Among cataclysmic events that have shaped India’s post independence history, none compare with the conflict ‘in’ and ‘over’ the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir is truly unique as not only is it the nub of the Indo-Pak feud, but also with her other adversary – China. Historically speaking, Kashmir has remained a frontline ever since the Great Game. In view of China’s growing outreach and the fact that Kashmir’s occupied territory link both India’s adversaries, it portends volatility in the India-Pakistan-China triangular relationship. Brig Amar Cheema’s well–researched endeavour recounts the Kashmir imbroglio beyond episodic accounts but by providing the record in continuum; provides a broader perspective. The Crimson Chinar delivers a blow-by-blow account of the many ‘wars,’ and continues the narrative through the phases of ‘No War-No Peace,’ ‘insurgency’ and ‘limited war’ that have progressively ravaged the state. The context and geo-strategic environment has been re-created based on in-depth research and captured the rationale of the times. The important take away being; ‘wherever’ and ‘whenever’ India has responded ‘pro-actively’ and with determination, results have been significantly different; 1965, 1971 and Siachen being prime examples. With myriad external and internal dimensions, Kashmir continues to cast shadows on the progression of the sub-continent. Peace remains as elusive as it was in the forties; if anything, the adversaries – both known and unknown, have grown stronger. While the reasons for the conflict may have changed with the times, the underlying causes remain as profound as they were decades ago.

Crimson China is a novel that traps the reader at the outset, shining a light on a tragic, hidden world that runs in parallel to our own. It is a story of identity and culture, of the irrepressibility of the human spirit, and the powerful undertow of love.

Tragedy in Crimsonis award-winning journalist Tim Johnson's extraordinary account of the cat-and-mouse game embroiling China and the Tibetan exile community over Tibet. Johnson reports from the front lines, trekking to nomad resettlements to speak with the people who guard Tibet's slowly vanishing culture; and he travels alongside the Dalai Lama in the campaigns for Tibetan sovereignty. Johnson unpacks how China is using its economic power around the globe to assail the Free Tibet movement. By encouraging massive Chinese migration and restricting Tibetan civil rights, the Chinese are also working to dilute Tibetan culture within Tibet itself. He also takes a sympathetic but unsentimental look at the Dalai Llama, a popular figure in the West who is regarded as a failure by many of his own people. Staggering in scope, vivid and audacious in its narrative aims, Tragedy in Crimson tells the story of a people on the brink of cultural extinction and the rising nation that is quashing them.

The untold and fascinating history of the unlikely artistic encounters between the US and China, the youngest and oldest of major powers

A beauty and beast tale of secrecy and love explores our perceptions of beauty and abnormality.

Although most studies of rural society in China deal with land villages, in fact very substantial numbers of Chinese people lived by the sea, on the rivers and the lakes. In land villages, mostly given to farming, people lived in permanent houses, whereas on the margins of the waterways many people lived in boats and sheds, and developed their own marked features, often being viewed as pariahs by the rest of Chinese society. This book examines these boat and shed living people. It takes an "historical anthropological" approach, combining research in official records with investigations among surviving boat and shed living people, their oral traditions and their personal records. Besides outlining the special features of the boat and shed living people, the book considers why pressures over time drove many to move to land villages, and how boat and shed living people were gradually marginalised, often losing their fishing rights to those who claimed imperial connections. The book covers the subject from Ming and Qing times up to the present.

It has been said that for the Chinese "a house is a living symbol," one endowed with meaning and the result of conscious action. China's Living Houses is the first book in any language to explore comprehensively the extraordinarily complex links among folk beliefs and household ornamentation across time, space, and social class. Well-written and copiously illustrated, it reveals dwellings as dynamic entities that express the vitality of Chinese families as each journeys through life.

What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.