Over twenty years of research has gone into the 50 Great Curries of India and it shows. A feast for the senses, this book explains how to add taste, aroma and colour to create that perfect curry. Dishes collected from all over India – from the classic Goa Lamb Vindaloo to the more exotic...
Read More »
Described by Amit Chaudhuri as the best debut novel I’ve read for a long time, Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park is released today. It tells the tale of Mohan, a letter writer who sits outside the main post-office in Bombay, his wife Lakshmi, and their nephew Ashish, a sexually uncertain 19 year old who comes...
Read More »
Roy Moxham seems to have a knack for the bizarre. In his last book, The Great Hedge of India, he discovered the existence of a 2000 mile customs barrier, a great hedge, once used to facilitate the collecting of a salt levy by the British Raj. Undaunted by the fact that no one knew...
Read More »
As the first stop in many people’s Indian travels, the country’s second largest metropolitan area, and the eighth largest city in the world by population, Delhi is truly one of the world’s great urban experiences: a multidimensional crush of life. In recent years there have been three great travelogues set in Delhi, the latest...
Read More »
Ayyan Mani, head astronomer at the Institute of Theory and Research, works as a submissive personal assistant to a brilliant though arrogant astronomer, Arvind Acharya, who is obsessed with his theory about microscopic aliens falling to earth. Stranded in a humdrum life, Ayyan decides to amuse himself by weaving an outrageous fiction around his...
Read More »
Among the astonishing array of jewels and gems left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans, green was – as it remains for all Muslims – the colour of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide...
Read More »
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India: A Portrait of Modern India by William Dalrymple is just out in paperback. For those that missed it first time round, this really is an extraordinary book, a profound look at the Indian spiritual traditions by one of the great living Indiaphiles. In this...
Read More »
Since its inception in the second decade of the 20th century, the Bombay-based Indian film industry—Bollywood—has developed a unique visual language, articulated by the vivid hand-painted movie posters that have since become highly-desirable collectors’ items. While Bollywood poster artists produced a staggering number of these hand-painted images, their ephemeral work has traditionally been presented...
Read More »
