I’d been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase ‘great power’. What would it mean, I’d asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so...

A bare two years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja...

Why don’t they complain?””They do sometimes. But usually there’s nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy’s appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn’t the CO. But...

That particular fear has the texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth....

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep...

She had talked of this at length with Kadambari—Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this...

He said: ‘You don’t understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what...

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to...

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings — the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of...

This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret,...