Author: James Crabtree
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.
The Billionaire Raj
Author: James Crabtree
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.
Raj
Author: Lawrence James
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312263829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 768
Book Description
From the critically acclaimed author of "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire" comes an unapologetic revisionist history of British rule in India. James recounts the twists and turns of imperialism and independence with a wealth of new material. 8-page photo insert.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312263829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 768
Book Description
From the critically acclaimed author of "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire" comes an unapologetic revisionist history of British rule in India. James recounts the twists and turns of imperialism and independence with a wealth of new material. 8-page photo insert.
From Raj to Republic
Author: Sunil Purushotham
Publisher: South Asia in Motion
ISBN: 9781503614543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
"This book makes a case for the unprecedented violence in India's immediate postcolonization and argues that it played a crucial role in institutional and constitutional development during this six-year span"--
Publisher: South Asia in Motion
ISBN: 9781503614543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
"This book makes a case for the unprecedented violence in India's immediate postcolonization and argues that it played a crucial role in institutional and constitutional development during this six-year span"--
The British in India
Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374713243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 641
Book Description
An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all? Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company’s first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374713243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 641
Book Description
An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all? Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company’s first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.
Document Raj
Author: Bhavani Raman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226703274
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226703274
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
Indian Tales of the Raj
Author: Zareer Masani
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520071278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
As rich and varied as India itself, these accounts bring to the reader the Indian perspective on the British Raj. Included are the memories and experiences of more than fifty Indian men and women who worked under the British, made friends with them, and then fought to throw them out. They describe the role of apprentice under the sahibs, the complex racial barriers that divided the rulers from the ruled, the Western education which eventually encouraged rebellion, and the ways in which liberal British political arguments were turned against the Raj by nationalist campaigns to force the British to quit India.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520071278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
As rich and varied as India itself, these accounts bring to the reader the Indian perspective on the British Raj. Included are the memories and experiences of more than fifty Indian men and women who worked under the British, made friends with them, and then fought to throw them out. They describe the role of apprentice under the sahibs, the complex racial barriers that divided the rulers from the ruled, the Western education which eventually encouraged rebellion, and the ways in which liberal British political arguments were turned against the Raj by nationalist campaigns to force the British to quit India.
Before the Raj
Author: James Mulholland
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
In this history of colonial literary production, James Mulholland argues that the East India Company was a central actor in the institutionalization of anglophone literary culture in India. as the EIC employed people from a variety of ethnic and national origin, it also expanded its cultural infrastructure, from presses and newspapers to poetry collections, letters, papermaking and selling, circulating libraries, an amateur theaters. Recovering this rich archive from a network of authors, reading publics, and corporate agents, Before the Raj shows how regional reading and writing reflected the knotty geopolitical situation and the comingling of Anglo and Indian cultures at a moment when the subcontinent's colonial future was not yet clear. The "translocal" links among Madras. Calcutta, Bombay, and settlements surrounding the Bay of Bengal demonstrate that anglophone literature adapted itself to geographical politics and social circumstances rather than being simply imitative of the works produced in the English metropole. Book jacket.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
In this history of colonial literary production, James Mulholland argues that the East India Company was a central actor in the institutionalization of anglophone literary culture in India. as the EIC employed people from a variety of ethnic and national origin, it also expanded its cultural infrastructure, from presses and newspapers to poetry collections, letters, papermaking and selling, circulating libraries, an amateur theaters. Recovering this rich archive from a network of authors, reading publics, and corporate agents, Before the Raj shows how regional reading and writing reflected the knotty geopolitical situation and the comingling of Anglo and Indian cultures at a moment when the subcontinent's colonial future was not yet clear. The "translocal" links among Madras. Calcutta, Bombay, and settlements surrounding the Bay of Bengal demonstrate that anglophone literature adapted itself to geographical politics and social circumstances rather than being simply imitative of the works produced in the English metropole. Book jacket.
The Chaos of Empire
Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610392949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586
Book Description
The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610392949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586
Book Description
The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.
The Structure
Author: Mahendra Raj
Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)
ISBN: 9783038600251
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The Structure explores the work of Mahendra Raj, India's most significant structural engineer. Examining Raj's sixty prolific years of practice, this volume looks at his unusually inventive and intuitive work and how he has offered pioneering engineering solutions for buildings in exposed concrete. As this book shows, many of his structures can be seen as monuments narrating the history of architecture in post-independence India. The Structure features twenty-eight of Mahendra Raj's buildings in detail through rich photographs and color reproductions of archival plans. Essays are contributed by Raj himself and by the architects Neelkanth Chhaya and Jaimini Mehta. Also included are interviews with Raj by the architect Sanjay Prakash and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a conversation with the architect BV Doshi, as well as an illustrated complete list of Raj's works.
Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)
ISBN: 9783038600251
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The Structure explores the work of Mahendra Raj, India's most significant structural engineer. Examining Raj's sixty prolific years of practice, this volume looks at his unusually inventive and intuitive work and how he has offered pioneering engineering solutions for buildings in exposed concrete. As this book shows, many of his structures can be seen as monuments narrating the history of architecture in post-independence India. The Structure features twenty-eight of Mahendra Raj's buildings in detail through rich photographs and color reproductions of archival plans. Essays are contributed by Raj himself and by the architects Neelkanth Chhaya and Jaimini Mehta. Also included are interviews with Raj by the architect Sanjay Prakash and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a conversation with the architect BV Doshi, as well as an illustrated complete list of Raj's works.
Rebels Against the Raj
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101874848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Book Description
An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101874848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Book Description
An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.