These essays initially appeared as ‘urgent public interventions at critical moments’ between 2001 and 2008. Collected together at the conclusion of India’s blockbuster 2009 general election, they present ‘a detailed underview’ of the consequences and corollaries of democracy (p. xi) and of partition’s long shadow. Gandhi once described independence as a ‘wooden loaf’ (p. 18)—notional … Read more
From a clear blue sky takes the form of a three-part drama: before the bomb, after the bomb and learning to live with the bomb. But it opens with the climax. In the early hours of Monday 27 August 1979, members of the IRA stowed between four and five pounds of explosives under the floorboards … Read more
The best travel books always have a back story: the line that goes back through time, tethering the writer to the reason why they wanted to write this particular book, make this particular journey. When Dervla Murphy was a child in Lismore, Co. Waterford, she received gifts of a second-hand bicycle and an atlas for … Read more
Over the years some rigorous, if isolated, comparative studies on Ireland and India have been published. S.B. Cook’s Imperial affinities and Margaret Kelleher’s The feminisation of famine stand out. The last five years, however, have produced a flowering of scholarship examining Irish–Indian connections. Some of the stimulus came from the Fourth NUI Galway Conference on … Read more
All historical study is principally concerned with analysing the structures and processes of power. Maria Misra’s history is an eloquently spun meditation on the great shifts in political, religious, territorial and cultural control that have contributed to the emergence of modern India as an economic superpower. The first half of the book spans the rise … Read more