India

BBC Radio 4 Today programme

The Second World War was not a tabloid version of good versus bad – a simple fight for freedom – as it has been portrayed. In this Today programme essay, Mihir Bose explains why.

The untold story of World War II

Calcutta Notebook: the Scots are keen to emphasise their contribution to Calcutta, including the Scottish Church College and Duff College

The Independent

It could be a script for a Bollywood movie. The chance meeting of a Scot and a Bengali results in both recreating lost glories.

At a dinner for a visiting dignitary in Calcutta’s Bengal Club, a young Indian architect, Manish Chakrabortti, is complaining to Sugata Sen, the head of the local British Council, that only third-rate Britons visit the city these days. Sen says, “Have you not met James Simpson?” She points to a renowned conservation architect from Edinburgh who taught the young Indian architecture at York. Pupil takes the tutor on a tour of Calcutta.

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The Independent

Britain and her former colony still feel the need to tiptoe around each other nervously

The state visit tomorrow of Pratibha Patil, India’s President, is being billed as an important landmark in the relationship between the two countries. It is the first state visit in 19 years and only the third since India became independent. We will hear many honeyed words and much talk of economic collaboration between Britain and an emerging Asian giant. Yet none of this can mask the fragile nature of this relationship, in which Britain and her former colony still feel the need to tiptoe round each other.

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New Statesman

Modern India sees itself as a great success story.

Slumdog Millionaire may have been made by the British director Danny Boyle but in selling a film about India to the West without a single Western character the film advertised a new, confident India, a confidence that extends to other cultural, economic and even sporting fields, as the success of the Indian Premier League in cricket shows.

Not only does India not look for hand-outs from the West, even the global downturn has not stopped growth, it has merely slowed it down, and as Indians are quick to point out no Indian bank has been bailed out by the government — many of them are offering interest rates of over 10 per cent to depositors.

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History Today

INDIA, The land of contrasts, presents no greater contrast than this: in a land rich in history there is a dearth of native historians, particularly those willing to tackle big subjects. Few academic historians are ready to explain how modern India emerged. Nor do they write biographies of prominent Indians. Even scarcer are large format illustrated books of popular history.

Indian historians appear to worry that they might ruffle too many feathers, and there is every reason to sympathize with this fear. A couple of years ago, an American academic James Laine wrote a biography of Shivaji, the seventeenth century Maratha king. Some modern day Shivaji followers were so outraged by certain passages in the book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, that the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute where Laine had carried out the research was attacked. Oxford University Press withdrew the book from India where it was banned.

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