Smitha Balachandran

Immortalizing a literary work which juxtaposes art and history, culminating in the creation of a masterpiece is no easy task. But a historian of Manu S. Pillai’s caliber has achieved this on a monumental scale in False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma. Pillai describes the travels of the painter Ravi Varma through five princely states. He demonstrates how these maharajas, far from being frivolous despots consumed by lust and luxury, were involved in industrialization,...

Certain books on geopolitics (past and present) are insightful and revelatory enough to constitute an intellectual treat for the reader. ‘Great Power Games’ by erstwhile RAW chief Vikram Sood is exactly that. Published in 2025, this work begins by describing how power and money result in global control. Sood begins with the phrase: “It is difficult to define or measure power, but it is true that wealth is a source of power and the ability to project violent force adds to that power.” In...

Terrorism, which is a near ubiquitous phenomenon today, raises its ugly and sinister head every now and then with frightening precision and disastrous consequences. Terrorism can be defined as the deliberate targeting of civilians to terminate or lessen their support of their political leaders. In American military historian Caleb Carr’s controversial ‘The Lessons of Terror’ (2002), he analyses and describes how initially, this method was used by the Romans till the late eighteenth century...