Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos edited by Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat and Rachel Dwyer, Penguin Random House India, 2019; pp 428, ₹999 (hardbound).
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World by Linda Colley, London: Profile Books, 2021, pp 502, ₹2,280 (hardcover).
The Lehman moment is the moment when Lehman Brothers—one of the largest investment banks in the United States (US) at the time—collapsed. The collapse happened on 15 September 2008.
Responding to Abhijit Sarkar’s “Rhodes Will Not Fall Alone” the authors argue that the aim of their campaign has been the opposite of “sanitising history.” The campaign wants to begin and sustain a long overdue conversation in Britain about its colonial past.
Many historians and commentators have discussed the disparate roles and responses of various Britons and Indians in India as well as the opinions and public policies of Britons in Britain during the struggle of 1857. This paper complements such work by highlighting how Indians living in British society related to those events and also the ways in which British attitudes toward them changed before, during and after 1857.
Hindi cinema and its popularity in the UK help unite different communities from the subcontinent who possess shared memories as well as conflicting histories of partition. Three attributes of post-1990 Hindi cinema - the language adopted, styles and codes and the centrality of the family - help provide a common and united cultural discourse to different communities of south Asians.
Two out of three of Britain's population, it seems, are opposed to joining the Euro. It is not at all clear why. Meanwhile the great events are being celebrated with solemnity and rejoicing elsewhere, a return to the Roman Empire (the last time Europe had a common currency), while the British sit outside the doors of the party, glum and resentful.
