Showing titles in South Asia

The whole world has a stake in India’s future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population—now the world’s largest—while staying democratic.

A collection of the lectures of Max Muller, India: What it Can Teach Us portrays India, especially Vedic India, as an epitome of virtue and morality, whose glory is equal to classical Greek and Roman thought. Muller, in these essays, urges the West to abandon their superior colonial mind-set to adopt the multi-dimensional efficacy that is inherent to Indian culture.

In this audiobook, the astonishing chronicle of the Sikh Empire unfolds, revealing a story of valor, resilience, and the fierce clash of empires. This audiobook is a portal to a bygone era, where the Sikh Army, hailed as the most formidable Indian force the British ever encountered, carved a 200,000-square-mile empire in the heart of the Punjab.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting audiobook to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

Embark on an enlightening journey and explore the resilient spirit and profound legacy of the Sikhs. Through engaging storytelling and detailed analysis, this work offers a comprehensive look into the remarkable history of Sikhism, from its origins in the fertile lands of India to its spread across the globe.

The book covers all the major landmarks of Indian history from prehistoric times up to the 21st century—starting with the country’s geological origins a few billion years in the past and the migration of Homo sapiens from Africa into the region several millennia ago.

Mumbai, 2008. On the night of November 26, Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists attacked targets throughout the city, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, one of the world's most exclusive luxury hotels. With a deep understanding of the region and its politics and a narrative flair reminiscent of Midnight in Peking, journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy vividly unfold the tragic events in a real life thriller filled with suspense, tragedy, history, and heroism.

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. 

Following the mighty river upstream, this highly acclaimed, award-winning travelogue takes the listener on a voyage through 2000 miles of spectacular landscapes and fiercely contested territory, and back through 5000 years of rich and eventful history.

On 26th January 1950 India became a republic, shedding its last links with its colonial past. With fundamental rights and civil liberties guaranteed by the state, the new constitution was universally acclaimed as the ‘world’s greatest experiment in liberal government’. This idealistic birth of a new republic meant a clean break with a repressive past. And yet, barely twelve months later, the very makers of the constitution were denouncing their own creation. Passed in June 1951, the First Amendment to the Constitution was a pivotal moment in Indian constitutional history.

For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death.

Precariously positioned between China and India, Burma's population has suffered dictatorship, natural disaster, and the dark legacies of colonial rule. But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. As historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U saw the cracks forming. In this insider's diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, he dissects all of the elements that came together to challenge the incipient democracy.

This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Inglorious Empire written and read by Shashi Tharoor. In the 18th century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism and caused millions to die from starvation.

In 21st-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation's development, so too are pop culture and technology - an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways.

Her tracks now–as she carried away the girl–led into the wilderness of rocks, some acres in extent, where the going was both difficult and dangerous. The cracks and chasms in between the rocks were masked with ferns, blackberry vines, and a false step, which might easily have resulted in a broken limb, would have been fatal.

Romila Thapar is one of the most important indian academics writing today. Well-researched and thoroughly accessible, this volume is sure to become essential listening for those interested in Indian history and religion. It includes her experience of writing history textbooks for school, analysis of ancient history and interpretations of the epics, and the role history plays in contemporary politics.

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody - it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the political leader of India, believed that Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand.

Ramachandra Guha takes us from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: "Great Soul".

The World Health Organization projects the majority of the world's heart attack patients will be Asian Indian within a few years. South Asians, who are predominantly Indians and Pakistanis, make up one-third of the world's population and have the highest prevalence of heart disease and diabetes. The South Asian Health Solution is the first book to provide an ancestral health-based wellness plan culturally tailored for South Asians.