In nearly fifty years of his career in the I.C.S, Sir C.D. Deshmukh served as the first Indian Governor to the Reserve Bank of India and later as Union Minister of Finance. This work is neither an autobiography nor a memoir. It is a judicious combination of both, which records the main events of his life and career. As a career his is, perhaps, without equal in modern India and must have few parallels elsewhere in the world. The telling of it is as direct, forceful and irresistable as the car...

In 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala looking for Christians and spices, he unleashed a wave of political fury that would topple local powers like a house of cards. The cosmopolitan fabric of a vibrant trading society - with its Jewish and Arab merchants, Chinese pirate heroes and masterful Hindu Zamorins - was ripped apart, heralding an age of violence and bloodshed. One prince, however, emerged triumphant from this descent into chaos. Shrewdly marrying Western arms to Eastern st...

The Indian Struggle 1920 – 34 by Subhas Chandra BosePages - 549The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942 is a two-part book by the Indian nationalist leader Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose that covers the 1920–1942 history of the Indian independence movement to end British imperial rule over India. Banned in India by the British colonial government, The Indian Struggle was published in the country only in 1948 after India became independent. The book analyses a period of the Indian indepe...

This book carries anecdotes encapsulating India's second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's childhood, growing up years and political life. Each anecdote is poignantly narrated by his son Anil Shastri. And, brilliantly interpreted by Pavan Choudary. The reader will take home unique and valuable insights. It is Lal Bahadur Shastri like never before.  

The book is a study of khadi, the fabric that successfully transcended its commodity status to become a political symbol. Khadi was not just a symbol; it was a massive exercise in organisational establishment, in forging networks, brand-building, and ideological investment. Using a fresh andimaginative approach, the book shows how an idea, determinedly pursued, can become a movement. It also argues that simplicity as advocated by the khadi movement can be subversive and revolutionary. Khadi a...

Sharad Pawar is one of India’s key public figures. Through his five- decade-long career, during which he has never lost an election, he has served as chief minister of Maharashtra four times and as India’s defence minister and minister for agriculture. On two occasions he came close to becoming the country’s prime minister. He has often bucked the trend, preferring policy and pragmatism over populism, and won admiration for his administrative acumen and consensual politics.Eyewitne...

C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, famously known as C.P., was born in 1879 to a marriage that was a celebrated union of two leading Tamil Brahmin families. He became one of India’s greatest constitutional lawyers, a passionate general secretary of the Indian National Congress, a loyal dewan of the princely state of Travancore and vice-chancellor of two different universities simultaneously. In the midst of a lecturing tour at universities in London and Oxford in 1966, C.P. breathed his last. Inheriting ...

H.D. Deve Gowda has been in public life for nearly seven decades. He started at the very bottom, as a member of the Holenarasipur Taluk Development Board and reached the very top as India's eleventh prime minister, in 1996. In between, he was an independent legislator, spent long years as leader of Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, had been an effective irrigation and public works minister, and finally, chief minister in 1994 after many missed opportunities. Even twenty-fiv...

A unique, authoritative insight into the first Indians to break the race barrier and gain a foothold in British politics. Written by Lord Mohamed Sheikh.For more than three centuries, from the East India Company's first trade missions to Asia until the long-awaited granting of independence in 1947, India was controlled and exploited by the British Empire. Indians were not considered fit to have a say in the running of their own country, let alone to be given any measure of politica...

Madhav Godbole, Union Home secretary had to seek premature retirement in March 1993, nearly eighteen months before the due date. This event was widely reported and extensively debated in the media. Ending all speculation, the author for the first time, narrates in his memoirs the events that prompted his decision to resign from government service. In a narrative that is both candid and absorbing, the author, a civil servant known for to the world of Indian bureaucracy and realpolitick.Tracing...

The book is about the colonization of the Sunderbans that began with the coming of the British. For two centuries, land-hungry peasants strove to transform the tidal forest vegetation into an agro- ecosystem dominated by paddy fields and fish culture. The construction of a permanent railroad led to the spreading of the co- operative movement, the formation of peasant organizations, and finally culminated in open rebellion by the peasants (tebhaga).

When the state of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956, the people of Telangana (the region ruled by the Nizams at the time of independence) did not want to be a part of it, fearing that they would be displaced by the more enterprising and better educated migrants from the Andhra region. In 1969, massive agitations for a separate Telangana left 400 people dead but the movement petered out. With the creation of new states like Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttaranchal in 2000, the battle for Tela...