"Mahatma Gandhi became a legend in his own time. A tireless fighter for human rights and for Indian independence, his strategy of satyagraha, or passive resistance, earned him the admiration of millions. Louis Fischer's biography is the definitive account of Gandhi's life; it tells the astonishing story of one man who changed the world forever." -- Back cover

More than half a century after his death, Mahatma Gandhi continues to inspire millions throughout the world. Yet modern India, most strikingly in its decision to join the nuclear arms race, seems to have abandoned much of his nonviolent vision. Inspired by recent events in India, Stanley Wolpert offers this subtle and profound biography of India's "Great Soul."Wolpert compellingly chronicles the life of Mahatma Gandhi from his early days as a child of privilege to his humble rise to power and his assassination at the hands of a man of his own faith. This trajectory, like that of Christ, was the result of Gandhi's passion: his conscious courting of suffering as the means to reach divine truth. From his early campaigns to stop discrimination in South Africa to his leadership of a people's revolution to end the British imperial domination of India, Gandhi emerges as a man of inner conflicts obscured by his political genius and moral vision. Influenced early on by nonviolent teachings in Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Buddhism, he came to insist on the primacy of love for one's adversary in any conflict as the invincible power for change. His unyielding opposition to intolerance and oppression would inspire India like no leader since the Buddha--creating a legacy that would encourage Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and other global leaders to demand a better world through peaceful civil disobedience.By boldly considering Gandhi the man, rather than the living god depicted by his disciples, Wolpert provides an unprecedented representation of Gandhi's personality and the profound complexities that compelled his actions and brought freedom to India.

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did all three.” Stanley Wolpert These are the opening lines of the preface of Stanley Wolpert’s book, “Jinnah of Pakistan” and serves to entice you to read an extremely thorough, comprehensive and detailed study about one of the most pragmatic and charismatic leaders of South Asia, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Stanley Wolpert is an American academic who is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on the political history of modern South Asia. During a trip to Bombay in 1948, he became interested in the complexities of Indian culture, history and politics. Since 1962, he has published many fictional and non-fictional books on his favorite subject. In the preface, Wolpert “For more than a quarter century, I have been intrigued by the apparent paradox of Jinnah’s strange story which has to date never been told in all the fascinating complexity of its brilliant light and tragic darkness.” “Jinnah of Pakistan” was published in 1984. This unique and insightful biography explores the fascinating public and private life of founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah from his birth in 1876 till his death in 1948. In recording the events that unfold and shape Jinnah’s life, Wolpert also chronicles almost eight decades of Indian history to the point where India achieves independence from British rule amid growing Muslim-Hindu antagonism. It is a tragedy that the new generation of Pakistan knows about the founder of their country only through text books, a few websites and television programs. These limited resources do not tell the complete picture of a very intelligent, shrewd and resilient lawyer, politician and statesman who altered the map of South Asia through his sheer indomitable will against all odds. It is almost a standard statement in Pakistani text books that Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a great man but after reading Stanley Wolpert’s “Jinnah of Pakistan” one can get a better understanding of why Jinnah can be….. and should be…. regarded as such a great leader. Physically a frail man, he alone gave courage, hope, strength and voice to millions of Muslims of South Asia who were dismissed as second class citizens in United India before partition in 1947. The biography is placed on a huge canvas and takes the readers to the bustling port of Karachi where Jinnah was born and follows him to London, Bombay, Calcutta, Lucknow, Nagpur, Amritsar, New Delhi, Simla, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Ziarat and finally Karachi again where lies buried “ one of history’s most remarkable, tenacious, enigmatic figures.” The book reveals Jinnah’s failings, his loneliness, his pain, his broken marriage, his estrangement from his only daughter, his long and fatal disease which he kept under wraps and yet the true worth of his gigantic accomplishment can only be more appreciated when viewed alongside his human weaknesses. The book also brings under spotlight, Jinnah’s love and marriage to the beautiful and vivacious “flower of Bombay" Ruttie. The whole episode is dealt with great deal of compassion as Wolpert gives a rare glimpse into Jinnah’s most private moments and thoughts___ and his ultimate pain when due to Jinnah’s extremely demanding political and legal career, the marriage breaks down and ends with Ruttie’s tragic death when she was only 29. An excerpt from the “It (the funeral) was a painfully slow ritual. Jinnah sat silent through all of its five hours. As Ruttie’s body was being lowered into the grave, Jinnah as the nearest relative was the first to throw the earth on the grave. He broke down suddenly and wept and sobbed like a child for minutes together. That was the only time when I found Jinnah betraying some shadow of human weakness.” The best thing about the book is that is very impartial and does not gloss over any facts or resort to hyperbole. Li

"Ruby of Cochin" is the first book written by a Jewish woman from Cochin. It is a rich description of Jewish life on the Southwest Coast of India, spanning many centuries. It is the story of one woman - yet it is also the story of all the Jews of Cochin, from the earliest settlements, when the Maharajah granted the Jews their land and privileged status, until today, when a transplanted Cochin community is finding new life in Israel. The book is written with a distinctive storyteller's voice and contains historical legends, ghost tales, colorful renditions of Jewish celebrations in Cochin, and translations of Jewish women's songs from Malayalam, the language of the Cochin Jews." -- Google books.

Autobiography of a retired army officer from West Bengal, India.

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--