September nonfiction: A new book of Indian history by William Dalrymple and five more titles to read

All information sourced from publishers’s blurbs.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire: A Personal Journey into History, Amrita Shah

On a quest to understand why her great-grandfather, Mohanlal, set sail for South Africa from pre-Independent India, Amrita Shah sets on record for the first time a sweeping social and business history of the Indian diaspora in the Indian Ocean, drawing out an incredible story spanning centuries of migrations and peopled by slaves, political prisoners, sex workers, lascars, smugglers, indentured workers, traders and interpreters.

Drawing on an extensive range of sources interwoven with her first-hand research in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, in The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, Shah covers a wide gamut, including in its sweep, the Indian Ocean, the medieval port of Surat where Europeans set up their earliest trading companies in India, the evolution of colonial Bombay and Indian migrant communities in the Indian Ocean littoral.

Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa

In 1927, when Irawati Karve, aged 22, arrived in Berlin to do her doctoral studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, she was faced with a dilemma. As a woman of colour, the subject of her thesis was to prove her supervisor Dr Eugen Fischer’s theory of the superiority of the European race over people of colour, based on the measurement of their skulls. After examining 149 “white” skulls from Germany and “non-white” skulls from German colonies in East Africa, Irawati came to the opposite conclusion: the shape of the human skull did not prove racial superiority. Fischer’s theory was later discredited, but at the time, it took courage to present the paper to him and it nearly cost Irawati her PhD.

Courage and a pioneering spirit continued to be her hallmarks on her return to India. At a time when such field trips were difficult if not dangerous, she travelled to the Adivasi areas in Coorg, Western Maharashtra, Assam, Kerala and Bihar. Her research resulted in two seminal works, Kinship Organisation in India and Hindu Society.

In 1968, she won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her book of essays on the Mahabharata, Yuganta. Irawati’s belief that the Mahabharata was not just an epic, but a historical record, earned her some criticism from her peers at the time, but Yuganta remains a classic to this day.

As the daughter-in-law of the reformist and feminist thinker, Maharshi Dhondo Karve, adored wife of Dinkar Karve, and privileged daughter of two families – her own parents, Ganesh and Bhagirathi Karmarkar, and her adoptive family, RP Paranjpye and his wife, Saitai – Irawati’s personal life was as rich and colourful as her professional one.

In this biography, writer Urmilla Deshpande, Irawati’s granddaughter, and academic researcher Thiago Pinto Barbosa, have created an intimate, captivating portrait of Irawati Karve, the anthropologist and philosopher, and Irawati, the woman, wife and mother.

The Third Eye of Indian Art: Aesthetics as Vedanta, Harsha V Dehejia

Traditional Indian art lends itself to multiple levels of experience, from the creator to the created, from an initial objective sensation to a deeper contemplative subjective experience, from our two outer eyes to an inner or third eye. The Third Eye of Indian Art encourages a rediscovery of India by contemplating its creative vision. While the creation and enjoyment of beautiful objects, vastu, is central to the Indian worldview, the discourse on Indian art or aesthetics, saundarya mimamsa, has suffered because we do not have an independent position on aesthetics and have had to borrow from many traditions to create an aesthetic discourse.

This book takes us on an aesthetic experience showing us how to use the third eye to not only recognise and celebrate what is objectively beautiful but to rest in the inner, subjective, serene state of beauty. And as we taste beauty (sundaram) and experience truth (satya) through our third eye, there will be a smaranam – a remembrance of who we really are.

How I Write: Writers on Their Craft, edited by Sonia Faleiro

How I Write is a collection of interviews with some of the most celebrated authors of our time. Among those featured are poets, novelists and non-fiction writers, but what they all have in common is that their work is deeply rooted in the South Asian experience.

In intimate conversations with fellow authors, these acclaimed practitioners of the art of writing talk about how they turned their love of books into a career, the challenges they faced, and what their creative process looks like. Candid and inspiring, this volume provides keen insights into the mind of a writer.

Who Is Equal: The Equality Code of the Constitution, Saurabh Kirpal

In 1950, we, the people of India, gave ourselves a constitution that promised justice, liberty and equality to all its citizens. Decades later, as a nation, we still struggle with inequality in various forms – religion, sex, caste, and gender. As we forge ahead, it is imperative to ask, “Who is equal?”, and “Is the idea of equality elusive to achieve?”

In his new book, Saurabh Kirpal, a senior Supreme Court lawyer, seeks to untangle the philosophical and practical tangents of inequality prevalent in our country. He presents to the readers the explanation and understanding of the existing laws and discusses theories that allow a close inspection of concerns over a spectrum.