Smṛti

Where the sultans came from, what Bhārata was before them, how they broke the north at Tarāin, why they turned south, how the Bahmani state was born from Delhi's own garrison and split into five, what became of Vijayanagara, and why the conquest begun in 1192 was never finished.

He proposed the official history of India's freedom struggle, was appointed to direct it, and was removed from it when he refused to write what the government wanted. Then he wrote it alone.

A life of Hyderabad from Muchukunda's cave in the Anantagiri hills to Cyberabad, and the argument over who the rock belonged to

Rupin Katyal had been married twenty-one days when five men boarded IC-814 at Kathmandu. The knife at Amritsar, the darkened runway at Lahore, the six days under Taliban guns at Kandahar, the three men India handed over on the last morning of the century -- and the quarter-century of blood that came back, ending with two shots fired into a furniture dealer in Karachi by men nobody has ever found.

Jauhar was never enjoined by any sastra. It was the answer given to a documented institution of capture, and its record runs from Rawar in 712 to a well in Rawalpindi in 1947.

On 18 June 1576 a defile named for turmeric, the most auspicious substance in the domestic religion of Bharatavarsha, swallowed four hours of war and gave a plain the name Pool of Blood. What the ground was, who fought on it, and why a kingdom that lost the field kept the war.

The son of Brahma and the highest of the Sakti Pithas, and six hundred years on their banks: from Bhagadatta of Pragjyotisa to the destruction of Aurangzeb's fleet at Saraighat, the eastern gate of Bharatavarsa that no invader ever forced.

Seventy years of Bharata in the air. What was taken, what was burned, what was paid, and what the state could not bring itself to tell its own citizens afterwards.

Four times armed men took the ground at the Harmandir Sahib. Four times it was desecrated, stormed and rebuilt. This is the story of that wheel, and of the officer who stopped it turning.

Every other ancient civilisation is a ruin, a museum, or a memory. Their gods have no worshippers, their fires no keepers. Bharata alone still performs the rites she performed four thousand years ago, in the language she composed them in. Why she alone did not die.

He killed a hundred thousand prisoners before a battle he had already won, emptied Delhi in fifteen days, and went home. A hundred and twenty-eight years later his great-great-great-grandson came back to claim Hindustan as an inheritance.

A Brāhmaṇa boy from a Rajasthan border town learned to pray five times a day, took a Muslim name, married into the Pakistan Army and sent Bharata four years of its enemy's secrets. Then Delhi sent a messenger, and the messenger talked.

Nine invasions, twenty years, and not one brick laid. Where he came from, why he came, who invited him, what it cost, who stopped him, and who collected the winnings he could not keep.

For eight hundred years the Khyber opened only inward. A fatherless Khatri boy from Gujranwala built a mud fort at its mouth in fifty-four days, and died holding it.

Portugal in Goa, 1498 to 1961 - the conquest, the statutes, the Inquisition, the flight of the deities into the hills of Ponda, the forty rebellions, and the thirty-six hours in which Bharata took it back

Thirty-three miles of shale and limestone between Kabul and the Indus. What the Khyber is, what it costs to cross, and everything that came through it.

The eight stages by which the richest and most learned nation on earth was brought to its knees, taught to despise itself, and made to wait for a deliverer

Five rivers rose in five holy places and ran, each unknowing, toward one summer of fire -- a novel of their confluence upon the heights, where the waters of Bharata climbed back into the mountains that bore them, and would not be turned.

Four and a half centuries in which the Deccan became the axis of Bhārata -- the janapada order before them, the Kṣaharāta occupation, Gautamīputra's reconquest, and what survived the fall.

वीर रस के उद्घोषक से लेकर अध्यात्म के मौन साधक तक — एक ऐसे कवि का काव्य-अनुशीलन जिसने परतंत्रता की ज्वाला और मनुष्य के अंतर्द्वंद्व, दोनों को समान अधिकार से वाणी दी।

How a deserter, two railway engineers and a hundred years of Indian archaeologists uncovered the oldest and largest civilisation of the ancient world, and what the ground still refuses to give up

Every war of Bhārata from the mahājanapadas to Galwan, judged by one question: what did the outcome do to Sanātana sovereignty. The victories, the holding actions that bought centuries, the defeats that cost them — and the invaders named as invaders, however long they afterwards sat on a throne here.

A full life of Mumbai - from the Stone-Age shore and the Trimurti in the basalt, through the dynasties, the invaders, the fire, the plague and the flood, to the city that flourished, was looted and rebuilt, and would not fall.

Two elite agencies, a decade of the state's full weight, seven Hindus in the dock — and not one thing proved

The ruler of Mysore has been remembered as martyr, moderniser, and tolerant sovereign. His campaigns, his captivities, and his own letters describe a different man.

The widowed queen of Malwa who, in an age of desecration, rebuilt the sacred body of Bhārata one tīrtha at a time -- and raised anew the temple of Kāśī Viśvanātha itself.

The charges against India's first Prime Minister — the mansion, the prisons, the succession, Kashmir, the states, Tibet, the seat declined, Somnath, free speech, the ally jailed, the reform for one community, Goa, the minister he would not drop, and the war that broke him — laid out in the sequence of his life and marked for what each is: documented, contested, polemical, or merely told. The reader keeps the scales.

On Deepavali in 2004, the police of Tamil Nadu seized the 69th Shankaracharya of Kanchi from a roadside puja and threw him into a prison cell. Nine years later, a court cleared him of everything. This is the full reckoning — the murder, the manufactured confession, the censured policeman, the collapsed prosecution, the silence of those who should have roared, and the woman who lit the fire.

Centuries before Euclid set down a single axiom, the architects of the Vedic altar were solving, with constructive exactness, the deepest problems of plane geometry — and reaching past the whole number toward the hidden structure of magnitude itself.

A thousand years on the Sābarmatī, told as it happened — the Harappan docks, the king who carved his name into the river, the night Somanātha burned, the morning a sultan wrote his own name across a living city, and the stones that still remember. Everything in it is true.

How a young, hungry, half-formed nation refused to be told who was permitted to hold fire — and kept that refusal, unbroken, for seventy years.

No tanks. No general on a balcony. Just a signature, a power cut, and a country that woke up to find its mouth taped shut — and how the people it gagged, jailed, and sterilised quietly buried it at the ballot box.

The rise and the long preparation, the sovereigns and the greatest of the great, the science and the statecraft, the people and their world, the adversaries and the wars, the comparison with history's supreme epochs, the fall, and the immortal aftermath.

Swami Vivekananda and the hour that awoke a nation — from the boy who demanded "have you seen God?" to the five words in Chicago that compressed a wounded civilization's answer into a single breath.

Sanātana Dharma fought its wars under a code — refuge for the surrendered, life for the defeated king, inviolability of women and the unarmed, no killing in the dark or from behind, combat only between equals. This is that code in its own words, set beside the doctrine and the documented conduct of those who overran this land — and the hard question it forces: why a civilisation that fought so righteously was so often defeated.

The world remembers him as the lion who stood against Hitler. This is the other ledger — the one kept in the languages of the people he ruled.

The richest throne on earth, the militia that defended it, and the five September days that ended it.

For five centuries the city of Kanyakubja was not merely a capital but a claim — whoever held it spoke for the whole of northern India. Its kings built the longest wall the subcontinent ever raised against conquest, and when that wall finally broke, an age ended with it.

Two thousand years of Tamil civilization — its kings, its temples, its saints, its seamless weave of Tamil and Sanskrit — and the hundred-year project that set out to unpick the thread, with the vanishing of its Brahmins as the note that will not fade.

The most complete military victory in India's history - ninety-three thousand prisoners, a nation born, a rival broken in thirteen days - and the peace at Simla that handed it all back for a promise never kept. Kashmir is still burning.

Neither at its inception nor today - from the war they called a mutiny to a century of governing by accommodation. (Approx. 22-minute read.)

Arunachal Pradesh and the anatomy of a Chinese claim — why the easternmost Himalayan frontier is, in history, law, and the will of its own people, an inalienable part of India.

India, China, and the war of 1962 — read through the Army's own classified review, the memoirs of the men who fought and commanded, China's stated aims, and the diplomatic record.

The Hindū-Śāhi dynasty held the gate of Bhārata against Ghazna for 155 years — the first stand of dharma against jihād, and the one India forgot.

Resistance of Sanatani Hindu kings

A fourteenth-century Kashmiri yogini, her vakhs, and what gets remembered when a tradition refuses to forget.

Kalhaṇa's twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir is the only sustained work of historical writing in classical Sanskrit. It is also a very strange book.