India category: 2353 books

Drawing on the newest historical research and scholarship in the field, Modern South Asia provides challenging insights into the history of this fascinating region over the past three centuries. Jointly authored by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, it offers a rare depth of historical understanding...

In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian,...

The last and most intriguing book of the Ramayana, the Uttara Kanda is rendered here by noted Sanskrit scholar Arshia Sattar in vivid, sensuous detail. First composed around 500 BCE, it tells the story of an unjustly exiled prince, the abduction of his wife from the forest by a ten-headed demon king,...

While Galileo suffered under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War ruined Europe, and the Pilgrims struggled to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial...

Illustrated with over one hundred maps, photos and portraits, of the battles, individuals and places involved in the Indian Mutiny] The fascinating diary and correspondence of a serving British light cavalry officer during the high empire days of the Mid-Victorian era in India. “Originally an infantry...

[Illustrated with over one hundred maps, photos and portraits, of the battles, individuals and places involved in the Indian Mutiny] Colonel MacKenzie was only a young subaltern of three years’ service when the great Sepoy Mutiny broke out in 1857. His regiment, the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry stationed...

[Illustrated with over one hundred maps, photos and portraits, of the battles, individuals and places involved in the Indian Mutiny] Even a long experience of Indian and the customs of the Indians could have prepared John Sherer for the tumultuous events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A tax...

For more than 200 years, the Mughal emperors ruled supreme in northern India. How was it possible that a Muslim, ethnically Turkish, Persian-speaking dynasty established itself in the Indian subcontinent to become one of the largest and most dynamic empires on earth? In this rigorous new interpretation...

An engaging, enlightening "biography" of the ancient Hindu manuscript that became the world's most famous sex manual The Kamasutra is one of the world's best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular...

Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay has been the most popular writer of novels and short stories in his native Bengaland in India at large. Despite this, he remains unrecognized in the English speaking world. Narasingha P. Sil fills this void by presenting a historical critical assessment of his upbringing...

Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru, and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers. Patrick French’s award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the “damned...

In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah’s fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of his...

First published in 1840. According to the Introduction: "The circumstance of an English army penetrating into Central Asia, through countries which had not been traversed by European troops since Alexander the Great led his victorious army from the Hellespont to the Jaxartes and Indus, is so strong...

You cannot work with a giant and not tell people anything about him, said Dr Zakir Hussain, prompting Y.D. Gundevia to write about Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. During his 36-year career in the Indian Civil Service, Mr Gundevia came into close contact with Pandit Nehru with whom he had a genuinely cordial...