On the cultural heritage of Delhi.

This book covers the sensitive real-life story of Gulzari and Parvati, their marriage in Lahore in 1942, the eruption of violence and carnage, their flight to New Delhi just a month before the partition and their aristocratic lifestyle that slowly crumbled (so did their love for each other). An interesting account of a man who struggles to keep up with his swanky lifestyle he once enjoyed as one of the richest landed families of Lahore, who never knew what it meant to work for a living! Slowly he watches everything crumble before him…including his relationships and his financial standing.

New Delhi was the grandest planned capital city of the British empire. In its meticulous urban plan it owed as much to earlier imperial traditions of Delhi as it did to Western movements such as the Garden City and City Beautiful. It is interesting to examine the process by which this plan came into being, and the interactions between the people responsible for it. This new city also became the centre of a culture at the cusp of Indian and British Indian society - centering on the shopping precinct of Connaught Place, restaurants, clubs, cinema theatres and other institutions. In the years immediately following independence and partition, came a sudden expansion of the metropolis beyond the limits of New Delhi. This left the original New Delhi as a predominantly administrative centre, with a low density of population, and an oasis of green. Far from being a sterile space however, its many cultural institutions, public spaces and thriving shopping precincts have given it a persisting vibrancy.

Travelling through time, space and history to 'discover' his beloved city, the narrator of this novel meets a myriad of people - poets and princes, saints and sultans, temptresses and traitors, emperors and eunuchs - who have shaped and endowed Delhi with its very mystique.

The Bhopal Saga Is An Incisive Analysis Of One Of The Worst Industrial Accidents That Has Taken Place In The Recent Past. It Also Discusses The Conflicting Stance Of The Union Carbide Corporation And The Government Of India On The Moral Responsibility For The Tragedy.

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the socio-cultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. Shama Mitra Chenoy’s exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

Ronald Vivian Smith is an author of personal experiences – a rare breed to find in a time when even journalists hesitate to put pen to paper without scanning through the internet. A definitive voice when it comes to some known and unknown tales and an inspiration to a new generation of city-scribes, Smith is a master-chronicler of Delhi’s myriad realities. Among the capital’s most ardent lovers, Smith believes in the power of observation and interaction. His travels across Delhi, most often in a DTC bus, examine the big and small curiosities – seamlessly juxtaposing the past with the present. Be it the pride he encounters in the hutments of one of Chandni Chowk’s age-old beggar families, or his ambling walks around Delhi’s now-dilapidated cemeteries, Smith paints with his words a city full of magic and history. This anthology features short essays on the Indian sultanate, its fall after the British Raj, and its resurrection to become what it is today – the National Capital Territory of Delhi. ‘No amount of bookish knowledge can compete with the sort of insights and real, lived memories he [Smith] has.’ —Rakshanda Jalil, LiveMint ‘… When it comes to writing on monuments of Delhi – known, little known or unknown – no one does a better job than R.V. Smith.’ —Khushwant Singh, Hindustan Times

This Book Is The First Comprehensive, Authoritative And Highly Readable Account Of Science And Technology In Independent India.

Fifty years ago, India went through a tragic event which has remained a deep scar in the country’s psyche: a border war with China. During the author’s archival peregrinations on the Himalayan border, he goes into some relatively little known issues, such as the checkered history of Tawang; the British India policy towards Tibet and even the possibility for India to militarily defend the Roof of the World. The author also looks into why the Government still keeps the Henderson Brooks Report under wraps and what were Mao’s motivations for ‘teaching India a lesson’. Throughout this series of essays, the thread remains the Tibet-India frontier in the North-East and the Indo-Chinese conflict. The more one digs into this question, the more one discovers that the entire issue is intimately linked with the history of modern Tibet; particularly the status of the Roof of the World as a de facto independent nation. British India had a Tibet Policy, Independent India, did not. This led to the unfortunate events of 1962.

Political history, 1973-1975.