<p><span style="color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: &quot;Amazon Ember&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The city of Lucknow was the epicentre of the uprising of 1857. In Lucknow, 1857 ― part of a new series of books on India’s historic battles ― historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones examines the conflict in detail, from the British annexation of Awadh to the Indian response and the subsequent revolt by sepoys. The defeat of a unit of the East India Company’s army at Chinhat led immediately to the siege of the extensive British Residency in the heart of the city. Here, nearly 3,000 people ― British, Indian and Anglo-Indian ― held out for four and a half months. The winter saw huge defensive barricades being built around Lucknow, but the British recapture was the inevitable outcome, with their superior firepower. This richly illustrated field guide draws on Llewellyn-Jones’s intimate knowledge of the city to paint a vivid picture of the events that unfolded in this historic urban battlefield.</span><br></p>

<p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4285em; color: rgb(98, 98, 98); font-family: roboto, san-serif; font-size: 14px;">Imperfect and extraordinary. The man behind the myth. Akbar the Great is a familiar figure to most Indians. Hailed as a brilliant warrior, a great administrator and a visionary ruler whose ideas of pluralism and tolerance sought to unify India with all its diversity of peoples and religions, he is also an increasingly contested figure in the national discourse. And familiar though he might be, Akbar is a mystery too, locked in his own legend:a man to admire but difficult to know. With revealing insights into Akbars complex and magnetic personality, this biography is also the story of how Akbars ideas and ideals of kingship evolved through his reign; of how he came to concentrate in himself both political and religious authority; of his instances of megalomania, his doubts and his yearning for justice. Rich in detail, and with a cast of unforgettable characters, it sparkles with humour and drama too, as it vividly evokes the world he lived in. Parvati Sharmas portrait of Akbar the Great brings alive as never before a man imperfect and extraordinary, who ruled for nearly fifty years and has lived in the Indian imagination for close to half a millennium</p><div><br></div>

<div aria-expanded="true" class="a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded" style="overflow: hidden; position: relative; color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: &quot;Amazon Ember&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; padding-bottom: 20px;">From being elected as Congress president in 1929 till his death in 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru remained a towering figure in Indian politics, a man who left an indelible stamp on the history of South Asia. As a leading light of the nationalist struggle and as India's first and longest-serving prime minister, his ideas shaped the political contours of the country and left an imprint so deep that his legacy continues to be debated furiously today.In life, as in afterlife, Nehru was many things to many people. Going beyond the imposed labels of contemporary discourse, this book illuminates four encounters that Nehru had with contemporaries from across the political spectrum - Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee - that are critical to understanding his ideas, and his long afterlife and impress on the present. Nehru may no longer be alive to answer his critics today, but there was a time when he pitted himself vigorously against his opponents in the marketplace of ideas, debating the most profound questions in South Asian history and decisively influencing political events. It is this intellectually combative Nehru whom we meet in this book - voicing ideological disagreements, forging political alliances, moulding political opinion, offering visions of the future and staking out the political field - a key figure in the debates that defined India</div><div class="a-expander-header a-expander-partial-collapse-header" style="position: absolute; bottom: 0px; width: 401.203px; outline: 0px; color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: &quot;Amazon Ember&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; opacity: 1;"><a data-csa-c-func-deps="aui-da-a-expander-toggle" data-csa-c-type="widget" data-csa-interaction-events="click" aria-expanded="true" role="button" data-action="a-expander-toggle" class="a-declarative" data-a-expander-toggle="{&quot;allowLinkDefault&quot;:true, &quot;expand_prompt&quot;:&quot;Read more&quot;, &quot;collapse_prompt&quot;:&quot;Read less&quot;}" data-csa-c-id="dqwolj-npv2a7-5calf5-efl7mu" style="color: rgb(0, 113, 133);"><i class="a-icon a-icon-extender-collapse" style="background-image: none; background-size: 400px 900px; background-repeat: no-repeat; display: inline-block; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; margin-right: 0.385em; width: 7px; height: 7px; background-position: -94px -293px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); border-image: initial; border-width: 0px 2px 2px 0px; padding: 3px; opacity: 1; transform: rotate(-135deg); margin-top: -1px; margin-left: 2px;"></i></a></div>

<p><span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">India's caravan trade with central Asia was at the heart of the complex web of routes making up the Silk Roads. But what was the fate of these overland connections in the ages of sail and steam? Jagjeet Lally sets out to answer this question by bringing the world of caravan trade to life. India and the Silk Roads is a global history of a continental interior, the first to comprehensively examine the textual and material traces of caravan trade in the 'age of empires'. By showing how no single ruler could control the nebulous yet durable networks of this trading world, which had its own internal dynamics even as it evolved in step with global transformations, Lally forces us to rethink the history of globalisation and re-evaluate our fixation with empires and states as the building blocks of historical analysis. It is a narrative resonating with our own times, as China's Belt and Road Initiative brings terrestrial forms of connectivity back to the fore-transforming life across Eurasia once again.</span><br></p>

<p><span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">How can we explain Britain's long rule in India beyond the cliches of 'imperial' versus 'nationalist' interpretations? In this new history, Roderick Matthews tells a more nuanced story of 'oblige and rule', the foundation of common purpose between colonisers and powerful Indians. Peace, Poverty and Betrayal argues that this was more a state of being than a system: British policy was never clear or consistent; the East India Company went from a manifestly incompetent ruler to, arguably, the world's first liberal government; and among British and Indians alike there were both progressive and conservative attitudes to colonisation. Matthews skilfully illustrates that this very diversity and ambiguity of British-Indian relations also drove the social changes that led to the struggle for independence. Skewering the simplistic binaries that often dominate the debate, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal is a fresh and elegant history of British India.</span><br></p>

<p><span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A dazzling history of the powerful women and men who forged a dynasty to rival the Mughals and the British. In late eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire's spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed.</span><br></p>

<p><span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Bhagat Singh, one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian Independence movement, was only twenty-three when he was executed in 1931. In their attempt to punish him, British authorities used controversial legislative powers to make an ordinance supposedly aimed at preserving 'peace, order and good government' but one that was never approved by the Central Assembly in India nor the British Parliament. A three-judge special tribunal was mandated to complete a hearing within a fixed period that did not even allow the 457 prosecution witnesses to be cross-examined. Dr Satvinder Singh Juss, a London-based law professor and practising barrister, looks at these and other flaws in the legal process that was followed leading to the hanging. Full of engrossing detail from previously unpublished original archival material, including documents translated here for the first time, The Execution of Bhagat Singh considers the case for setting aside the sentence of execution in retrospect and for an official pardon for the revolutionary today</span><br></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;color:#212121">'Every thoughtful person, concerned for the future of this country, needs to read this book.' - Prof. Irfan Habib Yaadon ke Bikhre Moti, the Hindi translation of the bestselling Remnants of a Separation, is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. The product of years of research, this book is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p><span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over 5,50,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service. The labour regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials. The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labour, constructing a distinct geography of the war-from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.</span><br></p>

<p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4285em; color: rgb(98, 98, 98); font-family: roboto, san-serif; font-size: 14px;">Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (Ahimsa). but this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years. Political violence in ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainism, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognised that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings. By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.</p><div><br></div>