HT Picks; New Reads

Stories of sepoys who won the war for Empire

More than one million Indian soldiers were deployed during World War I, serving in the Indian Army as part of Britain’s imperial war effort, even when it was clear to them that few of their commanders were looking out for their best interests. Andrew T Jarboe follows the stories of these soldiers — or sepoys — ‘from remote rural villages in the Punjab… to the trenches of Belgium and France, to the beaches at Gallipoli, and to the walls of Baghdad and Jerusalem’.

Drawing on contemporary reports, Parliamentary debates, archival sources —British as well as German — and, most importantly, soldier letters, Jarboe examines how British and Indian audiences interpreted soldiers’ wartime experiences differently and how these interpretations affected the British Empire’s racial politics. Presenting overlooked or forgotten connections, he argues that Indian soldiers’ presence on battlefields across three continents contributed decisively to the British Empire’s final victory in the war. While the war and Indian soldiers’ involvement led to a hardening of the Empire’s prewar racist ideologies and governing policies, the battlefield contributions of Indian soldiers fuelled Indian national aspirations and calls for racial equality. These, he shows, were replaced by calls for Swaraj when Indian soldiers were used to brutally suppress anti-government demonstrations in India at war’s end, setting the stage for the eventual end of British rule in South Asia.

Engagingly written, Indian Soldiers in World War I is a compelling account of the imperial nature of the war and its impact on anticolonial resistance in early twentieth-century India.*

Indian men and family life in the 20th century

In Men at Home, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials — autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and ethnographies — to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world, underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage, intimacy, and conjugality and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in familial interactions.

To uncover the nuances of these relationships, Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper-, middle-, and lower-class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honour and shame, rights and responsibilities, citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as it is a book about masculinity and conjugality, this is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society as seen from the location of men in the home.*

Death in Darjeeling

Tormented Delhi cop Roshan Rana is dragged into a high-stakes investigation in which he wants no part. Roshan’s personal life is in ruins. Dementia is eroding his father’s memory. The thought of being forgotten by his father, as his own son has done with him, cuts deep. As a chilling case unfolds in Darjeeling, Roshan’s buried past comes back to haunt him.

What starts as a missing-person case soon spirals into a nightmare as the hill town becomes a hunting ground for a ruthless and cunning psychopath. With a wave of brutal murders, Roshan realizes the serial killer isn’t just targetting individuals — he’s dismantling a community, piece by piece, with a savage, calculated precision.

Gripping, atmospheric, and emotionally charged, As Dark as Blood is a sharp crime thriller with psychological depth that leaves the reader breathless. *

*All copy from book flap.

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