I'm creating a recommended book list for students of South Asian history and politics.

What do you think should be on it?

- "Annihilation of Caste" by BR Ambedkar
- "Walking With the Comrades" by Arundhati Roy
- "Hindutva" by VD Savarkar
- "Slavery" by Jyotirao Phule
- "Mogul India" by Niccolao Manucci
- "Sketch of the Sikhs" by John Malcolm
- "Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" by Mohandas Gandhi
- "The Mughal Throne" by Abraham Eraly
- "Aurangzeb" by Audrey Truschke
- "What Gandhi and Congress Have Done to Untouchables" by BR Ambedkar
- "A History of the Sikhs" by Joseph Davey Cunningham
- "Travels in the Mogul Empire" by François Bernier
- "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple
- "A Free Man" by Aman Sethi
- "Ants Among Elephants" by Sujatha Gidla
- "Jahangir's India" by Francisco Pelsaert
- "The Sikhs in History" by Sangat Singh
- "We or Our Nationhood Defined" by MS Golwalkar
- "War at the Top of the World" by Eric Margolis
- "The Argumentative Indian" by Amartya Sen
- "The Age of Kali" by William Dalrymple
- "The Temptations of the West" by Pankaj Mishra
- "For Reasons of State" by John Dayal
- "The Punjab" by Henry Steinbach
- "Collected Works of Periyar EVR" by EV Ramasamy
- "BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence" by Koenraad Elst
- "Hindu Society Under Siege" by Sita Ram Goal
- "A Place at the Multicultural Table" by Prema Kurien
- "Hindu Nationalism in India" by Dibyesh Anand
- "Amritsar" by Mark Tully
- "Untouchable" by Mulk Raj Anand
- "In the Shade of the Swastika" by Marzia Casolari
- "Hitler's Priestess" by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
- "Time for Stock Taking" by Sita Ram Goel
- "Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History" by VD Savarkar
- "Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects" by Mridu Rai
- "The Clash Within" by Martha Nussbaum
- "Hindu Rashtra Darshan" by VD Savarkar
- "Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability" by Christophe Jaffrelot
- "Politics After Television" by Arvind Rajagopal
- "Shahjahanabad" by Rana Safvi
- "A Feast of Vultures" by Josy Joseph
- "The Saffron Wave" by Thomas Blom Hansen
- "Being the Other" by Saeed Naqvi
- "Shades of Saffron" by Saba Naqvi
- "Gujarat Files" by Rana Ayyub
- "Hindu Nationalism" by Chetan Bhatt
- "The Indian Ideology" by Perry Anderson
- "The RSS" by AG Noorani
- "Brotherhood in Saffron" by Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle
- "Uncle Swami" by Vijay Prashad
- "Spirit of the Sikh" by Puran Singh
- "A Concise History of Modern India" by Barbara and Thomas Metcalf
- "The Valiant" by Gurmeet Kaur
- "Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India" by Amrita Basu
- "Bhai Maharaj Singh" by ML Ahluwalia
- "The Hindu Nationalist Reader" by Christophe Jaffrelot
- "Looking Away" by Harsh Mander
- "The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conlict" by Shubh Mathur
- "Who Killed Karkare?" by SM Mushrif
- "Sicques, Tigers or Thieves" ed. by Amandeep Singh Madra and P Singh
- "Bunch of Thoughts" by MS Golwalkar
- "Listening to Grasshoppers" by Arundhati Roy
- "Early Indians" by Tony Joseph
- "The History of India" by Mountstuart Elphinstone

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
. THREAD 1/x

David Baddiel is getting lots of coverage and feedback on his book which again focuses on so called 'left wing' antisemitism.

I will start by saying that I have seen antisemitic comments made by Labour members and some genuine cases.

However, I have huge concerns.


2/x

Let's look in detail at this article written in April 2019 in the @Guardian - and I will explain the concerns.

The areas highlighted guide you to believe this was all Labour - IT WASN'T.

It also occurred before 2015! Detail follows...

https://t.co/cK59FP83aG


3/x

So as you see the writer of this rather deceitful piece starts with

"THAT CHANGED IN SEPTEMBER 2015" 🙄

This was done to point the timeframe as Corbyn's leadership. Yet the article goes on to describe things that are not even related to Labour, which occurred in 2014.


4/x

So... What in fact the @Guardian writer is discussing here is this case - where a group of Neo-Nazi's spent months inflicting abuse on Jewish MP Luciana Berger

All the detail is in the Court Notes when Bonehill-Paine was sentenced by the judge.

https://t.co/wAyo6Yro5Q


5/x

The Justice sentencing remarks to Neo-Nazi explain the previous cases too. See the date 2014.

Yet the Guardian writer refers to this NON LABOUR case to effectively make her article a lie.

"Star of David" - this was Garron Helm another neo-Nazi..

You May Also Like