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Kashmir: Behind the Vale
MJ Akbar is among those who have made a significant impact on Indian society by their writing, whether as authors or editors. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the seminal newsmagazine, Sunday, in 1976 and The Telegraph in 1982, he revolutionized Indian journalism in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s he launched The Asian Age, a multi-edition daily that once again had substantive impact on the profession. He has also served as the Editorial Director of India Today, Headlines Today and as the editor of the Deccan Chronicle and the Sunday Guardian. MJ, as he is popularly known, first entered public life in 1989, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha. He went back to media in 1993 and returned to the...
The Shade of Swords
From Muhammed to the Ottoman empires and the modern struggle for Palestine, Akbar's story explains how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice and the Muslim control over this phenomenon.
Riot After Riot
This book discovers the reasons behind communal and caste violence that have taken place in India after Partition. M.J. Akbar's journalist's eye for the revealing instance as also a historian's sense of the deeper treds, resulting in an illuminating study of the violence on the surface and beneath the land of Gandhi. A timely collection of reports of violence in a land formally pledged to the Mahatma's philosophy of non-violence.
Byline
Byline anthologises M.J. Akbar's finest writings over the last decade, bringing together essays that reflect the author's versatility and range. The book is divided into five seamless sections, each with its own identity, woven together by M.J. Akbar's delectably informal prose. 'Travel' is the first section in which the author shares his passion for history and the occasional fable, the obscure detail, the glorious and the ludicrous. This is followed by 'Politics and History' in which the reader is provided a view of some events and people in the recent past with all the quirks and whims that characterise the great as well as the mundane. The reader then moves on to 'Sidelines' (those delig...
Blood Brothers
Blood Brothers is M.J. Akbar's amazing story of three generations of a Muslim family - based on his own - and how they deal with the fluctuating contours of Hindu-Muslim relations. Telinipara, a small jute mill town some 30 miles north of Kolkata along the Hooghly, is a complex Rubik's Cube of migrant Bihari workers, Hindus and Muslims; Bengalis poor and 'bhadralok'; and Sahibs who live in the safe, 'foreign'world of the Victoria Jute Mill. Into this scattered inhabitation enters a child on the verge of starvation, Prayaag, who is saved and adopted by a Muslim family, converts to Islam and takes on the name of Rahmatullah. As Rahmatullah knits Telinipara into a community, friendship, love tr...
Gandhi's Hinduism the Struggle against Jinnah's Islam
Gandhi, a devout Hindu, believed faith could nurture the civilizational harmony of India, a land where every religion had flourished. Jinnah, a political Muslim rather than a practicing believer, was determined to carve up a syncretic subcontinent in the name of Islam. His confidence came from a wartime deal with Britain, embodied in the 'August Offer' of 1940. Gandhi's strength lay in ideological commitment which was, in the end, ravaged by the communal violence that engineered partition. The price of this epic confrontation, paid by the people, has stretched into generations. M.J. Akbar's book, meticulously researched from original sources, reveals the astonishing blunders, lapses and cons...
Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar
In July 1765 Robert Clive, in a letter to Sir Francis Sykes, compared Gomorrah favourably to Calcutta, then capital of British India. He wrote: 'I will pronounce Calcutta to be one of the most wicked places in the Universe.' Drawing upon the letters, memoirs and journals of traders, travellers, bureaucrats, officials, officers and the occasional bishop, Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar is a chronicle of racial relations between Indians and their last foreign invaders, sometimes infuriating but always compelling. A multitude of vignettes, combined with insight and analysis, reveal the deeply ingrained conviction of 'white superiority' that shaped this history. How deep this conviction wa...
Tinderbox
Indians and Pakistanis are the same people: why then have their nations moved on different trajectories since 1947? The idea of India is stronger than the Indian, and the idea of Pakistan has proved weaker than the Pakistani. Pakistan was not born across a breakfast table. It was the culmination of a search for 'Muslim space' that began during the decline of the Mughal Empire, by a north Indian elite driven by fear of the future and pride in the past. The father of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted a secular nation with a Muslim majority, did not realize there was another claimant to the nation he had delivered, Maulana Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the godfather of Pakistan. In Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan, M.J. Akbar embarks on a historical whodunit to trace the journey of an idea, and the events, people, circumstances and mindset that divided India. The investigation spans a thousand years, and an extraordinary cast: visionaries, opportunists, statesmen, tyrants, plunderers, generals and theologians. There could be no better guide to the subcontinent's past, and a glimpse into its future.
A Mirror to Power
A Mirror to Power takes a sharp look across the wide horizon of the past decade, a time when reputations were wrecked on a high-velocity rollercoaster and events became a jamboree instead of a procession. This tumbledown history of corruption, terrorism, justice delayed, rights denied and governance betrayed still left enough gaps for celebration of laughter in areas outside politics. The cast is extraordinary: from the founding fathers of our partitioned subcontinent to those shaping its future today. This book is especially distinctive because of M.J. Akbar's unerring eye for underlying causes and potential consequences that bookend current events and a prose style that conveys serious thought in lucid sentences and succinct paragraphs. The pieces are on subjects as diverse as politics, cricket, cinema stars, the lost art of reading and the joys of trash, besides long, elegant essays on the history of a community seen through the genius of its poets and the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar. This is an indispensable introduction to what promises to be an Indian century.
Leila
Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side.But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.There are thirty-two candle stubs buried in that lawn, and Shalini believes her search is finally drawing to a close. When she finds Leila, she will return and dig up each and every one.
