Essays

How We Valued Value

Bibek Debroy

Wealth is a neglected domain in our scriptures because they were written by brahmins and that is also why artha is intertwined with dharma

Writers’ Protest: Living in a Tragic Land in a Tragic Time

Keki N Daruwalla

Majoritarian hubris and the writers’ protest

The Novel and Its Discontents

David Davidar

Reading Marlon James’ Booker winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fireball of a novel, and wondering: What’s it that makes fiction great?

Subhas Chandra Bose: Stalin’s Prisoner?

Iqbal Malhotra

Was Netaji sent to the Gulag? The Subhas Chandra Bose files might reveal many hidden truths

The Last Mughal Renaissance

William Dalrymple

The works produced by the last of the Mughal painters in Delhi for British patrons are an extraordinary fusion of English and Indian artistic sensibilities

A Legacy of the Gods

Sunanda K Datta-Ray

Our cavalier attitude to truth imperils institutions

Delight of the Eye

William Dalrymple

Nainsukh broke free from the formality of Indian court art to explore the quirks of human reality, stripping courtly conventions down to create miniatures full of living and breathing individuals

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s Memoir: Dialogue is Destiny

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s magisterial memoir further underlines the truth that the consolidation of India’s own nationhood depends crucially on our being able to look on Pakistan as a friend and neighbour, not as a threat and an enemy