Goa’s Japanese slaves
ChrestomatherI met Daniel Botsman recently in New Haven, Connecticut. An Australian by origin, he is a scholar of Japanese history and teaches at Yale. When he heard of…
Opportunity for a working holiday in India
Karina Corrigan is the principal curator for 'Asian Export Art' at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Karina in one of the museum's spectacular…
Irrawaddy dolphin film clip
This letter and the accompanying clip took me back to my own trip on the Mekong, in which I accompanied Isabel Beasley on a river dolphin survey…
Mosquitoes and malaria: where the link was discovered…
From Kolkata Rangan Datta sends the letter below with a link to an interesting piece on the Ronald Ross memorial. There are several other interesting posts…
Sea of Poppies: The Film
Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui are a dazzling couple, blessed with a superabundance of talent, energy and charm. …
The Glass Palace and Recent Events in Burma
Dear Mr Ghosh, My name is David, I am a middle-aged Englishman, and an avid reader. I recently, for the first time, bought a couple of your books.…
Indian dies of Eating too Much Opium: London; 1903
Dinyar Patel, a gifted young historian, has written several pieces about the catastrophic state of Indian archives: he has done more to bring this matter to public notice than…
The Glass Palace and the Trail of the Last King of Burma
Dear Dr. Amitav Ghosh, I presume you must be getting a lot of fan mail, my mail is no different. Ever since I got hold of The Hungry…
The Mystery of the Meteorite in Bihar’s Opium Fields
This correspondence alerted me to a subject that I had no inkling of: the role of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in collecting and studying meteorites. My correspondent,…
The captivity of Burma’s last king and the fall of the Konbaung dynasty: a compelling new account
I met Sudha Shah in Mumbai in 2008, at the launch of Sea of Poppies. We had a brief conversation in the course of which she told me that The…