India

Separation anxiety

5 August 2017 9:00 am

As Europe remembers Passchendaele, India and Pakistan recall Partition, just 70 years ago, when Britain so hastily abandoned its Indian…

Taking the Kamasutra seriously

21 May 2016 9:00 am

The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously)…

The 90th birthday present that the Queen really wants

23 April 2016 9:00 am

The Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations start this week with the real thing and barely stop until her official birthday in…

Devastation after the collapse of the Twin Towers (Photo: Getty)

How trauma is passed down through the generations in our DNA

23 April 2016 9:00 am

Sue Armstrong’s programme on Radio 4 All in the Womb (produced by Ruth Evans) should be required listening for anyone…

The Cauliflower®: Nicola Barker’s divine comedy

16 April 2016 9:00 am

Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had…

Reasons to be cheerful about cricket, football and the Grand National

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew…

The public prosecutor, Geetanjali Kulkarni, in ‘Court’

A devastating critique of the Indian justice system: Court reviewed

26 March 2016 9:00 am

The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and…

I felt the earth move just as before: Akram Khan’s Kaash reviewed

19 March 2016 9:00 am

You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and…

Flying from Donald Trump to the beautiful ruins of another empire

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Just as the presidential race in America started to get really crazy, I left for India. On the morning of…

Next time I go to India, I want imperialism 2.0

23 January 2016 9:00 am

When in India, I always appal my highly educated tour guides. They despair of me, as they drag me round…

A non-dom speaks: ‘The Swiss, Hong Kong, the Singaporeans, they are all saying “Come”!’

26 September 2015 8:00 am

Indian magnate Nirmal Sethia on what the English get wrong about tea – and the other countries seeking to recruit our discontented non-doms

Portrait of the week

8 August 2015 9:00 am

Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while…

Rabdentse, near Pelling, the ruined former capital of Sikkim, with Mount Kanchenjunga in the distance

The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong

1 August 2015 9:00 am

Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…

How British universities spread misery around the world

25 July 2015 9:00 am

From Greece to Kenya, the worst economic ideas come from alumni of British universities

The forgotten army: abandoned by the British to the horrors of Partition

13 June 2015 9:00 am

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…

The dark side of Delhi

13 June 2015 9:00 am

When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…

Letter from Kathmandu: China's beating India in the aid wars

23 May 2015 9:00 am

After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later,…

The history of India in 50 personalities

23 May 2015 9:00 am

The idea of using objects — salt, cod, nutmeg, silk — to turn history lessons into something popular and accessible…

Posh, educated and energetic: meet the servants of the super-rich

16 May 2015 9:00 am

There is a huge industry catering to London’s foreign plutocracy

What happened to the children who survived the Holocaust?

16 May 2015 9:00 am

‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the…

The romance of cycling is suggested in this advertisement for Columbia Bicycles, with its quotation from ‘Lochinvar’

Bicycling: the Marmite means of transport

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…

Whose hair are you buying?

25 April 2015 9:00 am

British people buy £43 million worth of human hair a year. So who’s selling?

The birth of a royal baby is hardly an exciting event

25 April 2015 9:00 am

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the…

Murder on Grub Street

18 April 2015 9:00 am

Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…

An Indian Bayadère that meets a sludgy end

11 April 2015 9:00 am

For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877…