From freedom fighters to the plight of women, the bounties of nature, and the beauty of flora and fauna... RP Ghosh has traversed themes beautifully and seamlessly in this wonderful collection of poems. Born in 1944, at ‘Narail’, a suburb town of ‘Jessore’ district (now in Bangladesh) of undivided India, Ghosh found himself hurtled into the turmoil of life in pre-Independence struggling as a refugee, along with his parents and relatives. The collection offers us a peek into the life of the poet as a young child displaced from the world he knew, on account of the Partition. One must read the poem, Poverty, My Loving Stepmother’ for a portrait of life in those turbulent times. The menagerie of poems also delves into the poet’s musings during the pandemic, another turbulent time in his life. One gets to see the happenings of the last couple of years through his eyes when the world was held hostage by the pandemic that claimed the lives of thousands of people. “If it is considered as an offence; and I am sentenced to death, I shall greatly accept it as an attainment of my soul’s salvation which is the ultimate desire of every human being.” The longest and loveliest poem in the collection is on Bapu or Mahatma Gandhi. The poet’s beautiful description of the ‘father of Nation’ brings to the fore his admiration for Bapu as well as the sorry state of affairs today. In short, the collection juxtaposes wistful hope and harsh reality in a most evocative way.

Analyses the phenomenon of western Indophilia, its ideological and affective composition, and its political implications in late-colonial British India. Argues that Indophile deployments around transnational projects like abolishing indentured labour and global Hinduism, while anti-colonial, were not necessarily emancipatory.

An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.

Appearing for the first time in English translation, In Freedom’s Shade is Anis Kidwai’s moving personal memoir of the first two years of nascent India. It is an activist’s record that reveals both the architecture of the violence during Partition as well as the efforts of ordinary citizens to bring the cycle of reprisal and retribution to a close. Beginning from the murder of her husband in October 1947, with a rare frankness, sympathy and depth of insight, Anis Kidwai tells the stories of the thousands who were driven away from their homelands in Delhi and its neighbouring areas by eviction or abduction or the threat of forced religious conversion. Of historical importance for its account of the activities of the Shanti Dal, the recovery of abducted women and the history of Delhi, In Freedom’s Shade also has an equal contemporary relevance. In part a delineation of the roots of the afflictions that beset Indian society and in part prophetic about the plagues that were to come, Anis Kidwai’s testament is an enduring reminder that memory without truth is futile; only when it serves the objective of reconciliation, does it achieve meaning and significance.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments—his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor. “A revelation. . . . Lelyveld has restored human depth to the Mahatma.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in vivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, social values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on another subcontinent—during two decades in South Africa—and then tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” while following him only a small part of the way to the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges as one of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to political and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through the heroic—and tragic—last months of this selfless leader’s long campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended only with his own assassination. India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were less inclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables—for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole—produced their own leaders. Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of Gandhi’s extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy, which more than six decades after his death still ensures his place as India’s social conscience—and not just India’s.

In this booklet Kumari Manu Gandhi describes a few incidents with Gandhiji. They throw light upon some aspects of Gandhiji's character and activities. Manu is a grandniece of Gandhiji. But he had constituted himself her 'Mother'. Shortly after he had entered upon the last great mission of his life - namely, Hindu- Muslim Peace - in Noakhali (East Bengal) in September 1946, Manu joined him and was his only constant companion thenceforth till his martyrdom on the 30th January 1948. As such, these pen pictures will be read with great interest. They were first contributed to the Bhavnagar Samachar, a Gujarati weekly of Saurashtra - Kathiawad. They have been rendered into English by her friend.