Extreme Reading
ChrestomatherTabish Khair, picture by Christopher Thomsen Rarely has a novel seemed as timely as Tabish Khair’s Jihadi Jane. As the title implies, this is the story of a radicalized young…
A window into the new China: Lijia Zhang’s ‘Lotus’
I first met Lijia Zhang in 2010, at a literary event in Beijing. She had then recently published a memoir (Socialism…
Indian Merchants and Trading Houses in 19th and 20th century Japan: A Correspondence
Earlier this month I received the following inquiry from a PhD candidate at Japan’s Keio University. Dear Professor Amitav Ghosh, I am a researcher of Indian merchants…
Chennai Floods 2015
Chennai (formerly Madras) was hit by epic floods in November 2015. Although the floods were covered extensively by the media at the time not much has been written about them since, at least in English.…
A Voice for the Anthropocene
Because of my recently-concluded lecture series at the University of Chicago the Anthropocene has been much on my mind of late. It was serendipitous then that I happened to read Swimmer…
Some Recent Reading Recommendations
Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (Penguin, 2005): A novel of extraordinary power, written in a voice that is at once lucid and half-crazed with rage; the words explode…
Yangon’s ‘Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant’
The Jing Hpaw Myay Restaurant (or Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant) is in Sanchaung Township, close to the Myay Ni Ghone neighbourhood of…
Gandhi urged to make common cause with China on opium
My old friend, Ramachandra Guha, was kind enough to send me a copy of a letter that he found in Correspondence File No. 19 of the Gandhi Papers in…
Sleepwalking towards Disaster
Over the last couple of decades, largely because of changes in technologies of communication, the political sphere has become larger and more intrusive than ever before. The digital media…
Fractal buckwheat
As I've written elsewhere, what daffodils were to V.S. Naipaul, frangipanis were to me: As a child, while reading 'The Mutiny on the Bounty' I'd been fascinated by the…