History

Posts whose main purpose is to explain the past.

Harappa in Chattisgarh

A note on reported finds of a 2,500-year-old planned city at Tarighat in Chhattisgarh, quoting the state archaeology department, and asking whether it has any demonstrable link to the Indus…

Brown Pundits Archive26 March 20140 comments
“…abundance of everything but …no izzat”

A note arguing that izzat, tied to the conduct of women, held colonial rank in place and that Indian soldiers’ contact with French women in the First World War damaged…

Brown Pundits Archive23 March 20140 comments
World War I (from an Indian viewpoint)

A note on the roughly 1.4 million Indians who took part in the First World War, mostly from Punjab, regretting that Indian historians have neglected the subject, with a quoted…

Brown Pundits Archive22 March 20140 comments
“experiment of developing India ….has failed”

A note on Ramachandra Guha’s review of Neville Maxwell’s 1967 Times of London predictions that Indian democracy was disintegrating, and how well his verdicts have held up.

Brown Pundits Archive21 March 20140 comments
The West India company

A note linking Taymoor Soomro’s Dawn account of the East India Company as a monopolistic, state-backed forerunner of modern corporate power.

Brown Pundits Archive21 March 20140 comments
Neville Maxwell

A note on Neville Maxwell, who blames India for the 1962 war, with his comments on the still-secret Henderson-Brooks report and the poster’s question of who the whistle-blower was.

Brown Pundits Archive21 March 20140 comments
Train to Pakistan

An obituary note for Khushwant Singh (1915-2014), recalling his fondness for his birthplace in pre-partition Pakistan and his novel Train to Pakistan, with a quoted extract on its Mano Majra…

Brown Pundits Archive20 March 20140 comments
NASA-NSF predicts collapse of civilization

A note on a NASA-sponsored study warning that industrial civilisation could collapse from resource strain and inequality, with the poster questioning the claim and welcoming its comparison of Maurya, Gupta…

Brown Pundits Archive20 March 20140 comments
Trapped at the border of impulse and conscience

A note quoting a review of Savage Harvest, Mohinder Singh Sarna’s Partition stories translated by his son Navtej Sarna, on the violence in Punjab villages and the many narratives of…

Brown Pundits Archive16 March 20140 comments
the 14th Ferozepur Sikh regiment…and some others

Hamid Hussain traces the 14th Ferozepore Sikhs from their raising in 1846 after the First Anglo-Sikh War, covering the 1857 uprising, Lieutenant Brasyer’s role, its First World War service and…

Brown Pundits Archive14 March 20140 comments