articles
India
Pioneers of Indian Photography
Delhi Collonade
First hand accounts say that the temple . . .
From Kashmir to Kabul
As international events draw attention to the people and landscapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, images of these war-torn countries are becoming increasingly familiar. The harsh beauty of the region has been luring photographers since the Victorian age, the most famous of whom were William Baker and John Burke. Their photographs of the "Great Game" - a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling for the power struggles of British and Russian imperialism - were an inspiration to the writer, and remain some of the most poignant images of the British Empire.Read more
Eid Mubarak: Cross-cultural Image Exchange in Muslim South Asia
"In the 1970s and 1980s, a few days before the festivals of Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Zuha, I regularly visited the Urdu bazaar opposite Jama Masjid in old Delhi with my parents to buy visually attractive Eid cards, then wrote short messages of greetings and salutations for friends and relatives residing in other towns, and dropped these into the nearby post box.Read more
Journal of a Tour Through Spiti to the Frontier of Chinese Thibet
Philip Henry Egerton
Once again Hugh Ashley Rayner has done a great service to Raj photography by reprinting this important 1864 photographic volume by a British administrator. Philip Henry Egerton was traveling to an even more obscure area in the Himalayas at the same time as Samuel Bourne. While his photographs are not as impressive, the narrative and stories are richer.Read more
Curfewed Night
After seeing Basharat Peer read from this book during a recent academic event at Stanford University, getting it and reading the whole thing was inevitable. And very rewarding: a powerful, well-written, insightful narrative of how we got to today's Kashmir crisis from someone who grew up in a village as it all unfolded.Read more
Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road
A beautifully printed book of Asian images by one of the greatest early international photographers, Felice Beato. Produced in connection with the exhibition of Beato's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the book includes many more of his Indian images than the exhibition.Read more
Nine Lives
Another masterful book by William Dalrymple. This time he examines the lives of extraordinary people who have chosen the path of extreme religious devotion. The people are amazing, the stories intense celebrations of the human spirit that each life represents.Read more
Through the Colonial Lens: Photographs of 19th and 20th Century India
Maharajahs in Postcards
Modern India is said to have been born in 1858, after the famous Mutiny. From this time onwards the government was transferred from the British East India Company to direct Crown Rule with Lord Canning being appointed as the first Viceroy and Governor General.Read more
dacoit, dacoo
s. Hind. ḍakait, ḍākāyat, ḍākū; a robber belonging to an armed gang.