In Chinese, the region that was once the cradle of the mighty Qing dynasty is today rather prosaically known as Dongbei, the Northeast. Home to 110 million people, it has smoggy cities and bitingly cold weather. It can seem drab or worse to a visitor. But Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region's gritty surfaces.Mr Meyer's motivation for writing his book is simple. "Since 2000, a quarter of China's villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders", as the country urbanises, he notes early on, adding: "Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing."In Manchuria shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr Meyer's wife, Frances, who grew up

The retreat of rural China

Sir George Barlow, Hay Macdowall

Almost 50 years before the 1857 rebellion, British officers of the Madras Presidency mutinied against their superior officers and plunged southern India into turmoil for three months

The little-known mutiny by British officers in Madras

Business Standard

Political history had once occupied high status in the teaching and study of historiography in universities and schools not only in Europe and America but also in India.  The focus of studies in political history was all-inclusive; it did not confine itself to narrations of forms of governance but also comprehensively devoted attention to society, economy, culture, architecture, art and so on. Later, the boundaries of this discipline were extended to the study and teaching of colonial conquests and expansion and peoples' struggles against colonial exploitation.Of late, however, it has become fashionable for elite historians from the Subaltern School of historiography to belittle the importance of political history; they have incorrectly alleged that the discipline is narrow in scope because it focuses on politics in a very limited sense and particularly because it ignores the reality of the "subaltern classes" and their struggles. It has been alleged that there is a real need to study

The plunder that was colonialism

The trouble with this book begins with its title - Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant.I asked myself, has Indian news media ever been an "observer"? The first newspapers in India were born to aid, abet, participate and exhort others to participate in the fight for freedom from Britain. Their whole purpose was to needle, rile and irritate our British rulers. That is why newspapers set shop and shut down with such speed. Ram Mohan Roy started the first Indian-owned English daily Bengal Gazette in 1816. When that shut down, he launched Sambad Kaumudi, which shut shop in 1823. Before that, in 1822, he started the Persian weekly Mirut-Ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News). This, too, closed eventually. Many of the top publications today, Malayala Manorama, The Times of India (TOI), Mumbai Samachar, Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) and The Hindu, among others, are all survivors of the Indian freedom struggle.And that is where my disagreement with this book begins. Usha M Rodrigues's and Maya Ran

The argumentative Indian media

The year 1971 and the word "war" have different connotations in India and Bangladesh. On our side of the border, it was the finest moment of Indian defence forces and the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. In Bangladesh, the "war" was one for liberation from Pakistan. In the aftermath of the war, there were no further expansionist expectations from the Indian political leadership, but the Bangladesh leadership that took charge of the nation faced the challenge of making the country be what people dreamt it to be in the course of the liberation movement.Yet for the major part of four decades plus that Bangladesh has been in existence, it has been, as Salil Tripathi notes, a pale shadow of Pakistan. Clearly, the legacy of the liberation war has not been as exemplary as the Indian national movement's. The manner in which the nascent Indian nation-state shaped its destiny after independence became an inspirational model for countries breaking free from colonial bondage in the 1950s and the

Bangladesh's existential challenges

One day seven years ago, while on a magazine assignment, I found myself on a boat off the coast of Ireland, bobbing in dark, heavy seas 300 feet above the slumbering wreck of the R M S Lusitania as sport divers returned triumphantly to the surface. When they came aboard, the gleeful explorers, part of a marine archaeology expedition sanctioned by the Irish government, produced a piece of history - a plastic container holding a handful of .303 rounds they'd found inside the plankton-­hazed ruins, rounds that had been manufactured in America and bought by the British to kill Germans during World War I. One of the divers peeled back the lid, and the corroded ammunition greeted fresh air for the first time in 93 years.Few tales in history are more haunting, more tangled with investigatory mazes or more fraught with toxic secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, one of the colossal tragedies of maritime history. It's the other Titanic, the story of a mighty ship sunk not by

The mystery of the Lusitania

Granta's second book on India aims at providing a subaltern perspective on the country but doesn't quite achieve that, with too many English language writers and not enough regional works forming a part of it

India: Imagined and experienced

The book glosses over all the moral complexity that, these days, books for children about animals in captivity usually embrace

Bear extraordinaire

On the Trail of Genghis Khan argues that the Mongol Empire was not tyrannical as the European historians depicted in the 18th century, when the Europeans constructed their idea of the Orient. On the contrary, the author thinks the Empire was tolerant, decentralised and very well administered

In Steppe with Genghis

The murder of Avijit Roy, whom The Guardian described as a "prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin ...  founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free Mind) blog site - which champions liberal secular writing", last week is yet more evidence of how dialectical voices are under threat from fundamentalist forces all over the world. But the subcontinent is under particular threat. The site of the murder is the historic Teacher-Student Centre of Dhaka University, host to a number of important meetings during the liberation movement of 1971. Besides calling into question the security provisions on campus, the incident also highlights how universities as sanctuaries of dissent and debate are on the retreat in the region.A history of another leading education institution of the subcontinent - Jawaharhal Nehru University (JNU) - is perhaps a timely reminder of the lofty ideals that once governed institutions in neighbouring nations. JNU: The Making of a University by Rakesh Batabyal, a former stude

JNU in minutiae

The Islamic State of Iraq and (Greater) Syria, known across the world by its iconic abbreviation, Isis, thrust itself into global consciousness with the dramatic capture of the city of Mosul in June 2014, defeating an army of several thousand personnel, who fled in disarray, abandoning their weapons, uniforms, treasury and, above all, their responsibility to protect the civilian population of over a million. From Mosul, Isis forces swept across northern and western Iraq and then penetrated Syria, extinguishing the 90-year-old international border and capturing large parts of Syrian territory along the border with Turkey. The Kurds were challenged with the capture of Sinjar, after which their capital Arbil was threatened, while the much-vaunted peshmerga scurried to defend their homeland.At the end of June another dramatic development occurred: the leader of Isis emerged from the shadows to announce his name, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, his familial link with Prophet Mohammed, and that he was

Isis: anatomy of a new scourge in West Asia

This book could be read - idiosyncratically, since this is not the author's thesis - as an argument for not straying too far from home

Chhattisgarh mon amour

Mohsin Hamid's Pakistan is much more than what he wryly calls it, a 'villain in the horror sub-industry within the news business'

The divided man

For cancer to develop, the p53 gene has to malfunction or its activity has to be suppressed. Till 1989, the gene was supposed to be the cause of the disease

A cold, hard look at the metaphor for death

JNU: The Making of A University by Rakesh Batabyal was launched at Press Club of India, on Saturday.Batabyal, the history of media teacher at the Centre for Media Studies, is the author of books such as Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali (1943-47) and The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches. His latest book, published by HarperCollins, traces the history of the central university (where Batabyal was also once a student) from its inception in 1964 to 1989."The reason for writing this book was very specific," said Batabyal at the launch. "I wanted to find out why so many people want to be associated with the university and why an equal number are derisive about it."A visit of delegates from Yale University, who could not stop waxing eloquent about JNU's academic standards, a few years ago prompted Batabyal to study his alma mater's attractions. At the same time, he found himself defending the university from barbs of colleagues at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Sh

Book on history of JNU launched

In the 2010 film Social Network - a drama on the founding of Facebook - Harvard University President Larry Summers tells the Winklevoss twins, who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea of the popular start-up from them, that "Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding a job." Indians seems to have taken this idea to heart in recent times, venturing into the promising pastures of Start-up Land, with its unchallenged capital at Bengaluru.In Start-up City, the authors track 10 success stories from the capital of Karnataka. In the Preface, they claim: "This book is... an ode to this new romantic notion of entrepreneurship, as also to the software industry... It is also a paean to Bangalore..." True to their word, they wax eloquent about the entrepreneurial ventures that have struck gold. But those looking for a parallel history of the city will be disappointed.Contemporary urban histories of India are ubiquitous, with historian Gyan Prakash's Mumbai F

Odes to entrepreneurship

Describing the rising water of the Thames and London sinking a foot a century, Diane Ackerman comments: 'It needs not so much Knights Templar as Knights Temperature'

Sunny side up, the fury of Gaia

The home page of the website for Make in India - the principle project of the newly elected National Democratic Alliance government to attract foreign investment - displays its logo: the silhouette of a lion, with mechanical wheels within it. An introductory text asserts: "There's never been a better time to make in India." During its election campaign, the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised to open the floodgates for foreign investors. Make in India is an effort to make good the promise, and the initial response from the global community has been positive.The heady euphoria should, however, be tempered with a look at the country's not-so-fortunate history with foreign investment. And nothing could serve as a more sobering reminder than the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak.On the night of December 2 and early morning of December 3, 1984, the leak of the fatal methyl isocyanate from Union Carbide's factory in Bhopal claimed more than 5,000 lives. According to experts, more than

Lessons from a cold night of death

Turkish ambassador to India Burak Akçapar's book People's Mission to the Ottoman Empire opens: "It was an era where sides had to be taken and lines were drawn in people's minds." He might as well have been talking of our troubled times.Merely a few hours after the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the Jacobin made a point that would find wide circulation in the following days: killing journalists is heinous but the Parisian publication was racist. Hook-nosed caricatures of Arab jihadists have been ubiquitous in the pages Charlie Hebdo, as have been irreverent depictions of Jews and Christians. However, the weekly's depiction of Muslims and the Prophet has earned it the most criticism and violent attacks, including a fire-bombing of its offices in 2006.Mr Akçapar's book addresses some of the central issues of this debate, albeit through the lens of an almost forgotten chapter of India's engagement with pan-Islamism.Oxford Islamic Studies defines pan-Islamism on its website as "i

An Indian tryst with pan-Islamism

Across much of the world, populations suffer daily shakedowns by the police. At roadblocks, market stalls and entrances to government buildings, thugs in uniform gather "like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows", as Sarah Chayes writes. But that isn't the half of it. Globally, the three most important desiderata of our age - security, resilience and poverty reduction - are consistently being hollowed out by structural theft on a much larger scale, operating across corporations, governments, military establishments and civil services.One key reason the United States and its allies have struggled to establish sustainable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the governments of those countries are mired in graft, caught in a mafia-like system in which money flows upward. The same goes for parts of Africa and Asia, and most of the former Soviet Union.Ms Chayes's Thieves of State makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremi

Kleptocracy and extremism

A new biography asks the question but struggles for an answer

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: Is Captain Cool for real?

Book News: Check out for latest book news, reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

Books News: Latest Book, Book Reviews, Book Features, Book Launches | Business Standard

Check out for latest book reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

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