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This book brings together the writings on India produced by a range of Europeans who travelled or did not travel to India from 1500 to 1800. These include the arrivals from Portugal like Garcia da Orta, travellers headed to Mughal India, like the Frenchman Francois Bernier, Richard Steele and the Bordeaux jeweller, Augustin Herryard; collectors of material objects and trained warriors who arrived in the age of Mughal crisis and made most of the opportunities it offered also find a place in these pages: Richard Johnson and the Franco-Swiss mercenary Antoine Polier among others.

This book brings together the writings on India produced by a range of Europeans who travelled or did not travel to India from 1500 to 1800. These include the arrivals from Portugal like Garcia da Orta, travellers headed to Mughal India, like the Frenchman Francois Bernier, Richard Steele and the Bordeaux jeweller, Augustin Herryard; collectors of material objects and trained warriors who arrived in the age of Mughal crisis and made most of the opportunities it offered also find a place in these pages: Richard Johnson and the Franco-Swiss mercenary Antoine Polier among others.

Apologists for British colonial rule often claim that the Raj mainly brought democracy, the rule of law and trains to India. In her scholarly work about some of the best known hill stations on the subcontinent during the British colonial period, Queeny Pradhan provides us with another side to the story. She clearly shows that the Raj in India was an exercise in land appropriation, in the hegemonic domination of local colonized people, and in reordering of the natural space for the exclusive needs of the conquerors.

Is Indira Gandhi’s environmental legacy relevant to India of today? In Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature, Jairam Ramesh endeavours to enlist all her achievements, her motivations, her obstacles and more. It is a monumental treatise, an outcome of extensive and meticulous searching.
The author traces Indira’s interest in the natural world from her childhood—the influence of Jawaharlal, of Santiniketan and Rabindranath Tagore, whom she calls an ‘ecological man’, of Salim Ali and the rest. Her interest in nature was genuine and deep—in forests, stones, animal and birds, perhaps most in birds.

May you live in interesting times’, a favourite Chinese curse for all unmentionable acquaintances, could well describe life today not only for most of us individuals but also most countries. Just recently Catalonia has announced an, albeit short-lived, unilateral declaration of independence. It is one of the more prosperous provinces of Spain, having only 16 per cent of its population but receiving more than 20% of their FDI accounts for over 25% of their exports. Since the book does not directly focus on this, it is best not to say more about Catalonia except that most of us did not know that there was so much internal unrest in Spain.

It’s hard to come by a read that forensically lays threadbare the crimpled cohabitation of Mint Road with the two big sandstone blocks in New Delhi—North and South Block; and the dynamics of what is an inherently conflictual contract—if you can term it so—between them. You have one (of a kind) in T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan’s Dialogue of the Deaf: The Government and the RBI. Who gets to have the right of way—the mint or its owner?