Book Reviews
23 August 2019
Anita Anand's book, 'The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj,' focuses on the man who killed Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor who ordered General Dyer to Amritsar. Anand discusses Udham Singh and the myths around him and why nationalist leaders disowned him.[image:image-0]
In the latest book on the Amritsar massacre, Amritsar 1919 by Kim Wagner, the nationalist myth around the massacre is demolished by Wagner who sees the massacre as being the result of British paranoia following the Indian rebellion. Nevertheless, Wagner spends much time in presenting widespread evidence on British revulsion after the massacre.
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Over a million Indian soldiers served in WW1, yet how much do we know about these men and their war experience? Santanu Das in his book, 'India, Empire and First World War Culture' uses hundreds of pieces of evidence - memoirs, letters oral recordings - to sensitively give us a very readable account of the Indian experience of the Great War.
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To the Victorians the British Empire was portrayed as exciting and full of adventure. But was it really like this? In a new book entitled, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire, Jeffrey A Auerbach argues that living in far away lands with an alien climate and amongst strange animals was not the escape from tedium that many expected.
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