This is the first anthology to be devoted exclusively to light verse composed by British authors in undivided India, plus a few items illustrating parallel experiences in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Written overwhelmingly by the junior ranks of the military and civil service, these works constitute a ‘running commentary’ on the Raj from below. The typical subaltern liked to picture himself as unduly put upon, unfairly ignored, and inexplicably underrated. Before departure for India, the impressionable heads of young recruits could all too easily be filled with stories of immense fortunes to be easily made by ‘shaking the Pagoda Tree’. Once in India, such dreams quickly evaporated for a variety of reasons – the climate, the isolation, the slow pace or complete lack of career advancement, illness, or untimely death. Whatever the authors may have lacked in technical skill and refinement of poetical expression, they more than made up for by the vast range of subject-matter tackled and the outspokenness of the reactions recorded – amusing, surprising, shocking, scurrilous, abusive or otherwise thoroughly distasteful. As witnesses to both attitudes and events, these verses are of enormous value to social and cultural as well as political historians of nineteenth-century India.

This is the story of a painting capturing a landmark moment in history. Or is it the story of the subjects of the painting? Maybe it's the story of the painter? Or those who are missing from the composition. Set in Mysore, Southern India, in 1805. The story begins when princess Devajammani arrives at the royal court of Mysore to marry Krishnaraja Wadiyar III. They were both twelve years old and he was the newly anointed ruler of the Southern Indian kingdom. But Devajammani soon found herself recruited for a more momentous cause - to publicise and promote the smallpox vaccine. What followed was a concerted mix of politics, power, and persuasion by the East India Company to introduce the world's first ever vaccine to India, their biggest colonial enterprise. A Picture of Health is written by award-winning playwright Sudha Bhuchar, inspired by Irish painter Thomas Hickey's portrait 'The Three Queens of Mysore', which itself has been called 'one of the most important scientific paintings in the history of medicine in India'. This edition was published published to coincide with Theatre of Debate's schools tour starting in September 2024.

Nursery rhymes drawn from various Indian languages with English translation.

Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism’s confident return to the mainstream. Intellectual attempts to account for nationalism’s resurgence have however floundered. Desperately trying to read nationalism through one overarching cause – as capitalist crisis, as cultural backlash, or as social media led anti-Establishment politics – these accounts have proven woefully inadequate. This book argues that the only way to understand nationalism is through nationalism itself. To understand it as the key force of modernity that calls upon all existing ideological traditions in asserting its appeal: whether it is liberal, conservative, neoliberal or left-wing. This ideological clamour that characterises today’s British nationalism requires both recognition and theorisation. A meaningful understanding of new nationalism must reckon with the ideological range animating it and the deeply hostile aversion to different racial minorities that pervades its respective ideologies. Drawing on a variety of cultural and political themes – ranging from Corbyn’s dithering, the cult of Churchillism, the neoliberal fixation with a ‘point-system’ immigration policy, the muscular secularism of Richard Dawkins and friends, fears that the white working class have ‘become black’, and even simply the strange appeal of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones – this book provides a dazzling but always detailed study of how nationalism is the politics of today only because it is a politics of everything.