Showing results by author "Amit Schandillia" in All Categories

More than 2,400 years ago, Indian merchants traveling along the Silk Road introduced the world to an aromatic rice dish that would later become the Persian staple, pilaf. A couple of millennia down the line, the Mughals brought the dish back to the subcontinent and turned it into biryani...

History recorded him as the Butcher of Amritsar. On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open indiscriminate fire at a crowd of peaceful protesters in Jallianwala Bagh killing over a thousand right away. While this happened in Amritsar, a young Urdu poet in Aligarh dreamed of...

She was born to a nautch girl from the dingy alleys of Old Delhi, raised in a tiny hamlet in Haryana, abused as a kid, orphaned before she was ten, and bought to be a concubine before entering her teens. And yet, she beat every odd Providence threw her way and went on to become a queen who would...

More than two hundred years ago, a Muslim boy from Bihar lost his father, enlisted with the East India Company and set off on a voyage that took him to remote corners of India. By the late 1700s, he arrived in England and floated two business ventures — an Indian restaurant and a bathhouse...

Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was a culmination of many events and many actors that never enjoyed the centerstage in the broader discourse. Yes, Nathuram Godse pulled that trigger, but a lot more went into the project than just that. There was a disgraced barrister, a former Air Force officer...

In the context of Christianity in India, few conversations ever invoke Agra; even fewer invoke the Mughals. Yet, one of the oldest churches on the subcontinent not only belongs to this city but only came about with enthusiastic Mughal patronage. Patronage that was neither political, nor...

Five years before The Times and over seventy years before The New York Times, a four-page broadsheet appeared in Calcutta to become the first newspaper in India and all of Asia. This newspaper, started by an Irish expatriate on Indian soil under British patronage, soon became a lighthouse of...

On February 22, 1937, the Time magazine featured him on its cover as the wealthiest individual on the planet, a position he's believed to have held his entire life. At his peak, his net worth was the equivalent of $77 billion in today's money. He used a 184-carat diamond worth over $70 million...

There was a time when coffee ruled Britain. London was practically littered with coffee houses, some of which later spawned the country's stock-trading business. Back home in India, coffee was the beverage of privilege and dominated the Mughal court. Then tea happened and things took a turn...

Long, long ago in the deserts of Egypt, emerged a new Islamic sect that experienced a mortal threat from mainstream Islam right since inception. The sect invented the art of assassination as a defence strategy, participated in the crusades, and eventually entered India as an ally of the British...

The Golden Temple of Amritsar has always been more than just a holy site. Throughout its chequered history, the complex has served as the undeniable seat of Sikh power, both theological as well as political. So when it was desecrated in 1984, it's only natural the entirety of North India burst...

Aksai Chin is a barren wasteland that's disputed between India and China. Having caused at least one full-fledged war between the two nations already, the region continues to claim lives and resources like no other on the planet. This story charts the background to this problem tracing a line...

The 17th-century Jagat Seths are often referred to as India's Medicis for their wealth. Rich enough to sponsor the British win at Plassey, they were India's largest moneylenders of their time. The bull run came to an end with the execution of its patriarchs in 1763. With the single largest...

The 1911 Delhi Durbar was the third and the last, and a very special one. It was an event of many historical firsts—the first time Delhi took over from Calcutta as India's capital, the first time a reigning British monarch visited India in person, and the first time an Indian king openly...

Mahatma Gandhi sought India's independence, as did B.R. Ambedkar. Gandhi sought the emancipation of the oppressed, Ambedkar wanted that too. And yet, the two keystones of the monument called India couldn't be more antithetical to each other's principles. They held immense respect for each other...

India has been called the golden bird so often, that it's become a cliché now. But the title doesn't exist without reason. Sure, this land has seen catastrophic famines and poverty rarely seen elsewhere in human history, but it's never lost its familiarity with extreme wealth either...

Few agricultural commodities have influenced world history as dramatically as the humble cotton. And not some distant, unrecognisable antiquity, but times far closer to the present. Less than two centuries ago, these feathery balls nearly split America into two, triggered a civil war, propelled...

If the stories of Britain's affluence and American independence were boiled down to one single commodity, it has to be the humble ubiquitous tea. Although all of it first came from China, India is where the money to buy it came from. Sometime in the 18th century, this cash cow came down with a...

Today, the American dollar is legal tender in as many as seven sovereign nations besides the United States of America. But there was a time, not too long ago, when another currency enjoyed a similar influence far from home. It was legal tender in half a dozen countries besides its own, all of...

Two years after the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland, the exiled Polish army put 700 Polish women and children on a ship to virtually nowhere. "If we live, we'll meet again," is the last thing they heard from their families. After being denied by every country it touched, the ship...