Prashant Kidambi’s Cricket Country: The Untold History of the First All India Team is ostensibly about the first Indian cricket team to have toured Britain. However, in reality, the book is much more than that. It is about how sport helped dissolve national, caste, class and community.
‘We are off’ was the cryptic concluding line of a telegram two young British Telegraph officers managed to send out from Delhi to Ambala on 11th May, 1857, informing British military authorities there that the mutiny had spread to Delhi. Thus the Revolt of 1857…
‘The hungry rarely write history, and historians are rarely hungry.’
I have known the author of this astonishing book, Professor Sheila Zurbrigg, for a long time. I first read her book Rakku’s Story: Structures of Ill-health and Source of Change in the late seventies…
Aside from the reflections of India’s first psychoanalyst, Calcutta-based Gindrasekhar Bose (1886-1953), made famous via his correspondence with Sigmund Freud, contemporary Indian psychoanalysts have been fairly unanimous in finding the clinical work.
To be single by choice is not seen as choice. A few women I knew were kept single by their fathers so that the salary they brought home could provide for the son’s education. Others were promoted to the status of sons providing for the siblings’ marriages.
In the summer of 2019, while following the election campaign of Kanhaiya Kumar in Begusarai, I stumbled upon a dilapidated nondescript piece of history, tucked away in the vast hinterlands of Bihar. A dilapidated structure, seemingly remains of what was once a polling booth.