Before Buddha: The Spiritual Ferment of Ancient India
Centuries before Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath the bodhi tree, a quiet revolution was already stirring across the forests and river valleys of ancient India. T
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Chandragupta Maurya: The Boy Who Built an Empire
Few figures in ancient Indian history embody the sheer power of ambition and strategic brilliance quite like Chandragupta Maurya. Born around 340 BCE into circu
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The Sixteen Kingdoms: How Mahajanapadas Shaped Early India
By the sixth century BCE, the loosely organized tribal communities described in the Vedic hymns had given way to something new and far more consequential: a lan
Read MoreThe ISI Hand: Pakistan’s Role in Punjab’s Insurgency
Sanctuary in Lahore, camps and Kalashnikovs, handlers discouraging peace: Pakistan's ISI armed and prolonged Punjab's insurgency without creating it. The doctrine, the machinery, the limits, and the precise share of blame.
Read MoreHindus of Punjab: Migration, Fear and Staying Put in the Insurgency
Targeted by bus selections, bombings and hit lists meant to drive them out, Punjab's Hindus migrated from the terror belts but mostly stayed, and the communal war the killers engineered never came. The under recorded chapter, stated exactly.
Read MoreJournalists Under the Gun: Reporting Punjab in the Dark Years
Militant press codes enforced by assassination from one side, blackouts, TADA and surveillance from the other: how Punjab's journalists worked between two guns, what it did to the record, and the debt the era's truth owes them.
Read MoreThe Extortion Economy: How Militancy and Policing Both Taxed Punjab
Harvest levies and ransom from one side, paid interrogations and sold hope from the other: the double taxation of rural Punjab financed the war, disgusted the village, and decided the endgame before the police did.
Read MoreJaswant Singh Khalra: The Man Who Counted the Dead
A bank director who read cremation registers as testimony, announced the disappeared by the thousands, spoke of a lamp against the darkness, and went home to be disappeared himself: the record of Jaswant Singh Khalra, stated exactly.
Read MoreThe Disappeared: Enforced Disappearances and the Illegal Cremations
No FIR, no custody, no body, only an entry in a cremation register reading unclaimed. How the machinery of disappearance worked in Punjab, what scale the samples indicate, and the families' vigil that has never ended.
Read MoreEncounters, Real and Staged: How Punjab Counted Its Dead
Real firefights filled the honour rolls and staged executions filled the cremation registers, and the official record refused to distinguish them. The anatomy of both kinds of Punjab encounter, and what the euphemism cost.
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