History

Essay

India and Germany: A Two-Way Learning Street

There is much that India can learn from Germany's remembrance of the Holocaust, though the insensitivity towards the Palestinians is a smear. Germany too can learn from India, for while India…
▶27-Feb-2025
Harsh Mander
Book
Book Review

How Humans Ravaged the Earth—And Themselves Too

Sunil Amrith's "The Burning Earth" is 'history as literature and history as social science, and occasionally, history as natural history as well. It blends and brings together…
▶24-Feb-2025
Ramachandra Guha

Genomes Map Elephant Populations, History

A recent genome study of elephants in India sheds new light on their population, divergence, and history. The study identifies five distinct genetic populations of elephants in the country, with a…
▶04-Nov-2024
Arathi Menon

History’s Key Role in Bangladesh Students’ Deadly Protests

In their struggle against authoritarian rule, Bangladesh’s students rely on their history’s many artefacts.
▶30-Jul-2024
Samata Biswas

Encountering the Bhakt: Transformation in Religious Thought

Two examples from mediaeval Odisha’s bhakti tradition show how debates and differences about the sacred were part of devotional practice, and not forced onto us after the institutionalisation of…
▶15-Jul-2024
Abinash Dash Choudhury

Nagaland’s Night Marcher: Why Reading Kaka Iralu Matters

At a time when it was practically unimaginable, Kaka Iralu critically examined Nagaland’s relationship with India. His anarchist spirit of inquiry serves well to illuminate pressing questions of the…
▶05-Jun-2024
Varun Sharma

Emergent India and its Sikh Diaspora

Sikh activism is on the rise in the diaspora but it would be wrong to read it as all 'Khalistani'. India’s outreach policies need to acknowledge Sikh pluralism and respect the democratic…
▶22-Nov-2023
Shinder S. Thandi
Explainer

Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues

On 7 October, Hamas committed a war crime when in its attack on Israel, hundreds of civilians were killed, but since 1948 the scale of the crimes against the Palestinians repeatedly committed by…
▶24-Oct-2023
Rohini Hensman

Mammoths in Musth

The phenomenon of musth, first systematically observed and recorded in ancient India, is now a thread running through a deep history of elephants.
▶16-Oct-2023
Thomas R. Trautmann
Book
Book Review

Pakistan: Learning from Looking Within

In a work of deep introspection that is free of rhetoric, well-known Pakistani nuclear physicist and essayist, Pervez Hoodbhoy re-examines the history of his country, asking how it got to where it is…
▶01-Aug-2023
Nirupama Subramanian