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 ...

This is the story of Gandhi’s spiritual evolution – the turning points and choices that made him not just a great political leader but also a timeless icon of nonviolence.Eknath Easwaran grew up in India and witnessed how Gandhi inspired people of all races, backgrounds, and religions to turn anger into compassion and hatred into love.How had Gandhi transformed himself from an ineffective young lawyer into the Mahatma, the “great soul” who led 400 million o...

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...

<I>A Traveller’s History of Japan</I> not only offers the reader a chronological outline of the nation’s development but also provides an invaluable introduction to its language, literature and arts, from kabuki to karaoke. This clearly written history explains how a country embedded in the traditions of Shinto, Shoguns and Samurai has achieved stupendous economic growth and dominance in this century.

This is the extraordinary story of how one man's indomitable spirit inspired a nation to triumph over tyranny. This is the story of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who owned nothing-and gained everything.

Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history.Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer ...

Until the 1920s, to be a Maharani, wife to the Maharajah, was to be tantalizingly close to the power and glamour of the Raj, but locked away in purdah as near chattel. Even the educated, progressive Maharani of Baroda, Chimnabai—born into the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Mutiny—began her marriage this way, but her ravishing daughter, Indira, had other ideas. She became the Regent of Cooch Behar, one of the wealthiest regions of India while her daughter, Ayesha, was elected to the Indian Pa...

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...

Gandhi's life story unfolds from his early influences to his student days in London; how the racial prejudices that he faced in South Africa and the books of Leo Tolstoy, Adolf Just and others shaped the future Mahatma to use Satyagraha (Truth force) as a potent force both in South Africa to secure the Indians' rights there and later in India to achieve freedom from British Rule; his experiments with Satya (Truth) and his concept of Brahmacharya (Continence); his constant fasts to achieve ...

A major reinterpretation of Gandhi’s life, politics, religion and nationThroughout his long and turbulent career as a political leader, first in South Africa and then in India, Gandhi sought to fulfil his religious aspirations through politics and to reconcile politics with personal religious conviction. But Gandhi’s religion was wildly divergent from anything to have taken root in his native India. Foremost among his private tenets was the belief that he was a world saviour, long ...

Give me blood and I’ll give you freedom’, declared Subhash Chandra Bose. This was exactly what he believed in. The moderate ways of the Congress were not for him. Therefore, he formed the Azad Hind Fauj to overthrow the British. Burning with patriotic zeal, he tried his best to oust the British from his motherland. He was respectfully addressed as ‘Netaji’ and he dedicated his entire life for the freedom of his country.The annals of history have not done justice to this great patriot. It i...

Since his death in 1950, Sri Aurobindo Ghose has been known primarily as a yogi and a philosopher of spiritual evolution who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in peace and literature. But the years Aurobindo spent in yogic retirement were preceded by nearly four decades of rich public and intellectual work. Biographers usually focus solely on Aurobindo's life as a politician or sage, but he was also a scholar, a revolutionary, a poet, a philosopher, a social and cultural theorist, and the ...