The latest in Penguin's handsome and imaginative anthologies of national literatures: a hundred years of stories from the colonial period to the present.
How the daughter of Babur, first Mughal Emperor, wrangled her way out of the harem (for a while) to travel around India, to Persia and beyond. Based on her own account.
He ruled an area of the Indian subcontinent greater than anyone until the British 2000 years later; famously he renounced war for Buddhism and promoted religious toleration throughout his mu... read more
Clever mice, cunning crocodiles, loquacious tortoises: many of the stories from the Panchatantra made their way into the fables of Aesop and even La Fontaine. Here are a handful, retold by t... read more
800 years of cave paintings, from the C2nd BC to the C6th CE: a revised edition with digitally restored images, and a new introduction by Dalrymple who has been researching the history of Bu... read more
Moraes was an Indian poet educated in London and Oxford. This is an account of his wanderings as a very young man through northern India, Nepal and Sikkim in 1959, when military tensions wit... read more
A fine debut novel about a family's trajectory from India in 1898 to Idi Amin's Uganda, and then to Canada in the 1990s; it's underpinned by a secret, and a letter.
Chintz, calico and muslin; paisley, embroidery; jodhpurs, turbans - all have been used by designers such as Schiaparelli, Poiret, Balmain, Rhodes, Saint Laurent, Gauliter, McQueen...
Indian folk rituals and rites, customs and celebrations, presented through a sequence of photographic portraits. With contributions by Anuradha Roy, Catherine Clement and Kuha Kopariha.
Indian family drama revolving around an ambitious and bright but easily distracted daughter who hasn't yet heard that her father has died. Fraught, lyrical, set against the backdrop of relig... read more
Amrit Kaur was a Punjabi princess who lived in Paris in the 1930s, and who sold her jewellery to help save Jews. Arrested by the Gestapo, she died in a concentration camp.
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
An anthology of the writings by the often overlooked women of the Raj, many of whom flourished in India - Fanny Parks, Emily Eden et alia. A fascinating counterpoint to the stereotypical vie... read more
The Baburnama for children - a memoir of adventure, fame and all the trappings of a princely existence, yet combined with an exemplary life of the mind, and a powerful curiosity about the wo... read more
Ajay and his friends find an abandoned printing press and set up their newspaper - the Mumbai Sun. Their investigations naturally get them into hot water - will justice and the pursuit of tr... read more
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more
He left his young family in the '60s for sex, drugs, and enlightenment with the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; he would reappear from time to time, bringing chaos in his wake.
Garments to tents in South Asia in the C16th-C17th. Richly illustrated, this book shows cloth participated in both political and social spheres, and reflected seasonal rhythms.
A fascinating introduction to one of the most important Buddhis texts, balanced by Kerr's experiences in Kyoto, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea and India. Kerr has spent most of his adult life living... read more
The author's mother came from a Sikh family that fled the Punjab in Partition; later she moved to Berlin and Washington. A fine memoir of family whose identity and roots have been complicate... read more
A superb account of how European imperialism in Asia was undermined by a network of ingenious radicals, who used printing presses, global travel and the colonisers' languages to spread their... read more
There are those who swear he was a spy, others who insist he was too scatty or essentially lazy to be one. Whatever the truth, he was an exceptional linguist (Iranian, Afghan Persian, Arabic... read more
Zulfikar was executed in 1979; three of his children were murdered. One can understand why the brilliant author Fatima keeps her distance from politics.