Today, India is likely to become one of the major economies of the twenty-first century. But many unresolved questions remain about the sustainability of such growth and its effect on the stability of the nation. Veteran journalist Mark Tully draws on thirty years of reporting India and travels the length and breadth of the country to find the answers. Have the changes had any impact on the poor and marginalised? How can the development of the country’s creaking infrastructure be speeded up to match its huge advances in technology and industry? With a gift for finding the human stories behind the headlines, he looks at the pressing concerns in different areas of life such as governance, business, spirituality and ecology.
In revealing interviews with captains of industry and subsistence farmers, politicians and Dalits, spiritual leaders and bandits, Mark Tully captures the voices of the nation.
From the survival of India’s languages and the protection of wildlife, to the nation’s thriving industries and colourful public affairs, Non-Stop India is a testament to India’s vibrant history and incredible potential, offering an unforgettable portrait of this emerging superpower at a pivotal moment of its history.
Elegant, perceptive, and startlingly prophetic, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate is one of the finest accounts of Nehru ever written. Walter Crocker, the Australian high commissioner to India, admired Nehru the man—his grace, style, intelligence and energy—and was deeply critical of many of his political decisions—the invasion of Goa, India’s Kashmir policy, the Five Year Plans. This book, written shortly after Nehru’s death, is full of invaluable first hand observations about the man and his politics. Many of Crocker’s points, too—especially the implications of the Five Year Plans and of the introduction of democracy to India—are particularly relevant today. Out of print for many years, this classic biography has been reissued with an authoritative foreword by Ramachandra Guha.
Thomas Macaulay is most famous for having introduced the English language as a medium for learning in India, creating a class of westernized Indians who are sometimes derisively referred to as ‘Macaulay’s children’. Was this an act of cultural imperialism or a modernizing move far before its time?
Macaulay has always inspired both admiration and hostility in India. Ever since he served on the Supreme Council of India in the 1830s, his thinking and policies have had a profound, transformative impact on the subcontinent. Today, some Dalit activists even celebrate him as their liberator from caste tyranny.
Macaulay is the first biography of this vastly influential figure for the general reader, giving a vivid sense of a brilliant, eccentric, contradictory man and his complex times. In a portrait that is as elegant as it is intriguing, Zareer Masani traces Macaulay’s fascinating journey from child prodigy, historian and parliamentary orator in London to imperial administrator in India, and then a revered elder statesman back in Britain. The reader is allowed a glimpse into what it felt like to be at the centre of power in a global empire, ruling over hundreds of millions of Indian subjects and shaping the destiny of a subcontinent.
Told by the authority on the subject, Culture of Encounters gives us insight into how and why the Mughals-one of the most powerful imperial powers-poured immense energy into drawing Sanskrit thinkers to their courts, adopted and adapted Sanskrit-based practices, translated dozens of Sanskrit texts into Persian, and composed Persian accounts of Indian philosophy. Beginning with the invitation of Brahman and Jain intellectuals to King Akbar’s court, this incisive work details the numerous, Mughal-backed texts they produced under emperors Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan.
These cross-cultural encounters created a dynamic idea of Mughal rule essential to the empire’s survival. Many works, including Sanskrit epics and historical texts, were translated into Persian, elevating the political position of Brahmans and Jains and cultivating a voracious appetite for Indian writings throughout the Mughal world.
The first book to read these Sanskrit and Persian works in tandem, Culture of Encounters recasts the Mughal Empire as a multi-lingual state that collaborated with its Indian subjects to establish its role as an Indian empire. Revisiting a forgotten part of India’s history, Audrey Truschke certifies the critical role of the sociology of empire in building the Mughal polity, which came to shape the literary and ruling cultures of early modern India forever.
In this book Ramachandra Guha, an acclaimed historian of the environment, draws on many
years of research in three continents. He details the major trends, ideas, campaigns and
thinkers within the environmental movement worldwide. Among the thinkers he profiles are
John Muir, Mahatma Gandhi, Rachel Carson, and Octavia Hill; among the movements, the
Chipko Andolan and the German Greens. Environmentalism: A Global History documents
the flow of ideas across cultures, the ways in which the environmental movement in one
country has been invigorated or transformed by infusions from outside. It interprets the
different directions taken by different national traditions, and also explains why in certain
contexts (such as the former Socialist Bloc) the green movement is marked only by
its absence.
Massive in scope but pointed in analysis, written with passion and verve, this book
presents a comprehensive account of a significant social movement of our times,
and will be of wide interest both within and outside the academy. For this new edition,
the author has added a fresh prologue linking the book’s themes to ongoing
debates about the environmental impacts of global economic development.
Indian Accent opened in 2009 with an inventive Indian menu at The Manor, New Delhi. The restaurant serves a unique interpretation of Indian food, featuring historic revivals, playful nostalgia, with an openness to global techniques and influence. The restaurant was featured in the 2015 San Pellegrino list of 100 Best Restaurants in the World, the only one from India on the list, and awarded the Best Restaurant in India by the 2015 list of San Pellegrino Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants. The Indian Accent Restaurant Cookbook is based on the restaurant s path-breaking contemporary Indian menu by award-winning chef Manish Mehrotra. With photographs by Rohit Chawla, among India’s foremost food photographers, the cookbook has a selection of Indian Accent recipes to excite the adventurous while satisfying traditional palates.
Do I need to a founder’s agreement even if my co-promoters are my childhood friends?
What is a mentor agreement and how is it different from an investor agreement?
What clauses do I need to worry about in a seed investor agreement?
Do I need to patent everything I build on my own?
Is product management different for Indian start-ups?
These are the typical questions that bother an early-stage entrepreneur in the burgeoning Indian start-up ecosystem. The Manual for Indian Start-ups has been ideated as a handy guide meant for daily use. Authored by industry leaders, this book provides relevant templates based on the stage the venture is in for the first three years of the entrepreneurial journey.
Ways of Worship is a visual chronicle of ritual and religion in India. The photographs, taken by anthropologists in the course of fieldwork, illustrate the innovative, cosmopolitan and visually striking ways on which people please their gods. The photographs display the sophisticated visual cultures that frame the relationship between ordinary devotees and their gods.
‘It was easy becoming a voyeur.’ Saleem Peeradina, poet, artist, teacher-and compulsive people-watcher-gets extraordinary views of neighbourhood life from the twelve windows of his Versova Road house. From the age of four he has been drawn into the thrills of a voyeuristic life, a passion that was nurtured in his young adulthood by his interest in poetry and painting. In The Ocean in My Yard he gives us rare and exclusive pictures of the dramas he witnessed almost unobserved, sketching the interior landscape of hearts and heads. In lyrical prose interspersed with his own poems, Peeradina brings to life the vitality, as well as the predictability, of suburban Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s, where cycling down narrow lanes with school buddies, or peering into a film studio to catch a glimpse of a movie star, or having a ball of shaved ice was heaven itself. All of this is offset, of course, by run-over animals rotting at the neighbouring garbage dump. With passion, tenderness and sometimes detachment, he lucidly captures the experience of growing up Muslim in a large joint family: the adoring grandparents who light up his life all too briefly, the trio of eccentric uncles who confer on him the most favoured status, a difficult doctor-father against whose strong will he pitches his own, and a self-effacing mother whom he begins to appreciate only late in life. He also exposes religious and class issues and reveals how, even as a boy, he stood up against the ingrained sexism of Indian society. As Saleem candidly serves up anecdotes of his sexual awakening-massaging his aunt’s body to ease the tension after a long day in the kitchen-and trips to Anchor Cabins where his uncle conducted photography sessions that were to inspire his own nude paintings, we realize all too well how easy it is to become a voyeur, and how easy to fall under Peeradina’s spell.
The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi is an explosive and original analysis of the assassination of the ‘Father of the Nation’. Who is responsible for the Mahatma’s death? Just one determined zealot, the larger ideology that supported him, the Congress-led Government that failed to protect him, or a vast majority of Indians and their descendants who considered Gandhi irrelevant, and endorsed violence instead?
Paranjape’s meticulous study culminates in his reading of Gandhi’s last six months in Delhi where, from the very edge of the grave, he wrought what was perhaps his greatest miracle – the saving of Delhi and thus of India itself from the internecine bloodshed of Partition. Paranjape, taking a cue from the Mahatma himself, also shows us a way to expiate our guilt and to heal the wounds of an ancient civilization torn into two. This is a brilliant, far-reaching and profound exploration of the meaning of the Mahatma’s death.
