Download or read book Attendant Lords written by T.C.A. Raghavan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bairam Khan and his son, Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan were soldiers, poets and courtiers whose lives reflected the turbulent times they lived in. In telling their stories, Attendant Lords spans the reigns of four emperors - Babur, Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir - and covers over a hundred years of Mughal history, a time when these two noblemen were at the very heart of the court's labyrinthine politics.After Humayun's untimely death, Bairam Khan was regent to the young Emperor Akbar for four critical years. Bairam's own son, Abdur Rahim, became one of the most important generals of the Mughal Empire, but he is best remembered for his literary prowess, most particularly for his famous 'dohas'. Literature plays a large part in this story.This unusual dual biography traces the lives of these two noblemen against the backdrop of the courtly intrigues, brutal power struggles and the grand literary endeavours of the Mughal court. And it looks at their afterlives - how politics and the Hindi-Urdu debate reincarnated them as national heroes; how both men came to be seen as standing at the confluence of Hinduism and Islam; how their life stories have undergone subtle transformations; and how history, religion and literature combine in the broader context of nationalism and nation building.

Download or read book Attendant Lords Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India written by T. C. A. Raghavan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bairam Khan and his son, Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan were soldiers, poets and courtiers whose lives reflected the turbulent times they lived in. In telling their stories, Attendant Lords spans the reigns of four emperors - Babur, Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir - and covers over a hundred years of Mughal history, a time when these two noblemen were at the very heart of the court's labyrinthine politics. After Humayun's untimely death, Bairam Khan was regent to the young Emperor Akbar for four critical years. Bairam's own son, Abdur Rahim, became one of the most important generals of the Mughal Empire, but he is best remembered for his literary prowess, most particularly for his famous 'dohas'. Literature plays a large part in this story. This unusual dual biography traces the lives of these two noblemen against the backdrop of the courtly intrigues, brutal power struggles and the grand literary endeavours of the Mughal court. And it looks at their afterlives - how politics and the Hindi-Urdu debate reincarnated them as national heroes; how both men came to be seen as standing at the confluence of Hinduism and Islam; how their life stories have undergone subtle transformations; and how history, religion and literature combine in the broader context of nationalism and nation building.

Download or read book Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar written by M. J. Akbar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In July 1765 Robert Clive, in a letter to Sir Francis Sykes, compared Gomorrah favourably to Calcutta, then capital of British India. He wrote: 'I will pronounce Calcutta to be one of the most wicked places in the Universe.' Drawing upon the letters, memoirs and journals of traders, travellers, bureaucrats, officials, officers and the occasional bishop, Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar is a chronicle of racial relations between Indians and their last foreign invaders, sometimes infuriating but always compelling. A multitude of vignettes, combined with insight and analysis, reveal the deeply ingrained conviction of 'white superiority' that shaped this history. How deep this conviction was is best illustrated by the fact that the British abandoned a large community of their own children because they were born of Indian mothers. The British took pride in being outsiders, even as their exploitative revenue policy turned periodic drought and famine into horrific catastrophes, killing impoverished Indians in millions. There were also marvellous and heart-warming exceptions in this extraordinary panorama, people who transcended racial prejudice and served as a reminder of what might have been had the British made India a second home and merged with its culture instead of treating it as a fortune-hunter's turf. The power was indisputable-the British had lost just one out of 18 wars between 1757 and 1857. Defeated repeatedly on the battlefield, Indians found innovative and amusing ways of giving expression to resentment in household skirmishes, social mores and economic subversion. When Indians tried to imitate the sahibs, they turned into caricatures; when they absorbed the best that the British brought with them, the confluence was positive and productive. But for the most part, subject and ruler lived parallel lives. From the celebrated writer of the bestselling Gandhi's Hinduism: the Struggle Against Jinnah's Islam comes this extensively researched and utterly engrossing book, which is easy to pick up and difficult to put down.

Download or read book Red Fort Remembering the Magnificent Mughals written by Debasish Das and published by BecomeShakespeare.com. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we associate the Red Fort with the view of the Prime Minister proudly unfurling the national flag every year on 15 August on the massive red wall curtain. To children and even most of us, the Red Fort is only this view that is broadcast on television. It is the ubiquitous image often used in marketing as well. Many of us haven’t even bothered to go inside the Fort, and many, including me, satisfied ourselves with our photos taken in front of this wall. This actually is a later addition erected by Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb. The Red Fort is much more than this red wall and the platform where the prime minister delivers his speech. In the book, the author attempts to swipe aside the wall and take a deep dive inside the Fort – not just the physical structures but how exactly the planning was done to create a truly complex and artistic palace fortress, to explore the Mughal way of life with their festivals, ceremonies, food and clothing amongst other themes. The beauty of the fort can only be understood and best appreciated from the string of apartments that once lined the river Yamuna on its opposite side. It must have been beautiful indeed to glide down the Yamuna on a boat and appreciate all the buildings that housed the emperor’s private quarters. Now the river has receded afar, but in olden times the various private apartments such as the Rang mahal, Khwabgah (‘abode of dreams’) or the emperor’s bed-chamber as well as the famous Diwan-e-Khas where the Mughal Emperor sat on the Peacock Throne were lined along the river front. There is a reason why the pioneering British historian-explorer James Fergusson termed the Red Fort ‘the most magnificent palace in the East.’ It was a creative venture well integrated to a new city and was truly unrivalled with respect to its design as well as functioning. The book also highlights that, though separated in time by more than three centuries from today, we can still visualize how the unsure footsteps which Babur took in Hindustan took shape in the reign of Shah Jahan, a connoisseur of art and culture. Descending on one side from Genghis Khan and the brutal Tamerlane on the other, Babur gained an irreversible entry to India in the plains of Panipat almost unexpectedly, by defeating a mammoth army of Ibrahim Lodi in 1526. The Mughals, which was the Persian word for ‘Mongols’, set up an incredible empire in Agra and Delhi, to which were born great emperors like Akbar and Shah Jahan. Apart from magnificent monuments they also built a truly syncretic culture of shared values, encouraged free exchange of knowledge and established rituals, customs and festivals that assimilated age-old traditions from east and west. Even the Taj Mahal, described by Rabindranath Tagore as a ‘teardrop on the face of Time’, was built as a symbol of love of a king to his departed queen, like an re-incarnation of Majnun for his Laila, so different from the obvious imagery that a barbaric king may evoke in one’s mind. Similarly, the Red Fort of Delhi was the culmination of Mughal soft power. With profusely laid flower and fruit-bearing char-bagh gardens criss-crossed with streams of water canals, it was layered in symbolism that art historians find interesting even after many centuries to discuss elements that give it a sense of freshness even with the mere empty shell of buildings left behind after 1857. As the author says, “Delhi however lived up to its reputation of slipping through the very fingers of those who attempted to raise a new city here: starting with Prithvi Raj Chauhan’s Lal Kot; Allauddin Khilji’s Siri; the Tughluq trio’s troika of Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah & Kotla Firuz Shah; Humayun’s Dinpanah and later Lutyen’s Delhi of the British; Shah Jahan’s majestic offering to the city of his choice was soon to be destroyed by fate.” The narrative follows the incidents of 1857 till the British Durbars and highlights that the Fort was not the home of the Mughals only in their prime, but also in their decline and till their very extinction. The book seeks to present the lived culture of Mughals in all its multiple facets. The book is divided in four parts. In Part 1 the focus is on the Imperial court and the court etiquette, cultivation of Persian and its enrichment with translations from Sanskrit, patronage of Hindu and Jain scholars. Part 2 contains detailed accounts of the Red Fort and the symbolism of its architecture, the philosophy of jharokha darshan, ceremonies, games and pastimes, the material culture of costumes and jewellery, food, drink and perfumery. The remaining two parts deal with the decline and fall of the Mughal rule and the British Colonial Durbars at the Red Fort. The broadly historical narrative is enlivened by various anecdotes.

Download or read book The Lifework of a Labor Historian Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life Work of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden (eds. Ulbe Bosma and Karin Hofmeester), presents the latest developments in the history of labor and capitalism. As part of Global Labor History, Jan Lucassen, Magaly Rodrígues García, Sidney Chalhoub, and Willem van Schendel discuss new concepts of work and workers, including sex workers, slaves in Brazil, and voluntary communal laborers in North-East India, while Andreas Eckert shows the relevance of area studies. Jürgen Kocka presents a history of capitalism and its critics to date, Pepijn Brandon analyzes Marx’s ideas on the link between free and coerced labor, and Jan Breman looks at the effects of capitalism on rural solidarity through the lens of Tocqueville.

Download or read book The Story of Work written by Jan Lucassen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity’s busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure. From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today’s gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.

Download or read book Courting India written by Nandini Das and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound and ground-breaking approach to one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India. In September 1615, Thomas Roe—Britain’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire—made landfall on the western coast of India. Roe entered the court of Jahangir, “conqueror of the world,” one of immense wealth, power, and culture that looked askance at the representative of a precarious and distant island nation. Though London was at the height of the Renaissance—the era of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne—financial strife and fragile powerbases presented risk and uncertainty at every turn. What followed in India was a turning-point in history, a story of palace intrigue, scandal, and mutual incomprehension that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. Using an incisive blend of Indian and British records, and exploring the art, literature, sights, and sounds of Elizabethan London and Imperial India, Das portrays the nuances of cultural and national collision on an individual and human level. The result is a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire—and a cogent reminder of the dangers of distortion in the history books of the victors.

Download or read book Turkish History and Culture in India written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turkish History and Culture in India examines the political, cultural and social role of Turks in medieval and early modern India, and their connections with Central Asia and Anatolia.

Download or read book A Lamp for the Dark World written by Parvati Sharma and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akbar the Great is a very familiar figure to most Indians. Hailed as a brilliant warrior, a great administrator, and a visionary ruler whose ideas of pluralism and tolerance sought to unify India with all its diversity of peoples and religions, he is also an increasingly contested figure in the national discourse. And familiar though he might be, Akbar is a mystery too, locked in his own legend: a man to admire but difficult to know. What was Akbar really like—as a child, a father, a friend, a foe? What were his moods like – his anger, his melancholy, his passions and his laughter? How did a thirteen-year-old fatherless boy, surrounded by ambitious advisors and warlords, become one of the world’s most powerful monarchs; and how did he deal with his dizzying rise? Was Akbar a sceptic or did he believe he had divine, miraculous powers? With revealing psychological insights into Akbar’s complex and magnetic personality, this biography is also the story of how Akbar’s ideas and ideals of kingship evolved through his reign; of how he came to concentrate in himself both political and religious authority; of his instances of megalomania, his doubts, and his yearning for justice. Rich in detail, and with a cast of unforgettable characters, it sparkles with humor and drama too, as it vividly evokes the world he lived in. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Parvati Sharma’s portrait of Akbar the Great brings alive as never before a man imperfect and extraordinary, who ruled for fifty years and has lived in the Indian imagination for close to half a millennium.

Download or read book Rebel Sultans The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji written by Manu S Pillai and published by Juggernaut Books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Asean And India The Way Forward written by Tommy Koh and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-09-28 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India became a Sectoral Dialogue Partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1992. In 1995, India became a full Dialogue Partner. In 2002, ASEAN and India held their first Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Since then, a bilateral Summit has been held annually.India's relations with Southeast Asia date back a thousand years. There are many cultural, religious and people-to-people linkages between India and the 10 ASEAN member states. Trade and investment ties have also grown since the opening of the Indian economy in the early 1990s. Relations are good but not optimal.ASEAN and India: The Way Forward hopes to inspire policymakers on both sides to understand the multifaceted relationship and explore ways to raise the bilateral ties to a higher peak.The book first traces the evolution of ASEAN-India relations over the centuries. It then examines the key areas of convergence and divergence between ASEAN and India. The final part explores the emerging areas where ASEAN and India can deepen their cooperation.

Download or read book The Upanishads written by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr. and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.' - Alfred North Whitehead In The Upanishads: An Introduction, Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr argues, with greater justification, that the whole of Indian philosophy is a footnote to the Upanishads. What Western scholars perceive to be the religious stigma of the Upanishads is the very reason these texts remain intellectually alive three thousand years after they had been expounded. The Upanishads did not remain static, and served as the crucible for philosophical developments in the centuries that followed. Drawing upon the scholarship of Indologists such as S. Radhakrishnan, Surendranath Dasgupta, Chandradhar Sharma, Daya Krishna, Max Mueller, Karl Harrington Potter and Patrick Olivelle, this handbook introduces the general readers to the tenets of Indian philosophy and its core ideas, discussing them as they unfold in the Upanishads through dialogue and stories.

Download or read book Allahu Akbar written by Manimugdha Sharma and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That he was a medieval king who, with a progressive bent of mind, dared to look ahead to find that common ground for all his people to stand together. That he was a medieval king who is today tempting us to look back into the past to see our future through his eyes. Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014 with Narendra Modi as the prime minister, an organised campaign began to vilify Emperor Akbar and the Mughals. While there were always voices that tried to project the Mughals as just another 'Islamic empire', ignoring the civilisational impact they had on India, even for them Akbar was a shining light in an otherwise era of darkness. Those talking in terms of easy binaries always found a 'good Muslim' in Akbar and a 'bad Muslim' in Aurangzeb. Academics and other liberals who could have countered this incorrect portrayal did not do it, dismissing such claims as mere screeches by the fringe that do not deserve any attention. But with the Hindu Right assuming political power, the fringe today has become the mainstream. And Akbar is no longer the 'good Muslim'. Why is there such hatred for Akbar, once the most loved king in India? What was the journey like, from being great to not-so-great? And how is this India different from Akbar's Hindustan? Has he become irrelevant in an India where growing Hindu nationalism threatens to alter the nature of the Indian state from a secular republic to a theocracy? Or is Akbar even more relevant today given the backdrop of hate that we all find ourselves in? Allahu Akbar seeks to find answers to these questions while providing a profile sketch of the emperor, his empire and his times.

Download or read book Dear Mrs Naidu written by Mathangi Subramanian and published by Young Zubaan, an imprint of Zubaan. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old Sarojini’s best friend, Amir, might not be her best friend any more. Ever since Amir moved out of the basti and started going to a posh private school, it seems like he and Sarojini have nothing in common. Then Sarojini finds out about the Right to Education, a law that might help her get a free seat at Amir’s school – or, better yet, convince him to come back to a new and improved version of the government school they went to together. As she struggles to keep her best friend, Sarojini gets help from some unexpected characters, including Deepti, a feisty classmate who lives at a construction site; Vimala Madam, a human rights lawyer who might also be an evil genius; and Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, a long-dead freedom fighter who becomes Sarojini’s secret pen pal. Told through letters to Mrs. Naidu, this is the story of how Sarojini learns to fight – for her friendship, her family, and her future. Published by Zubaan.

Download or read book An Oriental Biographical Dictionary written by Thomas William Beale and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book History Men written by T.C.A. Raghavan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2019-12-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History Men is the story of the intersecting lives of three deeply committed historians: Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958), who was an expert on the Mughal period; G.S. Sardesai (1865-1959), whose works were on the Marathas; and Raghubir Sinh (1908-1991), who studied the Rajputs. How the three became close friends and joint workers; how they wrote about the great confrontations between the Mughals, Rajputs and Marathas; how their long association exposed continuing conflicts of interpretation and explanation; and how, together, they illuminated a historical moment make for a story worth telling.A narrative built from original research based on the correspondence and the published and unpublished writings of the three scholars, this is also a portrait of rich friendships, of the minutiae of the lives of these historians, and their fierce commitment to historical research as they addressed the significant questions of the age they lived in. Anyone who is interested in the making of historical narratives will find History Men a compelling read.

Download or read book The People Next Door written by T.C.A. Raghavan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tracks seventy years of the India-Pakistan interface. Events, anecdotes and personalities drive its narrative to illustrate the cocktail of hostility, nationalism and nostalgia that defines every facet of the relationship. It looks at the main events through the eyes and words of actual players and contemporary observers to illustrates how, both in India and in Pakistan, these past events are seen through radically different prisms, how history keeps resurfacing and has a resonance that cannot be avoided to this day. Apart from political, military and security issues, The People Next Door evokes other perspectives: divided families, peacemakers, war mongers, contrarian thinkers, intellectual and cultural associations, unwavering friendships, the footprint of Bollywood, cricket and literature: all of which are intrinsic parts of this most tangled of relationships.