Darshana & Itihasa: The Civilizational Gaze

History has its strange rhythms, and the Indian subcontinent seems to move to a peculiar beat—every century’s fifty-seventh year has brought...

Is it a valid argument that Syama Prasad Mookerjee was as culpable for the crisis in Kashmir as Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah? This is Ramachand...

In the 1950s, India’s foreign policy towards China was incredibly utopian—utopian because the Indian government was being led by fools who w...

The French writer André Malraux met Jawaharlal Nehru on several occasions in the 1950s and 1960s. In his autobiographical book Antimémoires ...

Imagine writing a 944-page history of independent India without mentioning in it even once the name of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Ramachand...

Ramachandra Guha begins the prologue to his book, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy , with a poem called ...

Most history texts claim that Emperor Asoka’s conversion to Buddhism happened after the Kalinga war, which was fought in the ninth year of h...

The Hindu principle of Karma does not entail that man’s life is fully determined, or that man cannot have free will since his life is govern...

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, “dictatorship of the proletariat” became a revolutionary slogan, and the word “proletariat” b...

Over the past century, the telling of Indian history has largely been filtered through external lenses—colonial, Islamic, and Marxist paradi...

By its insistence on total unity behind one God and one religious doctrine, monotheism often leads to oppression and tyranny. In his book, T...

In his book The Discovery of India , Jawaharlal Nehru has written that in the middle of the nineteenth century a significant part of Kashmir...

From 1600 to the 1930s, the most profitable “capitalist” corporation in the West was: Military Pvt. Ltd. The Western nations were using thei...

“The Marathas possess, alone of all the people of Hindustan and Deccan, a principle of national attachment, which is strongly impressed on t...

History offers few spectacles more consequential than the fusion of religion and political power. When spiritual visions intertwine with imp...

Did Emperor Asoka’s policy of governing through the pacifist tenets of Buddhism lead to the downfall of the Maurya Empire? In his book Ancie...

In 1999, at the age of 65, the popular writer and socialite Kamala Das converted to Islam—she took the name Kamala Surayya. The reason that ...

In  The Last Mughal , William Dalrymple constructs a vision of nineteenth-century India in which cultural and political vitality is almost e...

In 1858, a remarkable transfer of power occurred—one that remains among the most egregious financial injustices in imperial history. The Bri...

In his 1909 book, India: Impressions and Suggestions , J. Keir Hardie has accused the British government of causing famines in India through...

During the period of British rule, syphilis was known in India as the feringhee disease (European disease). In his book India in bondage , J...

“It has been computed that every fifth man in Great Britain is dependent, either directly or indirectly, on our Indian connection for his li...

During the period of British rule, India was racked by 25 famines (12 major famines and 13 minor ones), in which between 30 to 50 million st...

Hinduism’s Kali Yuga began when the monotheistic powers of the Middle East, Transoxiana, and Europe began their invasions of the Indian subc...

India paid 240 million pounds to finance Britain’s military effort in the First World War. India also contributed about 1.5 million soldiers...

In 1868, Britain declared war on the Ethiopian Empire (Abyssinia). An army was dispatched under General Robert Napier to crush the Ethiopian...

In 1895, the British government set up the Welby Commission to investigate wasteful spending in India. The commission presented its findings...

In the nineteenth century, the starving Indian peasant was bearing the burden of Britain’s military adventures in Asia. The British Empire p...

In the eighteenth century, the most prosperous regions of the Indian subcontinent were located in the Maratha Empire. The Maratha rulers imp...

In the 1770s, Edmund Burke—parliamentarian, philosopher, and one of the most eloquent critics of imperial excess—voiced serious concerns abo...

“Not only the wisdom of millennia – their madness too breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Za...

In  The Anarchy , William Dalrymple paints a portrait of pre-colonial India filtered through a selectively sympathetic lens—one that elevate...

In his 1968 book, A History of Warfare , Field Marshal Montgomery suggests that the Marathas were the Mongols of India. He says that in the ...

The Battle of Panipat in 1761 was more than a decisive loss for the Marathas—it was a seismic shift in the balance of power across the India...