiness perimeter, offering a new framework to understand how Indian cities can move beyond reactive expansion toward deliberate, future-ready planning.
Why does history in India ignite such fierce debate? Who gets to shape the story of a nation—and to what end?
In Who Owns the Past?, historian Shaan Kashyap delivers a gripping, deeply researched account of how India’s history has been written, rewritten, contested, and politicized from the colonial era to the age of social media. This is not just a book about the past—it’s about the power struggles that define the present.
From Macaulay and James Mill to Romila Thapar and Vikram Sampath, Kashyap traces the intellectual battles that have shaped the “Idea of India.” He examines how textbooks are crafted, how institutions influence memory, and how political shifts leave their imprint on the stories nations tell about themselves.
Blending sharp archival work with vivid portraits of historians, policymakers, and power brokers, Who Owns the Past? is both a sweeping narrative of Indian historiography and a timely exploration of identity, ideology, and nationhood.
Provocative, balanced, and essential reading, this book asks a simple but urgent question: if the past is constantly being rewritten, what does that mean for our future?
Perfect for readers of history, politics, public policy, and anyone invested in understanding the intellectual fault lines shaping contemporary India.
A monumental intellectual history of the pivotal figure of Hindu nationalism .
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was an intellectual, ideologue, and anticolonial nationalist leader in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, one whose anti-Muslim writings exploited India’s tensions in pursuit of Hindu majority rule. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is the first comprehensive intellectual history of one of the most contentious political thinkers of the twentieth century.
Janaki Bakhle examines the full range of Savarkar’s voluminous writings in his native language of Marathi, from political and historical works to poetry, essays, and speeches. She reveals the complexities in the various positions he took as a champion of the beleaguered Hindu community, an anticaste progressive, an erudite if polemical historian, a pioneering advocate for women’s dignity, and a patriotic poet. This critical examination of Savarkar’s thought shows that Hindutva is as much about the aesthetic experiences that have been attached to the idea of India itself as it is a militant political program that has targeted the Muslim community in pursuit of power in postcolonial India.
By bringing to light the many legends surrounding Savarkar, Bakhle shows how this figure from a provincial locality in colonial India rose to world-historical importance. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva also uncovers the vast hagiographic literature that has kept alive the myth of Savarkar as a uniquely brave, brilliant, and learned revolutionary leader of the Hindu nation.
Long considered a bastion of the Left, the state of West Bengal has been politically dominated by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) for more than a decade, to the extent that the opposition parties here have been reduced to electoral irrelevance. But over the last few years, the TMC has been faced with a new challenger: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has slowly made inroads into the state’s political arena, winning seventy-seven seats in the 2021 assembly election, a significant jump from its 2016 tally of three assembly seats.
Does this mean that the end is near for the TMC as the BJP prepares for a historic wipeout, reminiscent of the Left’s decimation in 2011? Or will Mamata Banerjee manage to hold her own by utilizing her grassroots presence and still-formidable public appeal? In Battleground Bengal, author and scholar Sayantan Ghosh attempts to answer these questions, and to gauge the anxiety and excitement in the build-up to the 2026 assembly election in the state.
Through archival documents, electoral data, interviews with political leaders and experts, and years of field reporting, Ghosh presents a critique of the contemporary political scene—from Mamata’s welfare-oriented populism to the BJP’s organizational crises—and looks back at the state’s recent history for clues about its possible future. In the final analysis, Battleground Bengal reveals how identity, patronage and fear continue to shape Bengal’s politics, regardless of who is at the helm.
In February 2024, the Calcutta High Court ordered the change of the name of a lioness Sita in the Siliguri Safari Park. Some organizations had objected to her being housed with a lion named ‘Akbar’. In India today, even lions are subject to the same political pressure as Hindu-Muslim couples.
The propaganda, legislations and police actions are based on the premise that Muslim men are luring Hindu women into marriage, and that ‘love’ is a tool for ‘jihad’.
The book argues that ‘love jihad’ is not a category of relationship—it is a surveillance slogan. It allows vigilantes to enter homes, check phones, question faith and dissect the friendships of adult women.
The author explores the multidimensional lives of Hindu women, Muslim men and Dalit Bahujan masses and through humour, poetry and personal stories draws connections to reports, statistics and legal battles, making the work a truly delightful read.
Irreverent in its tone and blunt in its arguments, it is a book like no other.
मणिबेन पटेल के अद्भुत जीवन, उनके संघर्ष, राजनीतिक सिद्धांतों और राष्ट्रसेवा की अनसुनी कहानियों को सामने लाती है। यह पुस्तक बताती है कि कैसे सरदार पटेल की बेटी होकर भी उन्होंने अपनी पहचान कर्म, सादगी और निष्ठा से बनाई। इतिहास, राजनीति और प्रेरणादायक जीवनियों में रुचि रखने वालों के लिए यह एक महत्त्वपूर्ण और प्रभावशाली कृति है।
A girl and a boy born into different classes meet by chance. In their meaningful but brief time together, they explore life and the reality of New India. Two dogs accompany them as his nationalism runs into her studied scepticism.
Guiding readers through a country remade, Discovery of New India is a witty, accessible political primer on a decade of change and its human impact.
