top of page
Who Remembers Raja Rajendralal Mitra, India’s First ‘Scientific’ Historian?
Part 2: In an age when our country’s history was written by Europeans, Mitra showed that Indians could interpret their antiquities for...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Aug 28, 20255 min read
From Panipat’s Ashes: Peshwa Madhavrao and the Phoenix-like rise of the Maratha Empire
With scalpel-like precision, Dr. Uday S. Kulkarni revives the drama of one of Indian history’s greatest recoveries. The Marathas’...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Aug 24, 20255 min read
The Republic of Reason
India’s Constitution tied freedom of thought to freedom of rule. The test is whether both can endure together. As India turns 79, it is...
Dr. Kishore Paknikar
Aug 21, 20254 min read
Excavating Civilisation: A.S. Altekar and India’s Ancient Historical Imagination
In the decades after Independence, India’s past was often narrated through a narrow lens. As a result, many of the country’s finest...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Aug 19, 20255 min read
Brighter than a Thousand Suns: 80 Years of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Literature
From the blinding flash of August 1945 to the present, the atomic bomb has haunted literature with questions of morality, necessity and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Aug 9, 20255 min read
The Tiger’s Last Roar: Ranthambore and the Twilight of the Chauhans
The fall of Ranthambore in 1301 to Ala-ud-din Khalji signalled the slow eclipse of heroic Hindu resistance in north India. Ranthambore,...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 30, 20255 min read
Jadunath Sarkar and the Fall of his Empire of Truth
Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 24, 20256 min read
The Curators of Conquest
Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 23, 20256 min read
Who’s Afraid of Hindu History?
Inconvenient Truths - the NCERT Textbook Row India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 22, 20256 min read
Rewriting or Restoring? NCERT and the Myth of Secular Historiography
Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 21, 20255 min read
How a Murder in Colonial Bengal Sparked a Forensic Revolution
The murder of Hridaynath Ghosh seemed unsolvable until a brown smudge on a calendar and a classification system devised in Kolkata...
Laurence Westwood
Jul 19, 20254 min read
The Quiet Radical
Two and a half centuries on, Jane Austen still startles the world with her wit, wisdom and unflinching clarity. Had Jane Austen been born...
Smitha Balachandran
Jul 16, 20253 min read
Return of the Threaded Epic: The Bayeux Tapestry Comes Home
After 900 years, the Bayeux Tapestry is coming home to a Britain as divided and politicised as the one it first depicted. It has been...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 10, 20255 min read
The Dynasty and the Darkness
India’s tryst with authoritarianism during the Emergency remains a lesson in the dangers of dynastic politics and constitutional...
Akhilesh Sinha
Jun 25, 20253 min read
The Unsung Saviours of Democracy: the RSS and The Emergency
While liberal academics and Congress loyalists paint the RSS as reactionary, it was the Sangh’s disciplined underground network that...
Kiran D. Tare
Jun 25, 20255 min read
Persian Entanglements: How Israel and Iran went from covert allies to existential enemies
In the final part of this series, we trace the forgotten Cold War alliance between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. and their lasting political...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jun 23, 20255 min read
Deir Yassin and the Invention of Israel’s ‘Original Sin’
In this series, we examine some of the most enduring myths surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict by tracing their historical roots and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jun 22, 20255 min read
Founding Fictions: Israel, Colonialism and the Weaponisation of History
In this series, we examine some of the most enduring myths surrounding the Arab-Israel conflict by tracing their historical roots and...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jun 21, 20255 min read
Unyielding Flame
On the 167th death anniversary of Rani Laxmibai, India remembers the woman who dared the world’s mightiest empire. On a dusty plain...
Amit Bhowmik
Jun 18, 20253 min read
The Geometry of Resistance: How Algeria’s FLN, Spain’s ETA and Sri Lanka’s Tigers reshaped the asymmetric battlefield
Our series on asymmetric warfare revisits pivotal moments in modern history when underdogs rewrote the rules of war, and forced...
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jun 11, 20255 min read
bottom of page