The neglect of Bengal’s women revolutionaries mirrors a deeper failure to uphold the dignity and rights of women in the state today. Matangini Hazra featured on an Indian Stamp Bengali women have played a decisive role in shaping movements of resistance, reform and revolution throughout India’s long and complex history. Their contributions have been profound and transformative, from the anti-colonial struggle to social reform movements. But in modern narratives, these contrib

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearl

There are a few places in India where a walk of less than a kilometre can take you through more than a century of the nation’s memory. In Amritsar, it can. Within walking distance stand Jallianwala Bagh, the Partition Museum and the Golden Temple. Together, they mark three moments when India's sense of itself was profoundly altered. Jallianwala Bagh reminds us of the brutality of colonial rule. The Partition Museum bears witness to the human cost of Independence and Partition

As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, its finest histories reveal a restless nation unable to escape the foundational neurosis of its own creation. Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), by Emanuel Leutze. No painting has done more to canonise America’s founding myth. Yet beneath its heroic certainty lies the restless republic that historians from Charles Beard to Robert Kagan would relentlessly question. Behind the fireworks and the dutiful invocations of libe

A diplomatic row over a wartime nationalist force exposes centuries of contested memory between Poland and Ukraine. Memorials to the victims of Volhynia remain central to Polish historical memory. “How can I live in this country / Where the foot knocks against / The unburied bones of kin?” Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz asked in his 1945 poem In Warsaw. Writing amid the ruins of a continent devastated by war, Miłosz captured a transcendental truth about Eastern Europe, where t

Long before the ‘Out of India’ theory, a forgotten Victorian orientalist turned the foundations of Western civilization upside down by audaciously making India the cradle of Greece. What if Greece, the pride of Western civilization, the birthplace of Homer, Plato and Aristotle, was actually Hindu in origin? What if the first inhabitants of Hellas had first spoken a form of Sanskrit? What if the Pelasgians, the mysterious people who inhabited Greece before the Greeks themselve

As Majapahit crumbled and Islam reshaped the archipelago, Bali emerged as the unlikely custodian of Java’s classical inheritance. The last article in this column discussed how Java held a uniquely important position of the strongest anchor of the Indic character of Indonesia. Not many Indians are aware of a fact about the supporting or rather the most crucial role that has been played by Bali, a tiny adjacent island thinly separated by sea from Java, in historically protectin

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positive

Cinema frequently departs from historical reality to serve narrative and emotional needs. Cinema has served as a powerful medium of blending history with storytelling to create emotionally compelling narratives. The representation of history in cinema oscillates between fact and fiction. It raises questions on authenticity, interpretation, and artistic freedom. Bollywood has shown fascination with historical themes and grand empires like the Mughals and other kings and kingdo

Beneath the world’s largest Muslim democracy lies an older Indic inheritance now under strain from deepening Arabisation. In last two articles we discussed the idea of Indosphere and the challenges faced by it. We now move to the core, by picking up a suitable example, whereby a more granular understanding of both these aspects can be developed. The examples of identifiably strongest representative Indic character are two in the whole Southeast Asia region, one each from its

Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem On April 11, 1961, in a converted cultural hall called Beit Ha’am in Jerusalem, the world witnessed an extraordinary reckoning with one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century - the Holocaust, in which six million European Jews were systematically murdered under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Sitting behind a bulletproof glass booth was Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer who had served as head of Jewish affairs in the Nazi securi

To treat the Mysore ruler and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as comparable figures is not merely bad history, but an abdication of all moral judgement. Finding the body of Tippoo Sultan-Samuel William Reynolds, (1800) When Maharashtra Congress chief Harshwardhan Sapkal, with an eye to minority appeasement, recently declared Tipu Sultan the equivalent of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, he was tapping into a long-running project which is the rehabilitation of the Mysore ruler as a ‘s

Hussain Nizam Shah I orders the decapitation of Ramaraya (r. 1542-65), the defeated ruler of Vijayanagar. From the manuscript of Ta'rif-i Husain Shahi. The fall of Vijayanagar was sudden and spectacular. On January 26, 1565, on the plains between the villages of Rakkasi and Tangadi, the last great Hindu empire of South India lost its ruler, its army and its future. Rama Raya, the empire’s all-powerful regent, was captured and beheaded by a confederacy of Deccan sultans. Withi

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