Ramachandra Guha

The amazing inter-cultural correspondence (1919-1940) between two cultural icons of the twentieth century, Nobel laureates from the East and the West: the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and the French novelist, playwright, and biographer, Romain Rolland (1866-1944), has remained undiscovered for far too long.This work brings together, ...

Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizationssuch as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and Chinakings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivoryall of them tending towa...

In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer, award-winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles of play, players, and goals that express the unique personality of certain times and places. In Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Galeano takes us to ancient China, where engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have been designe...

With Whigs and Hunters, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson plunged into the murky waters of the early eighteenth century to chart the violently conflicting currents that boiled beneath the apparent calm of the time. The subject is the Black Act, a law of unprecedented savagery passed by Parliament in 1723 to deal ...

How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire. Lavishly illustrated and powerful, Britons remains a major contribution to our understanding of...

In all of the South Asian subcontinent, Bengal was the region most receptive to the Islamic faith. This area today is home to the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic population. How and why did such a large Muslim population emerge there? And how does such a religious conversion take place? Richard Eaton uses archaeological evidence, monuments, na...

In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Harjot Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through a searching examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikh tradition was not concerned with e...

From the Preface by Lucien Febvre: MARC BLOCH'S Caracteres originaux de l'histoire ruralefranfaise, which was originally published at Oslo in 1931 and appeared simultaneously at Paris under the imprint Belles Lettres, has long been out of print. As he told me on more than one occasion, he had every intention of bringing out another edition. In Marc...

Starting from 2005 when a government-sponsored vigilante movement, Salwa Judum, killed hundreds and drove thousands of villagers into camps, to the present day when it is the most militarized area in the country, the war in Bastar has taken a heavy toll on the people of Bastar, the security forces, the Maoists and human rights activists.This book c...

Tzvetan Todorov is one of Europes leading intellectuals. Beyond his work in cultural and literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Todorovs influence is extraordinarily far-reaching specifically because of the clarity of his writing and his refusal to be bound by systems of thought and disciplinary straitjackets.Todorovs many writings include...