Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

[ramana]

The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Manan Ahmed Asif

A field-changing history explains how the subcontinent lost its political identity as the home of all religions and emerged as India, the land of the Hindus.

Did South Asia have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? This is a subject of heated debate in scholarly circles and contemporary political discourse. Manan Ahmed Asif argues that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Republic of India share a common political ancestry: they are all part of a region whose people understand themselves as Hindustani. Asif describes the idea of Hindustan, as reflected in the work of native historians from roughly 1000 CE to 1900 CE, and how that idea went missing.
This makes for a radical interpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity. Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, Asif uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. Asif closely examines the most complete idea of Hindustan, elaborated by the early seventeenth-century Deccan historian Firishta. His monumental work, Tarikh-i Firishta, became a major source for European philosophers and historians, such as Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, and Gibbon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet Firishta’s notions of Hindustan were lost and replaced by a different idea of India that we inhabit today.
The Loss of Hindustan reveals the intellectual pathways that dispensed with multicultural Hindustan and created the religiously partitioned world of today.

Basically, each invader imposed their idea of the name on the land.
Muslims called it Hindusthan and British called it India when all along it was Bharat

[ramana]

Partition: The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947
Barney White-Spunner

Between January and August 1947 the conflicting political, religious and social tensions in India culminated in independence from Britain and the creation of Pakistan. Those months saw the end of ninety years of the British Raj, and the effective power of the Maharajahs, as the Congress Party established itself commanding a democratic government in Delhi. They also witnessed the rushed creation of Pakistan as a country in two halves whose capitals were two thousand kilometers apart. From September to December 1947 the euphoria surrounding the realization of the dream of independence dissipated into shame and incrimination; nearly 1 million people died and countless more lost their homes and their livelihoods as partition was realized. The events of those months would dictate the history of South Asia for the next seventy years, leading to three wars, countless acts of terrorism, polarization around the Cold War powers and to two nations with millions living in poverty spending disproportionate amounts on their military.

The roots of much of the violence in the region today, and worldwide, are in the decisions taken that year. Not only were those decisions controversial but the people who made them were themselves to become some of the most enduring characters of the twentieth century. Gandhi and Nehru enjoyed almost saint like status in India, and still do, whilst Jinnah is lionized in Pakistan. The British cast, from Churchill to Attlee and Mountbatten, find their contribution praised and damned in equal measure. Yet it is not only the national players whose stories fascinate. Many of those ordinary people who witnessed the events of that year are still alive. Although most were, predictably, only children, there are still some in their late eighties and nineties who have a clear recollection of the excitement and the horror. Illustrating the story of 1947 with their experiences and what independence and partition meant to the farmers of the Punjab.

[ramana]

The tears of the Rajas : mutiny, money and marriage in India 1805-1905
Ferdinand Mount

A controversial history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single family, the Lows, ancestors of the author, Ferdinand Mount.
The Tears of the Rajas is a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family. For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt, and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own. Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise.

On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India. The Lows are the family of the author's grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget.

The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers - the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral - but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust. An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.

Sort of people's history of Raj from the English commoner.

[ramana]

Indus Saga
Aitzaz Ahsan

The Indus region, comprising the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan), has always had its distinct identity - racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. In the last five thousand years, this region has been a part of India, politically, for only five hundred years. Pakistan, then, is no 'artificial' state conjured up by the disaffected Muslim elite of British India. Aitzaz Ahsan surveys the history of Indus - as he refers to this region - right from the time of the Harappan civilization to the era of the British Raj, concluding with independence and the creation of Pakistan. Ahsan's message is aimed both at Indians still nostalgic about 'undivided 'India and their Pakistani compatriots who narrowly tend to define their identity by their 'un-Indianness'.

Alternate history to justify Pakistan.

[chetak]

Indus Saga
Aitzaz Ahsan

The Indus region, comprising the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan), has always had its distinct identity - racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. In the last five thousand years, this region has been a part of India, politically, for only five hundred years. Pakistan, then, is no 'artificial' state conjured up by the disaffected Muslim elite of British India. Aitzaz Ahsan surveys the history of Indus - as he refers to this region - right from the time of the Harappan civilization to the era of the British Raj, concluding with independence and the creation of Pakistan. Ahsan's message is aimed both at Indians still nostalgic about 'undivided 'India and their Pakistani compatriots who narrowly tend to define their identity by their 'un-Indianness'.

Alternate history to justify Pakistan.

supported by the spiel that they spew out on all PIA international flights

[ramana]

High Conflict
Amanda Ripley

When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people. High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with "an us and a them." In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.

Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better.
All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good, something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recatego­rized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.

[ramana]

The unthinkable: Who survives when disaster strikes and why
Amanda Ripley

It lurks in the corner of our imagination, almost beyond our ability to see it: the possibility that a tear in the fabric of life could open up without warning, upending a house, a skyscraper, or a civilization. Today, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? What will it feel like? Will we be heroes or victims? Will our upbringing, our gender, our personality–anything we’ve ever learned, thought, or dreamed of–ultimately matter? Amanda Ripley, an award-winning journalist for Time magazine who has covered some of the most devastating disasters of our age, set out to discover what lies beyond fear and speculation. In this magnificent work of investigative journalism, Ripley retraces the human response to some of history’s epic disasters, from the explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship in 1917–one of the biggest explosions before the invention of the atomic bomb–to a plane crash in England in 1985 that mystified investigators for years, to the journeys of the 15,000 people who found their way out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Then, to understand the science behind the stories, Ripley turns to leading brain scientists, trauma psychologists, and other disaster experts, formal and informal, from a Holocaust survivor who studies heroism to a master gunfighter who learned to overcome the effects of extreme fear. Finally, Ripley steps into the dark corners of her own imagination, having her brain examined by military researchers and experiencing through realistic simulations what it might be like to survive a plane crash into the ocean or to escape a raging fire.

Ripley comes back with precious wisdom about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain’s fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses. Most unexpectedly, she discovers the brain’s ability to do much, much better, with just a little help. The Unthinkable escorts us into the bleakest regions of our nightmares, flicks on a flashlight, and takes a steady look around. Then it leads us home, smarter and stronger than we were before.

I know in a panic situation the reptilian brain takes over. However, if we step back a split second and let the neocortex work out a viable plan it's best.

[Cyrano]

Ramana garu, how do you manage to read so many books?! I can't get through one or two a month!!

[ramana]

Need to have deep interest in the subject and can absorb fast.

[ramana]

For example the two Amanda Ripley books are crucial to negotiate the modern world.

[ramana]

High conflict is what the Bhagavatam tells us happened repeatedly. And leads to total annihilation. Mahabharata was the last one.

[ramana]

Castles Made of Sand: A Century of Anglo-American Espionage and Intervention in the Middle East
Andre Gerolymatos

"Extensively researched—with detailed source notes and an expansive bibliography—and cogently argued, Gerolymatos's study of diplomacy by espionage is timely and instructive." - Publishers Weekly
With roots in imperialism and the nineteenth-century mindset of the "Great Game," Western nations have waged an intricate spy game this past century to establish control over the Middle East, secure access to key resources and regions of commerce, and prevent the spread of Soviet communism into the region. From the Suez Canal to the former Ottoman Empire, British and American intelligence communities have conspired to topple regimes and initiate Muslim leaders as pawns in a geopolitical chess game fought against Marxist expansion.
Yet while the Iron Curtain was doomed to fall near the end of the twentieth century, this pattern of tunnel vision has created a different monster. The resulting resurgence of Muslim radicalism, and the induction of Arabs and other Muslims into the dark arts of espionage and sabotage, have only served to fan the flames in an already incendiary region and deepen the tensions between the Middle East and the West today.
An authority on international studies and the history of guerilla warfare, André Gerolymatos offers the contemporary reader insight into the intelligence game that is still waged internationally with lethal intent, and into the Middle Eastern terrorist networks that had evolved over the decades. In this definitive account of covert operations in the Middle East, the author brings to life the extraordinary men and women whose successes and failures have shaped relations, and he reveals how the explosive nature of the region today has direct roots in the history of American and Western intervention.

Has a chapter on ISI founding by the British.

[ramana]

Wang Hui

The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity
Wang Hui

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China’s social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization. Arguing that China’s revolutionary history and its current liberalization are part of the same discourse of modernity, Wang Hui calls for alternatives to both its capitalist trajectory and its authoritarian past. From the May Fourth Movement to Tiananmen Square, The End of the Revolution offers a broad discussion of Chinese intellectual history and society, in the hope of forging a new path for China’s future.

China from Empire to Nation-State
Hui Wang, Michael Gibbs Hill

This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern.

China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.

[Mukesh.Kumar]

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman- Robert. K. Massie

What is it about?
The story of Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great), Tsarina of Russia between 1762 and 1796. Born into lesser German nobility, she was betrothed to the heir to the Russian Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter The Great) at the age of 14. Despite not knowing Russian at that time, and being a Lutheran, she converted to Orthodox, married the heir to the throne, became Empress Consort, before finally deposing her husband at thirty three, and ruling over Russia for the next thirty four years.
The book offers a window into contemporary European court life, politics, intrigue and covers an interesting period in history. She was the contemporary of Prussia's Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa and Josef II of Austria, and witnessed both the American Revolution and French Revolution during her reign.
Her reign oversaw the dismemberment of Poland between Prussia, Austria and Russia ( Poland did not exist as a nation till the Treaty of Versailles), the expansion of Russian south, taking over lands in Ukraine from the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Crimea and Southern Ukraine from the Ottomans. Peter the Great had given Russia her first access to the sea in the Baltic, under Catherine Russia got her first warm water port on the black Sea in Sebastopol, creation of new cities - Kherson, Odessa, Sebastopol; founding of Moscow State University; her patronage of Art which built up one of the largest art collections in Europe. She corresponded with Voltaire and Grimm, but at home domestic politics made her resort to authoritarian measures. And despite her wishes to renew the legal code of Russia, domestic dynamics made her accommodate serfdom.

What Makes the book interesting?
The author drawing on her memoirs, correspondence with intellectuals, court documents and accounts of diplomats and foreign emissaries, paints a real picture, showing her with her emotions and how she maintained a public facade often when troubled inside. How despite her wishes to make a more equal society, she had to play along with the powerful Church and nobility. How political alliances changed dynamically in Europe and how great powers grew or were diminished.

Especially interesting is her comments on how she could get her wishes passed, "I do not pass laws until I am sure that it is something that the populace wants." Interesting parallels can be drawn to India currently.

What were weaknesses in the book?
I felt that an angle on state finances, the costs of war, etc was missing. Without which it is difficult to grasp the significance of the investments and numbers mentioned in the book.

Why we should read it?

• Understand Russia- Why the Russians are how they are? Why they are adamant on Ukraine? Why they consider the Baltic their playground?
• Understand Geopolitics- No nation has grown strong without resilience or focusing on self-interest.

[A_Gupta]

Any takes on
Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future
Raghuram Rajan, Rohit Lamba

[chetak]

Any takes on
Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future
Raghuram Rajan, Rohit Lamba

A_Gupta ji,

the tome is probably a hygienic necessity that is best perused on the throne, more so, in those few lonely locales, where Modi's jal jeevan mission has yet to reach.

The man has no real formal training in economics. He is a "finance professional", a professor of finance in the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and his basic degree is in electrical engineering. He is politically patronizing and woke in his brash statements on India's future under Modi, and has delusions of grandeur, and high but futile hopes of making it either as India's PM or FM, under the tried and used mafioso raincoat model but with pappu calling the shots.

If it unfortunately comes to pass, it will be a real laurel and hardy show

[Tanaji]

Cross posting:

Can anyone recommend a definitive reference book on Ramjanmabhoomi temple , its history and the movement? Must cover Babari demolition as well. Definitely not from the likes of Irfan Habib and ilk

[ShauryaT]

Cross posting:

Can anyone recommend a definitive reference book on Ramjanmabhoomi temple , its history and the movement? Must cover Babari demolition as well. Definitely not from the likes of Irfan Habib and ilk

Tanaji: Three works that may be of interest.

1. An older one from the reverative BB Lal: https://www.amazon.com/Rama-Historicity ... 158&sr=8-1

2. Meenakishi Jain - documents the politics of the movement too. https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Rama-Case ... C96&sr=8-1

3. I found the Allahabad (Prayag) judgment an interesting read at the time. https://elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in/ ... ingPage.do

[Tanaji]

Many thanks Shauryaji. I will get the Jain book for starters and then move on to the Lal book…

Lets hope more such books get written.. there is hardly any coverage of Mulayams actions post Babari demolition and is brushed over..

[ricky_v]

i am currently reading the book, 1491, revelations of the americas before columbus



this book deals with the premise that the americans, before columbus worked ecological projects on a mammoth scale and had civilisational philosophy not seen elsewhere, this goes against everything that cope authors and books preach of tree-hugging savage injuns who had literal actual 0 civilisation and then go on to great intellectual masturbatory lengths to justify this assertion, such as a north-south axis or aliens, anything but the obvious fact staring everyone in the face; diamond's book, rationalisation of failure / soft bigotry of low expectations, is the worst of the lot, it made me mad when i first read it and its memory makes me mad even now

... back to 1491, quoting from wiki

The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in present-day northern Peru; and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico.

Mann argues that, in fact, Native Americans were a keystone species, one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species". By the time the Europeans arrived in numbers to supplant the indigenous population in the Americas, the previous dominant people had been almost eliminated, mostly by disease. There was extensive disruption of societies and loss of environmental control as a result. Decreased environmental influence and resource competition would have led to population explosions in species such as the American bison and the passenger pigeon. Because fire clearing had ceased, forests would have expanded and become denser. The world discovered by Christopher Columbus began to change after his arrival, so Columbus "was also one of the last to see it in pure form"

[chetak]

i am currently reading the book, 1491, revelations of the americas before columbus

The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in present-day northern Peru; and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico.

Mann argues that, in fact, Native Americans were a keystone species, one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species". By the time the Europeans arrived in numbers to supplant the indigenous population in the Americas, the previous dominant people had been almost eliminated, mostly by disease. There was extensive disruption of societies and loss of environmental control as a result. Decreased environmental influence and resource competition would have led to population explosions in species such as the American bison and the passenger pigeon. Because fire clearing had ceased, forests would have expanded and become denser. The world discovered by Christopher Columbus began to change after his arrival, so Columbus "was also one of the last to see it in pure form"

ricky ji,

for your information, just in case ....................


In 2011, Mann published his sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

It explores the results of the European colonization of the Americas, a topic begun in Alfred Crosby's 1972 work The Columbian Exchange, which examined exchanges of plants, animals, diseases and technologies after European encounters with the Americas.

Mann added much new scholarship that had been developed in the 40 years since that book was published.

[ricky_v]

ricky ji,

for your information, just in case ....................

thanks chetak sir, did not know about this one, will take up after 1491