The writing moves you. It leaves you seething at the indignity and injustice inflicted on the last heroes and countless others by a system seeped in colonial bureaucratic rigmaroles/bureaucracy. Sainath highlights the irony of how independent India chose to recognize its freedom fighters and framed the eligibility criterion for pensions such as the Swatantra Sainik Samman.
The author cautions against using the words ‘natives’ or ‘whites’ or ‘Anglo-Indians’ among others, as these are politically contested terms in themselves. While they are loaded terms, the colonial archives’ understanding them became a way to address non-European locals, thus staying away from their identity or parentage.
Raghavan’s reflections, as a seasoned diplomat, on the problems that Asaf Ali had to face as India’s Ambassador to the United States (appointed by the Interim Government a few months before Independence), allow us to appreciate the adverse conditions under which the first set of envoys had to function. They were ridiculed if they were ostentatious
The present volume, going ahead, narrates Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s friendship and interactions with a host of political leaders across ideologies. Gandhiji, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan were some of such leaders.
This research monograph based on fresh, unknown and by that token unutilized sources of the political history of Varanasi offers insights and presents incisive analysis of many known and unknown events. The historians’ gaze has largely remained oblivious to the sources, scattered as they are, not only in many regional repositories, various State Archives
The numbers that Feldhaus has used to illustrate her argument are fascinating. There are the 12 jyotirlingas, the twelve major sites of pilgrimage of Siva worshippers, and while most do not explain the multiplicity of such sites