India

At the Coronation Durbar of 1911 George V announced that the capital of British India was to be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. But the move to the new model city was a troubled one, as Rosie Llewellyn-Jones explains.

Benjamin Zachariah helps to debunk the romantic 'Legend of the Mahatma'.

The Battle of Britain began on August 8th, 1940. Richard Overy looks behind the myth of a vulnerable island defended by a band of fighter pilots to give due credit to the courage of the civilian population.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7th, 1941. Hugh Tinker charts the life of the man who 'was, perhaps, India's greatest son in modern times'.

David Cameron has called India Britain's 'partner of choice' and is anxious to forge stronger trade links with the country. Yet how well do the British understand their former colonial possession? Christopher Harding looks at how histories of India have evolved.

The intriguing death of an Indian holy man in 1985 suggested that he was none other than Subhas Chandra Bose, the revolutionary and nationalist who, it is officially claimed, died in an air crash in 1945. The truth, however, is harder to find, as Hugh Purcell discovers.

A cremation ghat built in Brighton for Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War has recently been inscribed with their names, writes Rosie Llewellyn-Jones.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recalls the Victorian economist who helped resolve the financial crisis in India after the Mutiny of 1857.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

A century ago, the British authorities in India passed a series of reforms that they hoped would appease the subcontinent’s increasingly confident political movements. But, writes Denis Judd, it was too little, too late.

The West Indies is home to a large and vibrant South Asian population descended from indentured labourers who worked the plantations after the abolition of slavery. The arrival of the first, from Bengal in 1838, is recorded in the journal of a young doctor who accompanied them, as Brigid Wells describes.

India’s rulers demonstrated what power they had by adopting the crafts of their conquerors – first the Mughals, then the British. Corinne Julius looks at the background to a new exhibition of dazzling artefacts

Edna Fernandes visits a madrassa in northern India founded in the wake of the Indian Mutiny. One of the first Islamic fundamentalist schools, its influence has spread into Pakistan and Afghanistan, among the Taliban and followers of Osama bin Laden.