India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh

A selection of our books on India and Sri Lanka

LUXE Sri Lanka

Luxe City Guides

(Third Edition)

ISBN 9789628935406

Pbk £4.99

A Golden Age

Tahmima Anam

As Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming; her children are almost grown-up; and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air. But none of the guests at Rehana`s party can foresee what will happen in the days and months that follow. For this is East Pakistan in 1971, a country on the brink of war. And this family`s life is about to change for ever. Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence, A Golden Age is a story of passion and revolution, of hope, faith and unexpected heroism. In the chaos of this era, everyone - from student protesters to the country`s leaders, from rickshaw-wallahs to the army`s soldiers - must make choices. And as she struggles to keep her family safe, Rehana will find herself faced with a heartbreaking dilemma.

John Murray 2007

ISBN 0719560098

£14.99

The Palaces of Rajasthan

George Michell & Antonio Martinelli

The splendour of Rajasthan's richly appointed palaces, majestic forts and traditional mansions is revealed in this lavishly illustrated book. Antonio Martinelli's stunning photographs survey architectural developments in Rajasthan over a period of more than five hundred years, providing a detailed visual record of magnificent facades and opulent interiors. His photographs evoke the grandeur of Rajput courtly life at its height, be it imposing darbar halls where maharajas held formal audience, or mirrored apartments where they enjoyed more private entertainments.

Frances Lincoln Ltd 2005

ISBN 0711225052

Hbk £35.00

Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian

John Beames

These memoirs were discovered in the 1950s when the author's grandson was sifting material for Philip Mason's The Men Who Ruled India. Beames arrived in the sub-continent just after the Mutiny, and stayed for the next thirty-five years. Unlike most diarists of the Victorian Raj, he was completely outspoken and wrote plain lively prose. The result is probably the most vivid description of a District Officer's life in India.

Eland 1961

ISBN 0907871097

Pbk £12.99

Love Bengaluru

Fiona Caulfield

A beautifully made guide to Bengaluru (Bangalore), described as a handbook for the luxury vagabond. Printed on handmade paper with a locally-made raw silk cover, it includes personal recommendations for dinning, eating, shopping and being adventurous in the southern India city.

Because Love Bengaluru is published in India, when out of stock this book is subject to delay.

Love Travel Foundation 2007

(Second Edition)

(This is the new edition of "Love Bangalore")

ISBN 9788190432207

Pbk £20.00

Love Mumbai

Fiona Caulfield

A beautifully-made guide to Mumbai - the biggest, fastest city in India. Described as a handbook for the luxury vagabond, this guidebook lists personal recommendations for making your trip to Mumbai as rewarding and exhilarating as possible. The entries for dinning, eating and shopping are well chosen and include thoughtful details. Printed on handmade paper with a locally-made raw silk cover.

Because Love Mumbai is published in India, when out of stock this book is subject to delay.

Currently In Stock

Love Travel Foundation 2007

Pbk £20.00

Love Delhi

Fiona Caulfield

A beautifully-made guide to Delhi. Described as a handbook for the luxury vagabond, this guidebook lists personal recommendations for making your trip to Delhi as rewarding and exhilarating as possible. The entries for dining, eating and shopping are well chosen and include thoughtful details. Printed on handmade paper with a locally-made, raw silk cover.

Because Love Delhi is published in India, when out of stock this book is subject to delay.

Love Travel Foundation 2008

(Second Edition)

Pbk £20.00

Curry - a Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

Lizzie Collingham

Curry changed and evolved according to the tastes of the various invaders of India. The Mughals brought with them the rice dishes of Persia; the Portuguese introduced the chilli peppers recently discovered by Christopher Columbus in the New World; and the Mrs Beetons and Eliza Actons of the British Raj added jam, carrots and apples to their curry recipes. The Raj also ensured that curry came the other way, from India to Britain. Almost every Indian dish is a fusion of different food traditions. This book, which tells the story of such dishes, and the people who invented, discovered, cooked, and ate them, is vivid, entertaining - and delicious.

Vintage 2005

ISBN 9780099437864

Pbk £8.99

The Last Mughal

William Dalrymple

Bloomsbury Publishing 2007

ISBN 9780747587262

Pbk £8.99

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

William Dalrymple

In Xanadu William Dalrymple traversed thousands of miles. Now he traverses thousands of years. In the course of 12 months in Delhi, he peels back the successive encrusting layers of history, using both material and human remains of each of the eight cities of Delhi, interlacing innumerable stories with the present and ending with the Delhi creation myth contained in the great Indian epic The Mahabharata.

Harper Perennial 1994

ISBN 9780006375951

Pbk £9.99

The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj

David Gilmour

For nearly 200 years a small group of British officials administered vast areas of south Asia. In 1900 just over a thousand civil servants ruled a population of nearly 300 million people spread over a territory now covered by India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh. This absorbing book traces their lives from recruitment to retirement, from a jungle to Government House, from a bungalow in Burma to a Residency in Rajputana. It describes their work and their leisure, their intellectual and their private lives, explaining their reasons for going to India and what they did when they got there. The result is a portrait more varied and complicated than that painted by their old admirers, and yet fairer and subtler than those routinely produced by postcolonial detractors.

Pimlico 2007

ISBN 071266565X

Pbk £10.99

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Suketo Mehta

Part Memoir, part journalism, part travelogue, and written with the relentless observation and patience of a novelist, Maximum City is a brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people - a book as vast, diverse and rich in experience, incident and sensation as the city itself.  It was shortlisted for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize in 2005, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Kiriyama prize for outstanding writing about the Pacific Rim and South-East Asia

Review 2004

ISBN 0747259690

Pbk £8.99

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry

Set in mid-1970s India, A Fine Balance is a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have foreseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local delight; and, above all, compulsively readable.

Faber & Faber 2006

ISBN 057123058X

Pbk £7.99

Maharanis - The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses

Lucy Moore

In Maharanis, Lucy Moore brilliantly recreates the lives of four women: Two grandmothers, a daughter and a granddaughter, all of them princesses of the royal courts of India.  Each maharani changed the world she lived in, shaping the way modern women define themselves.  Through their story spanning 150 years, Lucy Moore creates an intimate portrait of a nation during an era of great change.

Penguin 2005

ISBN 0141009721

Pbk £7.99

Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress

Jan Morris

The first volume in the Pax Britannica Trilogy tells the story of the rise of the British Empire, from Queen Victoria's accession in 1837 to her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 Morris vividly evokes aspects of the 'great adventure' and traces the impact of empire on places as diverse as Sierra Leone, Fiji, and the Canadian praries.

"An unorthodox masterpiece, a wise, witty, romantic love-hate affair with a dying empire." New York Review of Books

Faber and Faber 1973, 1998

ISBN 9780571194667

Pbk £9.99

Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat

Jan Morris

In the third volume of the Pax Britannia Trilogy Jan Morris traces the momentous decline and fall of the British Empire from 1897 to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. With characteristic brilliance, this narrative history describes the long retreat and final dissolution of the British Empire.

Faber and Faber 1978, 1998

ISBN 9780571194681

Pbk £9.99

Jules Stewart - Spying for the Raj

Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:

Returning to his theme of Britain in India in the days of Raj, recently explored in The Khyber Rifles, Jules Stewart here presents the history of the Pundits.  The Pundits were the key players and unsung heroes in the protracted duel of intrigue and espionage indulged in by the British and Russian empires in Central Asia during the nineteenth century.  As Russian influence advanced steadily towards British India,  progressing from one desert khanate to the next - Bokhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Merv, Khiva - the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey in Dehra Dun responded by training their own native spies in the arts of map making, subterfuge and espionage.  The Pundits were launched northwards into the completely unknown and unmapped void of terra incognita beyond the Hindu Kush , the vacuum into which Russian influence was insidiously creeping from the north.

Travelling disguised as pilgrims or traders the Pundits were men of exceptional resourcefulness and courage who mapped vast Trans-Himalayan regions, in constant danger and at the greatest risk of their own safety, with phenomenal accuracy.

Jules Stewart's exhaustive research has reclaimed the Pundits' heroism and devotion to the now out-moded concept of duty from the historical obscurity to which they might otherwise have remained consigned.  He tells their story with the fastidious eye for detail of a historian combined with the novelist's keen appreciation of a tale of derring-do, excitement and high adventure.

Sutton Publishing 2006

ISBN 0750942002

Hbk £17.99

William Dalrymple - The Last Mughal

Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:

Drawing on the newly rediscovered "Mutiny Papers", a vast store of virtually unused documents in Persian and Urdu in the National Archive of India, William Dalrymple presents a completely new view of the Indian Mutiny.  Dalrymple's researches have shown that from the Indian perspective the Uprising was from the first a war of religion: a response to missionary activity, the rise of Christian Evangelism, and the ambition of many on the British side to impose Christianity on India.

Both the British retreat from Delhi and their return were marked by violence and viciousness on both sides but this was as nothing compared to the mass murder and wholesale destruction unleashed by the British once they had retaken Delhi.  Many seemed to be engaged in a war of extermination as members of the Mughal court were hunted down and the still- "beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilisation was ripped out".

A sad, shaming story of Imperial conceit and catastrophic retribution which Dalrymple concludes by tracing a direct link from the consequent hardening of Moslem attitudes towards the Raj which occurred at the Deobandi madrassa from where, 140 years later, the radicalism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda would also spring.

Bloomsbury Publishing 2006

ISBN 9780747587262

Pbk £8.99

India and Sri Lanka Special Places to Stay

Alastair Sawday

A selection of hotels from across India, from palaces to tented camps, that prioritise warmth, beauty and flair.
Each entry has detailed description of the hotel making the book very useful for those planning a honeymoon or a special trip.

Illustrated with colour photographs and maps.

Alastair Sawday 2009

ISBN 1906136254

Pbk £11.99

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