Sadashivrao Bhau with Ibrahim Khan Gardi “We went forth to Paniput to battle with the Mlech, ere we came back from Paniput and left a kingdom there.” So runs Rudyard Kipling’s haunting verse on the Third Battle of Panipat, from his poem ‘With Scindia to Delhi.’  The devastating line - “and left a kingdom there” - has never lost its chill as we enter the 265th anniversary of that fateful battle. For Maharashtra, the Panipat catastrophe, where the forces of the Afghan invader A

As the INSV Kaundinya retraces an ancient sea route, Shoumojit Banerjee explores India’s rich maritime past and its disruption by European colonialism Two days before the New Year, as the winter sun settled over Porbandar’s harbour, a ship put to sea in a manner that would have been eminently recognisable along India’s western coast more than a millennium ago. There was no engine to mark its departure, no steel hull vibrating against the pier as the vessel slipped into the Ar

Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) Every empire produces at least one great historian who anatomises its exhaustion with a completeness that neither predecessors nor successors quite match. For Rome, it was Edward Gibbon who dissected the long senescence of the western Roman and eastern Byzantine power through six volumes in ‘The history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ with prosecutorial irony between 1776 and 1788. For Habsburg Spain, it was Fernand Braudel, whose

Part 2: of our three-part series on the making of Indian Railways traces the journey from national trauma to technological ambition. A packed refugee train during Partition of Punjab, 1947. The Chittaranjan Locomotive Works was the precursor to today’s ‘Make in India’ initiative. Few institutions in the Republic have absorbed India’s shocks and ambitions with the stoicism of its railways. Born of an unlikely colonial wager, the Indian Railways’ modern story is one of reinvent

Part 1 : Part One of our three-part series examines how India’s railways evolved from a colonial experiment into the connective tissue of a modern nation. M.K. Gandhi leveraged the reach of the trains to connect rural suffering with national aspirations. Asia’s first passenger train created history on April 16, 1853, chugging 34 km from Bombay to Thane. Few institutions in India command the same emotional, political and economic resonance as the railways. They are at once an

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom 350 years on remains a defining moment in the subcontinent’s battle between power and principle. Painting depicting the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur. On November 24, India marks 350 years since the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, who was executed in Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. His death, seared into memory as an act of serene defiance, reshaped the religious and political landscape of northe

Eighty years on, the Nuremberg trials, for all its imperfections, remain the world’s most audacious attempt to tame barbarism with law. Robert Jackson at Nuremberg Judgement at Nuremberg (1961 film) Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg today has long been stripped of its wartime drama. The dock is empty; the headphones used for simultaneous translation - then a remarkable innovation - are now museum pieces. Yet, eighty years on, the ghosts of Courtroom 600 stil

A young British correspondent sent to decode Mao’s China instead became one of the earliest symbols of hostage diplomacy. Anthony Grey was held hostage in Peking during Mao's 'Cultural Revolution.' Anthony Grey, who passed away last month aged 87, first learned what it meant to be a pawn of great-power politics long before the term ‘hostage diplomacy’ came into vogue. ‘In view of the illegal persecution and the fascist atrocities in Hong Kong against Chinese correspondents, t

More than a century after the Great War, the spectre of Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Theory’ continues to haunt the world’s geopolitics. Sir Halford Mackinder Each November 11, Europe falls silent for two minutes to mark the end of the First World War in 1918. The Armistice that ended the Great War was met with exhausted relief, but also with great illusions, namely that mankind had fought “the war to end war.” Until 2014 (the centenary of the start of the Great War), it is estimat

Published at the height of the Cold War, Starship Troopers shocked readers with its unapologetic militarism and strict civic philosophy. First edition dust jacket of Starship Troopers Robert A. Heinlein It came as quite a surprise back in March to learn there is to be another film adaptation of Starship Troopers, perhaps science fiction grand master Robert A. Heinlein’s most controversial novel. With no confirmed release date, this new adaption is set to be written and direct

Part 4: Cunningham’s pioneering and sympathetic opus on the Sikhs was an act of moral courage that cost its author his career. Colonel James Tod and James Grant Duff are remembered as the grand patriarchs of Indian regional history. For all their flaws and limited sources at hand, the works of Tod, the romantic chronicler of Rajput valour with his ‘Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’ (1829–32), and Grant Duff, the epic narrator of Maratha ambition in his three-volume ‘Histor

Justice Ranade’s 1900 classic remains a foundational text of Maratha historiography that sought to reinterpret Maharashtra’s past as a disciplined national effort. When Mahadev Govind Ranade published ‘Rise of the Maratha Power’ in 1900, he was better known as a judge and reformer than as a historian. Yet, this book (more accurately, a collection of essays), issued in collaboration with his fellow jurist K. T. Telang, became the founding text of Maratha historiography. In a l

Phil Craig’s stunning ‘1945: The Reckoning’ restores Asia’s war to the centre of Empire’s collapse. Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany In the...

By recognising a phantom Palestinian state, Britain and France are not advancing peace but replaying their very misjudgments that set the...

In a lifetime devoted to relentless scholarship, Mehendale sifted legend from fact, giving the Maratha ruler the biography he truly...

The recent Israeli airstrike in Qatar exposes historic tensions between the Jewish state’s political leadership and its intelligence...

Part 3 - Ojha painstakingly sifted inscriptions, challenged Persian court chronicles and pioneered regional history to give Rajasthan a...

79 years ago, a little-known meat trader Gopal Mukherjee stopped India’s prized city from being swallowed by Partition. On August 27,...

Part 2: In an age when our country’s history was written by Europeans, Mitra showed that Indians could interpret their antiquities for...

With scalpel-like precision, Dr. Uday S. Kulkarni revives the drama of one of Indian history’s greatest recoveries. The Marathas’...