Bright Earth

Title: Bright Earth – The Invention of Colour

Author: Philip Ball

Publisher: Penguin, 2002 (First published 2001)

ISBN: 9780140296624

Pages: 434

An elephant is noted for its muscle power, a cheetah for its speed and a dog for the extraordinary ability to smell. What is man worth? Undoubtedly, he is the most intelligent among all creatures, but intelligence is an abstract faculty that is not always obvious – at least for a few among us. The facility of colour vision makes up for a lot of disadvantages in other departments. The ability of the human eye to perceive colour in its rich variety and multitude of hues makes it a truly versatile one. Only a few bird species possess even better capacity to perceive colour than us. Awash in varied colours in our day to day lives, men naturally wanted it to be preserved in art forms civilized societies cultivated. Even primitive tribes are noted for the deft attention to colour they spent on cave paintings on scenes such as the hunt. As art developed into pictures drawn on walls, canvas and paper, artists faced a daunting task as to reproduce the originals according to the artistic mores of the time. This book narrates the development of colour reproduction over the ages and progress of technologies from canvas to the digital computer. The book makes a survey of art in general and concentrates on how the magic of colour was faithfully copied to a medium of expression. Philip Ball is a science writer who has several books to his credit. He regularly contributes to science journals such as Nature and New Scientist. His talent at art appreciation is evident from the fact that he had curated for an exhibition on science and art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Even though this book was found in the chemistry shelf of the library, it has more of a claim to be in the ‘art’ category. Ball’s description of the famous paintings noted for the ingenuous application of novel pigments and colouring styles are essential reading to students of art and painting. Until the advent of modern synthetic pigments in the nineteenth century, artists’ colours were finely ground minerals. Most of them were later found to be metal-containing compounds. Natural dyes didn’t come in plenty. Hardly a dozen or so pigments were available from nature then, which had exploded to nearly 9000 synthetic dyes as of now. Colour is the medium of painters for expression and communication. As a result, they had diversified the range of colours by careful and skilled mixing of dyestuffs. The book incorporates an excellent narrative on famous paintings and elucidation of the peculiarities of each. All this is backed up with a lot of colour plates depicting those very pictures in detail. Novices in art also find this section extremely helpful, as the author stoops to keep them also on board for his informed appreciation of the pictures. A case in point is the difference that exists between Renaissance paintings with the earlier ones. The painters in the middle ages were equally adept, but the norms that limited their creativity were rather narrow and utilitarian. Painting was a way of telling a story without words. Important characters in the frame should be clearly identified and portrayed in colours that encoded symbolic meanings and redounded to the splendour of the Lord. Renaissance changed all that. The observer’s presence on the scene became implied. The light and shadows and realism of the scene mandated the perspective of the observer to be maintained in the picture. The portrayal became real and effectively tangible. Painting really arrived with the glorious artists of Italian Renaissance. Ball also mentions the characteristic features of later techniques like impressionism, pointillism, fauvism and Orphism.

The twentieth century belonged to physics, but the nineteenth marked the high tide of chemistry. Scientists quickly discerned the intricacies of chemical reactions and the molecular structure. New elements were discovered, after casting out the four ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water. It is with this background that Ball proudly declares that “there will never be another fifty years in chemistry like those that began in the 1770s”. By 1820, chemists spoke much the same language as they do today. For the first time in history, experimenters could somehow predict the outcome and physical properties of their trials, including its colour. A wide range of synthetic dyes soon flooded the market. The pride of place belonged to purple, as all earlier efforts to synthesize this colour of the royalty had failed. The Roman aristocrats used a rich tint of it called Tyrian purple which was extracted from an internal gland of a kind of shell fish found in the ancient city of Tyre. Extraction of the dye was painfully time consuming and the cost of it was astronomical. Each shell fish yielded just a drop and one ounce of the dye could be collected only after sacrificing an astounding 250,000 shell fish in the bargain. It is no wonder then that a pound of purple-dyed wool cost around three times the yearly wage of a baker. This made the colour a monopoly of the rich and powerful in the empire. Later emperors restricted its use among the reigning coterie. This discrimination was overcome not by war or reforms. A revolution of a different kind was needed to democratize the privileges traditionally enjoyed by the wealthy. The spurt in the development of science and technology offered the masses some of the luxuries that couldn’t even be dreamed about by great monarchs – however powerful their stature was. Alexander couldn’t communicate in real time with his governor sitting thousands of miles away however hard he tried, Akbar didn’t receive the quality of medical care when he died at 56 which even a layman now takes for granted. The examples are endless. Similarly, as new chemical processes developed, new dyes of huge range of tints in aniline derivatives appeared by 1850s. Purple came within the reach of ordinary people. Major European corporations like Bayer, Hoechst and BASF were born around this time, mass-producing the colours.

Any treatise on colour won’t be complete without touching upon how colours are preserved or restored after they had aged due to action by light and corrosive gaseous chemicals. This book includes a chapter on preservation techniques. The author being a science writer, the book is up to date with nuances of colour reproduction in the photographic arena as also digital media such as a computer. The author’s comment on the slow development of photography that “many technologies blossom not when the technical means are available, but when a conceptual advance unlocks their potential” is thought provoking.

The book is not at all designed for easy reading, but more than compensates for it by the entry it affords to the reader in the realm of pure art. The experience of glancing over and enjoying the works of masters of painting is exhilarating. It also contains detailed descriptions of chemical processes and materials, which is a little tiresome. A long list of various pigments in its natural form is good for comprehensiveness but unsuited for smooth reading. The book includes a long section on Notes and offers a good bibliography. The index is comprehensive, but a separate list of the paintings would’ve added much more utility. I would have normally rated this book 3-star, but owing to the deep artistic knowledge of the author and for the great opportunity it provided me for getting familiarized with some of the grand representatives of it, I would place it a notch higher.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Pacific

Title: Pacific – The Ocean of the Future

Author: Simon Winchester

Publisher: William Collins, 2016 (First published 2015)

ISBN: 9780007550777

Pages: 492

The Pacific is the world’s largest ocean, covering almost a third of the total surface area of the planet and contributes hugely to its long and short-term weather and climate patterns. The ocean is sprinkled with an enormous number of islands that played a significant part in the colonial game. Even now, a few Western powers claim foothold and sovereignty on most of these islands. The dismantling of the colonial edifice in Asia and Europe has still not reached the Pacific, which was first sighted by a European in 1513, in the person of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, and crossed by Ferdinand Magellan seven years later. It was this great mariner who christened it mare Pacifico. The book includes ten events that took place in the ocean or its rim, after January 1, 1950. The date is set arbitrarily as it is argued to be the cutoff date in radiocarbon dating on which the era of the Present was assigned. As noted, the Pacific is marked by unmistakable signs of occupation by the mighty, even though the book ends by rhapsodizing about the new consensus slowly emerging, in which the culture and customs of the native people are respected by their masters and a happy blending of values is taking place. Simon Winchester is a best-selling British author who has now settled in the U.S. He has published many excellent titles like Krakatoa and The Map that Changed the World’.

Owing to its mammoth size and unimaginably vast quantities of water it contains, the Pacific ocean play a very critical part in forming the climate anywhere on the planet. Winchester makes interesting and absorbing descriptions of how the interplay of heat and water generate such phenomena as El Nino and La Nina, which can make or mar the economies of many countries due to its capacity to change the pattern of rain elsewhere. People who are gleefully unaware of the peculiar changes of wind and warming in the Pacific are given a rude jolt of reality when the monsoon fails, or a typhoon descends on them, which can lead to loss of lives and disruption of normal life for a long time. It is a lesson to learn for all mankind that the little planet we call our home is so fragile and sensitive. Perhaps people may look up with some more gravity on ecological issues after reading this book.

Climate change and global warming may or may not be induced by man’s actions. But, the author describes another set of actions that are fraught with extreme peril and can lead to lasting effects. The remote Pacific islands have long been a favourite testing ground of nuclear weapons by the U.S. This is a thing of the past, now no nation explodes them above ground. The gruesome description of how the bombs were detonated makes chilling reading, especially the apocalyptic narratives of eyewitnesses who saw thermonuclear devices unleash the terrifying destructive forces hidden in their bellies. A group of inhabitants in a nearby island was subjected to radiation from the bomb, as the planners forgot to take the direction of the wind into account. It was a new piece of knowledge that people had in fact died of nuclear bombs in peacetime too.

The author takes a survey of the islands and nations encircling the Pacific, by telling a story about an interesting incident connected to it. Readers thereby get a vivid image of the various states over which the narrative slowly weaves its warp and woof. The separation of the Koreas and the intransigence of North Korea makes one chapter in the book. In 1968, a U.S. spying vessel was captured by North Korea and its occupants were imprisoned. A long and winding negotiation process began, during which the prisoners were tortured and manhandled at will by the dictatorial regime. After a slew of apologies and dispiriting admissions of guilt from the American side, the hostages were freed after eleven months of captivity. This chapter is very relevant now, since we see the rogue grandchild of the man who was the President of North Korea then, engaged in a standoff with the U.S, whose navy has moved its big aircraft carriers to the South China Sea and Kim Jong Un is readying the nuclear-tipped missiles which are boasted to be capable of striking the American mainland. If Kim Jong Un makes any foolish move such as a direct strike, that would surely be the end of him as well as of his regime, but the loss of lives in such an encounter would be frighteningly huge. Kim would do better by not gifting another Pearl Harbour to the U.S.

Pacific ocean is not so pacific as the name implies, but the first widely appealing images that come rushing to our mind would be of paradisiacal tropical islands and cheerfully careless inhabitants. The author identifies the seeds of a future conflict in the region between the U.S. and the rising superpower of the east, China. It has been the studied program of China to spread its maritime influence to a range of islands known as the First Chain in the near term, to the Second Chain in the medium term, and possibly to the Third Chain which includes Hawaii in the long term. China suddenly got a shot in the arm when the Pinatubo volcano erupted in 1991 in the Philippines. The dust and ash fell heavily on two nearby U.S. military bases which had to be closed down. They couldn’t be reopened owing to nationalistic compulsions of Philippine politics. China duly stepped into the power vacuum in the area by forcefully occupying islands near the archipelago which belonged to nobody and began intimidating Philippine fishermen who inadvertently landed there. China’s highhanded and disdainful policies towards its neighbours are bitterly resented by the East Asian nations. It now browbeats them with its fleet of gleaming new warships built during the last quarter century. Winchester presents a scary scenario of Chinese hegemony in the West Pacific which is increasing day by day and is not effectively checked even by American naval power. He has put forward the shift of American attention from Europe and the Middle East to the Western Pacific as a defining feature of the current century in which the possibility of another cold war can’t be entirely ruled out. The book maintains a firm posture against China and its expansionist policies. Is it a sheer coincidence that in the long list of acknowledgements declared by the author, there is not even a single Chinese man or woman?

The book is very easy to read and is a page-turner most of the time. The relevance of some of the chapters to the Pacific theme is somewhat labored. The history of the rise (and possibly fall) of the Sony Corporation is a moot point. Riding on the establishment of a positive business environment after the Second World War, Sony quickly rose to eminence around the world. The most notable display of its competence was in America, but still, no Pacific ethos can be attributed to it without stretching the point too much. Japan’s transition from a naturalistic temperament to a scientific one is a specifically Japanese phenomenon and have nothing to do with the Pacific. The chapter on surfing is totally unappealing to most readers and appears superfluous. On the other hand, a good number of monochrome plates are added as an excellent visual backdrop to the arguments. A comprehensive number of notes and footnotes are provided. The book is also accompanied by a good bibliography and a huge index.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Theft of India

Title: The Theft of India – The European Conquests of India 1498 – 1765

Author: Roy Moxham

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9789352640904

Pages: 252

 

Before I begin, let me inform you that this is the 400th book review in this blog.

There are a few incidents in history which don’t make much immediate impact as and when they unfold, but which later turn out to be world-shattering in its long-term consequences. One such event is the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453. This won’t have made much of an impact had it occurred two centuries earlier, when Europe was still tired of the futile crusades and laboring in the Dark Ages. But the fall of the great city came at a moment when Europe was on the cusp of Renaissance and a soaring spirit of adventure was steeling the nerves of the petty kingdoms. Besides, the key to European trade now lay with the Arabs and Turks who controlled all trade routes to India, China and the Spice islands. The Spanish quest for finding a trade route by the sea opened up a whole new continent that was as vast in area as it was rich in resources. European states established trading outposts all over the world and these enterprises slowly transformed into colonial administrations. The trading companies openly picked the pockets of the oriental kingdoms, and the colonial regimes made laws that helped pick the money with greater ease. It took nearly three centuries for the colonies to gain independence from their masters, but profound changes had taken place in the meantime for the countries and their societies. India was also no exception and this book spells the story as it began in 1498 with the arrival of Vasco da Gama and runs to the grant of the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765 to the East India Company. The British thus consolidated their hold on Bengal, which was one of the richest provinces. This book is compiled from the narrative accounts of traders, company officials and travelers to the realms. Roy Moxham is not an academician, but is more than compensated for this drawback on account of many years of first-hand service in managing tea estates and organizing art in Africa. He is a qualified book and paper conservator and has authored many history books and novels. Following retirement from active work, he spends half his time in London and the other half travelling, principally in South and South East Asia.

The story of the subjugation of India started in 1498 according to this book, when Vasco da Gama disembarked at Calicut. This is rather odd. India had been subject to disastrous raids and colonization by Muslim invaders for another 500 years before this date. But the author has cleverly chosen to omit this period, perhaps for being politically correct! In the Indian academic circles dominated by Leftist historians who are more loyal than the king, anyone attempting to cast aspersions on the Muslim invasions are certain to be beaten black and blue in reviews and criticisms. These Islamic invasions are in fact as disastrous, unsettling and tragic as the European ones. Some of the cruelties of the Mughal officials recounted in the book make us feel that the Europeans, especially the British, treated Indians far better. Some of the Mughal kings were tolerant by the standards of the times, but the petty officials through which the sultan’s writ was run were bigoted and extremely corrupt. The Mughal officials were reported to be ‘employing Hindus taking from them nothing but their bad mud-walled ill thatched houses, and a few cattle to till the ground, besides other miseries’ (p.68). And mind you, the Mughals were the most humane of the Muslim kings who ruled India! Under the reign of Aurangzeb, the torture reached its extreme. He pulled down many places of worship, whether they be Hindu or Jain and erected mosques in its stead. Moxham reports from eyewitness accounts that if a Muslim man was asked to repay a debt taken from a Hindu, he’d threaten to report him for insulting the prophet, forced to circumcise as a punishment and become a Muslim (p.96). If you think this practice to be medieval and has died out from the world, stop for a moment before learning that such misdeeds are reported from Pakistan even today. The Portuguese were no better in granting freedom of worship and respect for human rights. Merchants and learned men usually fled from their strongholds. One of the greatest advantages that accrued to the British was that a lot of talent and money flowed into Bombay when the East India Company set up a trading post there. The comparatively free and liberal policies of the company made the marshy island attractive to traders who later developed it into India’s largest metropolis.

There are no analyses presented in the book on anything. Moxham presents the narrative in an interesting style that is based on the records of eyewitnesses or travelers. It is a pertinent question as to why the country lost out so miserably to foreign invaders. India lost its superiority of land-based forces to the Afghan and Turk conquerors at first. Capitalizing on the weakness of the native rulers, they set up expansive regimes that grew to pervade all available space for kingship. After settling down for a few centuries, the conquerors became too emphatic and dependent on land-based armies. They were oblivious to the sweeping changes taking place in navigation and ocean exploration. The Europeans were forced to venture the seas as the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, thereby controlling all possible avenues of trade with the East. This necessity prompted Spain and Portugal to explore the oceans to find a sea route to the Indies. This head-start helped the Europeans to develop better techniques of naval warfare. The Indian sultans neglected to build up their navies. This was because all maritime trade with India was handled mostly by the Arabs, who were the co-religionists of the sultans. So, when the axe fell, they were unprepared to take on the European naval men. The astounding thing was that the Arab kingdoms were also defenseless against this new threat. Portugal could bring the entire Indian ocean under their effective control.  Others could ply their ships and carry on trade only with a written permit called ‘cartaz’ issued by the Portuguese authorities. Moxham makes a comparison of the prospects of the Portuguese and the Dutch, who lost out on the race for India against the English, who turned out immensely successful in the end. This is ascribed to the scarce use of military power by the British, at least in the initial stages of consolidation in the seventeenth century. This was in stark contrast with the Portuguese who fought everywhere with the native principalities and overstretched themselves. The British brought in their military recruited mainly from Indians only towards a very late stage of political drama.

The Europeans were overawed at first by the immense number of infantry troops gathered by Indian princes and probably thought that they didn’t stand a chance against that formidable force. This bubble was pricked in 1746 when the French defeated Mahfuz Khan’s Carnatic army in Madras. It convinced the Europeans that they might challenge the supremacy of the huge Indian armies with modernly equipped and well trained soldiers. It was then a short step to the British overrunning Bengal under Robert Clive. The book presents the very grave danger of the traders becoming rulers of the land, and the Bengal famine that ensued. The company grabbed the revenue of Bengal as gratification for its officers and transported this money to England. When the monsoons failed that year, the local administration couldn’t buy food from other parts of India, plunging the province into a severe famine. An estimated ten million out of the total population of thirty million perished in it. At the peak of the famine, the company displayed the temerity to hike the land tax by a further ten percent. This instance serves as a warning to separate the commercial interests from administration in any government – past, present or future.

The book is easy to read, interestingly written and well structured. Being sourced from narrative accounts, a lot of interesting anecdotes are also retold. The Danes were one of the runners in the race for India, but most history books omit them, being an insignificant story in the grand game. Moxham includes details of them too. The book also incorporates a good bibliography and an index.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

Title: The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

Author: Ramya Sreenivasan

Publisher: Permanent Black, 2007 (First)

ISBN: 9788178241852

Pages: 276

For about a thousand years, India was under Muslim rule. Sweeping changes took place in the country as the invaders intruded into the closed chambers of Indian polity, society and religious customs. The attackers wanted riches, land, religious converts and women. For a multitude of reasons, not least among them religious fanaticism, the Afghans and Turks rode roughshod over the heart of India, subjugating one kingdom after the other and enslaving the men and women of India. There were a few pockets of resistance where the Muslims reaped victory only in the bitter end and that too, a Pyrrhic one. One such instance is Chitor resisting Ala-ud-din Khilji. Enamoured by the beauty of Padmini, the queen of Ratan Sen, the ruler of Mewar, Ala-ud-din wanted her to his harems. Animal lust was the sole motive of the Delhi sultan, as we have already found him to be a heinous bisexual pervert in a previous book review (see Khilji Dynasty, reviewed earlier in this blog). The sultan won the battle with his superior legions, but couldn’t consummate his desire as the Chitor women including Padmini performed jauhar (ritual self-immolation) at the death of their men folk. Ala-ud-din had to return to Delhi dejected and empty-handed. This book presents an analysis of the numerous accounts of Padmini and her valour written during the five centuries preceding the present. Ramya Sreenivasan is a PhD from JNU, Delhi and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of  Buffalo, New York. Three major streams of the legend is examined in the book – the socio-political and cultural horizons of Sufi Islam in sixteenth century North India; Rajput kingdoms in northwest India between 16^th and 18^th centuries and the growing colonial power in the nineteenth century.

The first known narrative of Padmini is found in the work by the Sufi poet Malik Muhammed Jayasi of Avadh and titled ‘Padmavat’, compiled in the year 1540. Avadh is located nearly 600 miles east of Rajasthan, and the narrative seeing the light of the day after more than two centuries after the historical Ala-ud Din Khilji’s invasion of Chitor, is intriguing for historians. Unfortunately, or rather unbelievably, the author doesn’t make any attempt to hazard a guess on the rationale of a Sufi poet writing a poem in Avadhi language in Persian script that extols the virtues of a Hindu queen and her husband the king in faraway Rajasthan. The poem almost laments the victory of Islam over Chitor, which is incongruous from a Sufi author. This sad omission on the author’s part is like the flaw of a detective who omits to state the motive of a crime before the court, but instead treats the crime itself as the starting point of the scheme of things. We know what awaits such a miserable detective! Ramya asserts that the legend of Padmini was not seen in literary form prior to Jayasi’s work. Amir Khusrau’s (who was a contemporary of Ala-ud Din) Khazainul Futuh (Treasuries of Victories) penned in 1311-12, does not mention Padmavati or Padmini. But what about oral traditions? Isn’t it possible that Jayasi was influenced by one such Rajasthani tradition that prompted him to write Padmavat? The author’s silence and reluctance to address this point borders on indifference. She lends the weight of her commendable scholarship to give credence to the silly idea that India first heard about the Padmini story only in the sixteenth century CE through a Sufi!

The second set of narratives originated in Rajasthan itself, appearing a few decades later than Jayasi’s work, but going on for nearly two centuries thereafter. These come in two kinds of traditions – memory and literary romances. The first poetic accounts of Padmini in Rajasthan are Hemratan’s Gora Badal Padmini Chaupai (1589), Jatmal Naher’s Gora Badal Ki Katha (1623) and others. These accounts differ much from Jayasi’s. This adds to the earlier surmise that a strong wave of bardic rendition of the Padmini legend was blasting across the arid sands of Rajputana since Ala-ud Din’s invasion in 1303. These stories eulogize the valour of two chiefs Gora and Badal, who strives bravely and futilely to save the honour of their king, Queen Padmini and the land. The author’s handling of heroic chronicles is not concerned with fidelity to historical fact, but entails exploring how the Padmini narrative in the 17^th and early 18^th century Rajasthan were shaped by the politics and values of their Rajput and Jain courtly patrons. Ramya follows the dictum that if a poet writes at the court of a local chief, his work is likely to include a chiefly protagonist in the story so as to placate the concerns of the benefactor who himself belongs to this group.

The author then jumps to the nineteenth century, where James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’ claims a prominent place on account of the new methods of historiography employed by the British political agent of Rajputana. Though a fiction, this account marked the transition to the modern. An English-educated Hindu middleclass was growing up in Bengal. Ramya has presented a very good description of its growth and tilt towards nationalism with a tinge of Hindu pride. The British were abolishing the privileges and language of the medieval Muslim aristocracy. The official language of the government was Persian till 1837 and it was changed to English and Bengali. Coupled thus with the loss of remunerative official positions, the alienation in language as well helped turn many Muslim nobles towards extremist ideals and a false sense of Islamic superiority. This period showed variations on the acknowledged histories such as Abdul Karim’s Bharat barshe Musalman Rajatver Itihas (1898), Muizuddin Ahmad’s Turashker Itihas (1903) and Shaikh Abdul Jabbar’s Makka Sharifer Itihas (1906) and Madina Sharifer Itihas (1907), which extolled the glories of Muslim rule and brought into focus the trans-regional and pan-Islamic community. With hindsight, we can see in such innocuous attempts at glorification the seeds of terrorism and militancy that has so vitiated the present-day world.

As the Muslim polity and literature were diverging from the mainstream, the bhadralok literature was assuming a stridently nationalistic posture. The author alleges that historiography in the late-19^th century, especially in Bengal, was tacitly communal (p. 16). The assertive Hindu spirit can be detected in the works of Rangalal Bandopadhyay’s Padmini Upakhyan (1858), Jyotirindranath Tagore’s Sarojini ba Chitor Akraman (1875), Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod’s Padmini (1906) and Abanindranath Tagore’s Rajkahini (1909). The rising Hindu consciousness resisted attempts to reform religious customs by the colonial power which they routinely indulged in, prior to the mutiny of 1857. This extended even to gory rituals and customs. The practice of Sati was outlawed in 1829, but voluntary culpable homicide was re-legalized in 1839 and later retained in the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Even though the author does not say so in so many words, the birth of Hindu Nationalism can be traced back to Bengal in this period. The writers made legends of a pan-Indian nature and made heroes of them irrespective of their place of origin.

The book is not exactly a pleasure to read. A notable drawback is its silence on the inspiration of Jayasi in the sixteenth century to bring out a narrative on events occurred two centuries before, in another corner of the country. This book includes summaries of the various versions of the Padmini story as an appendix. However, this fact is never mentioned in the main text, and readers are inconvenienced at the prospect of reading the critical review of the author before getting familiarized with the story. In some parts, the book looks like a doctoral thesis, but this is compensated by the chapter on Bengali revival of the ancient Hindu spirit in the half-century after 1857. The book includes another appendix which lists all the versions and variations of the story evolved over the centuries. An extensive bibliography is credited as also a good index. Readers can be assured of one thing after fully reading the text in the context of the controversy over attacks on Sanjay Leela Bansali and his Padmini film shooting crew recently. There are many flavours of the Padmini story – Islamic, Hindu and British – but not a single one among them tell about any emotion other than lust on the part of Ala-ud-din Khilji and revulsion on the part of Padmini towards the other. So much for Bansali’s idea of love between them!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star