The French victory at the Battle of Adyar River in 1746 showed how disciplined infantry and modern firepower could overturn the old Indian military order, while offering the British a lesson they would master. Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix The Adyar, winding through the southern reaches of present-day Chennai before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, was neither a great imperial frontier nor the setting for one of those enormous engagements in which the fate of kingdoms appe

While its consequences were politically decisive, Akbar’s siege of Chittor culminated in mass slaughter and a tragedy that haunted Mewar for generations. Akbar shoots the Rajput commander, Jaimal using a matchlock, illustration from the Akbarnama, 1590–1595. There is a sanctity in the very name of Chittor, wrote Col. James Tod in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829-32), which from the earliest times never failed to animate its defenders. Chittor’s fame rests not upo

Published in 1893, Oman’s history remains a dazzling narrative of the centuries after Rome’s fall, and complicates the darkness traditionally ascribed to them. Battle of Tours (732), by Charles de Steuben (1837) Sir Charles Oman For a modern reader, the very title ‘The Dark Ages’ is a red flag. Over decades, we have been well-schooled by academia to treat the phrase “the Dark Ages” with a mixture of condescension and linguistic allergy. To speak of the five centuries followin

Long before Khajuraho became a shorthand for erotic sculpture, Sisir Kumar Mitra’s history reveals the formidable dynasty that made those temples possible. The impregnable fortress of Kalinjar, apogee of the Chandellas. The erotic sculptures at Khajuraho have become so inseparable from the place that the temples are often reduc ed, in the popular imagination, to the sensual figures carved on their walls. Yet the Chandellas, the powerful dynasty that built Khajuraho, were not

In Xi Jinping’s China, the fight against corruption has become inseparable from the struggle for political control. Since the 1990s, there has been a popular saying in China: If the Communist Party doesn’t fight corruption, it will destroy China. But if it does fight corruption, it will be the end of the Communist Party. This then is the paradox that has faced the Communist Party of China since Deng Xiaoping instituted the Reform and Opening Up Era during the 1980s, where u

In the gadfly historian’s classic The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, diplomacy is less a stately art than a dangerous game of miscalculation and bluff. Seventy years on, the world it describes still feels disconcertingly familiar. “We seek nothing but the security which comes from the balance of power.” The words were attributed by Lord Acton to William III in Acton’s lecture on the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), as one of the English king’s last conversations sp

Hyderabad was one of the richest princely states in India. The Hyderabad State comprised five districts of Marathwada, eight districts of Telangana and three districts of the Hyderabad-Karnataka region. Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu and Hindi were spoken across the state, while Urdu was its official language. The Nizam's dynastic rule continued for about two and a quarter centuries, from 1724 to 1948. Kamruddin was the founder of the Nizam dynasty, while Mir Osman Ali Khan w

The battle over the past is ultimately a battle over how a civilisation understands itself. AI generated image It is a celebrated maxim that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, second as farce. Yet, the deeper one peers into the abyss of antiquity, the further one can project into the horizons of posterity. Lessons extracted from the annals of time have perpetually served as guiding beacons for political statecraft, both ancient and contemporary. Historically, India was

A civilisation defends its history not by silencing uncomfortable narratives, but by creating generations strong enough to question every narrative. Manan Ahmed Asif History is not merely a record of what happened. It shapes how societies remember themselves, understand their origins and interpret contemporary conflicts. Historical scholarship is therefore a form of intellectual power. The controversy surrounding Manan Ahmed Asif’s The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of Indi

Paying respect to Vande Mataram is not about endorsing any party or government but is a tribute to the freedom struggle where countless Indians from all states created a singular national chorus. The recent controversy in Keralam over the full recitation of Vande Mataram at official events has once again brought to the fore an old yet critical question that can the national memories of our freedom struggle be compartmentalized within the boundaries of states, political partie

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