Here are 100 books that Indian Architecture fans have personally recommended if you like
Indian Architecture.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
I liked this book very much because it is a brave book. It is becoming more and more difficult to accept that ancient Indian culture was influenced by outside influences, as is the case with all parts of the world.
But at the time, it was already a debated issue. This book advocated an open perspective on the Indian past and present. I was very pleased to see the author's lack of prejudice and wide knowledge. I enjoyed it very much.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
What I like about Prakash's book is that it is a very analytical text, very technical in a sense: it is simply trying to see if there are influences in Indian mythological stories from other cultures.
And with the same simplicity, he shows that there are, and in particular, Greek ones. He does it in such a way that you don't have to know much about Indian myths to understand it, and with a lot of (sometimes too much?) prudence.
Dr. Arora's present book is indeed a most welcome addition to the growing field of comparative mythological studies. The work is a very thorough investigation into some of the major themes and motifs in Indian mythology in a much wider and comparative perspective. He has carefully selected them from Indian, Greek, West-Asian, and other sources. The result obtained by him provides an amazing story of interaction between various cultural traditions through space and time. This is a painstaking work of research and a substantial contribution not only to the History of Indian Civilization but also to that of the ancient…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
Of the five recommended books, this is the most current. No wonder there are so many years in between. Maintaining that there are external influences in India is very dangerous academically. I like that Morales-Harley, a young scholar who knows Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, dared to do it.
I like his book because it is well written, well argued, and always leaves open alternative interpretation possibilities.
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman)…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
I wanted to end my list with another book by an Indian author. This is a text similar to Acharya's, a text that impressed me when I found it and that almost no one cites.
This is an author who argues not only that there are external influences in ancient India but that it is a constant in Indian history and that there is no reason to be ashamed of it. Why should there be? It is a basic text in the good sense of the word, a brave book that deserves to be reread.
I am an art historian and have been engaged with India for over 40 years. Among other topics, I write about the Rajput courts in Rajasthan – especially Jaipur and Jodhpur – and about the Mughal cities of Delhi and Agra. I taught courses on these subjects at the University of London (at SOAS) in the 1990s. Since 2004 I have been living in India, where I work with museum trusts and with travel companies. Before the pandemic, I lectured regularly to tour groups visiting sites like the Taj Mahal, my aim being to bring the insights provided by expert research to a wider audience.
This is a survey of all Mughal architecture, in which only a few pages are devoted to the Taj Mahal directly, but for anyone who wants to understand the Taj not as something unique and inexplicable, but as a logical part of a longer tradition of design, this book is essential reading. While there are other surveys of Mughal architecture on offer, a major strength of this one is the author’s inclusion of many minor and provincial buildings that provide a wider context for the famous stand-out masterpieces like the Taj.
In Architecture of Mughal India Catherine Asher presents the first comprehensive study of Mughal architectural achievements. The work is lavishly illustrated and will be widely read by students and specialists of South Asian history and architecture as well as by anyone interested in the magnificent buildings of the Mughal empire.
Suspense thrillers were staple “reading food” in my college and young adult days, and my love for them continues. I always craved thrillers that are based on WWII, the Cold War, and secret scientific advances and that offered fresh historical perspectives and dared to challenge popular narratives while delighting the readers with dexterously woven fictional tales. And then, most importantly, it is the feeling the author has conducted genuine, painstaking research bringing out captivating, reasoned nuggets of history that I find most satisfying.
Can a memoir be a thriller? I say this one is. It is truly an amazing and inspiring account of an immigrant’s tenacious, fearless journey to success, from humble beginnings in a small town in India to earning a PhD in the US and becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur.
While not exactly a historical thriller, The Blue Suitcase took me on a roller coaster ride full of fascinating cultural insights and nuances and the serendipities that shaped Thanedar’s journey.
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
Rajendra B. Aklekar (born 1974) is an Indian journalist with over 25 years of experience and author of best-selling books on India’s railway history and heritage. He is also the biographer of India’s legendary railway engineer Dr. E Sreedharan. With museology from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharasj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, Aklekar is also a Google-certified Digital Marketer. Aklekar, associated with the Indian Railway Fans’ Club Association, Indian Steam Railway Society, Rail Enthusiasts Society, has contributed significantly while setting up the Rail Heritage Gallery at the UNESCO-listed Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station, formerly Victoria Terminus building, Bombay, and documentation of heritage relics of India’s first railway.
The Indian Locomotive Series of four books by Hugh Hughes is a must-have for all rail fans, learners, academics, and researchers. Even if you are not a serious historian and would just want to know more about locomotives in India, this is the key book. Hugh C. Hughes was a teacher by profession, who was a prominent statistician and railway historian of the Indian Railways. He has documented and listed every possible locomotive from the by-gone era that ever worked on rail lines here and has managed to acquire some very rare pictures of those locomotives. I personally recommend the book because it adds to value because the old images of stations and locations along with those old workhorse engines are today really valuable to get a context of how the old station was historically as it is seldom that such photographs are taken by the official machinery of the…
Part 1 in this series begins with a general history of the development of broad gauge railways in India, the locomotive types, and stock totals at 20 year intervals to illustrate the varying trends in motive power. The book then provides a detailed look at 14 railway systems, covering over 10,000 locomotives. For each system, there is a roster of all known locomotives, a brief history of the railway (including opening date, mergers, etc.), and a description of the main features of the locomotive stock. Railways covered include the Bengal-Nagpur, the Bombay, Baroda & Central India, the East Coast, the…
I started writing fiction and writing aboutfiction at about the same time. My novels and stories tend to be about solitary characters pulled into the maelstrom that is contemporary Indian urban life and trying to make sense of it. I’ve always believed that to be an effective observer of your society you need to stay in tune with what your peers are doing and the last two decades in which I’ve been writing and publishing have been some of the most exciting for Indian fiction in general.
This slim novel I read in one sitting not because, in the way of conventional thrillers, one hopes for a decent resolution, but because the story is so devastating. Its very hopelessness somehow pulls one in. Pandey has written a very gentle account of the very brutal forces ranged against one couple who have committed what can be a crime in modern India – marrying outside one’s caste and religion.
This is like Kafka in Deoria. Or Camus in the cow belt. But more accurate to say that Legal Fiction is an urgent, literary report about how truth goes missing in our land. I read it with a racing heart.
-- Amitava Kumar, author of The Lovers
Chandan Pandey goes looking for the story that lurks just out of sight, getting under the skin of news headlines and extracting a story that is as compelling as it is devastating.
-- Annie Zaidi, author of Prelude to a Riot
Chandan Pandey has written a brilliant, gripping political novel. Legal Fiction is…
I am a historian of modern India at the Department of History, University of Delhi, with a longstanding interest in the intersections of gender, caste, sexuality, and religious identities in early twentieth-century North India. My work draws deeply from Hindi vernacular sources—popular tracts, magazines, cartoons, and pamphlets—which offer a rich yet underexplored archive for understanding the everyday life of Hindu nationalist ideologies and also ways in which it was punctured or questioned. Since my doctoral research in 1996, I have been particularly drawn to the everyday gender and caste dimensions of Hindu politics.
I loved this book because it nuanced my understanding of how modern Hindu identity was manufactured through Hindi literature in the literary salons and polemics of nineteenth-century Banaras. Dalmia’s intricate study of the life and writings of Bharatendu Harischandra, a colorful and creative personality and often called the Father of Modern Hindi, impacted me strongly.
Here was a writer, playwright, publisher, and polemicist who played a critical role in the formation of Hindu modernity in North India. I also find the book interesting for its description of social history, rooted in the ancient city of Banaras.
This volume studies how a dominant strand of Hinduism in north India--the tradition which uses and misuses the slogan "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan"--came into being in the late nineteenth century. It examines the life and writings of one major Hindi writer of the nineteenth century--the playwright, journalist, and polemicist Bharatendu Harishchandra (often called the "Father of Modern Hindi")--as its focal point for an analysis of some of the vital cultural processes through which modern north India came to be formed.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Abi Oliver is a pen name as my real name is Annie Murray—I write under both names. My first book, A New Map of Love, set in the 1960s, featured an older woman who had been born in India. She developed into such a character—a bit of an old trout to be truthful—that I wanted to tell her story. It also tapped into my family’s many connections with India and the fact that I have travelled a lot there. I finally got to travel, with my oldest daughter, and stay in one of the tea gardens in Assam—a wonderful experience.
This first volume—with the other three—is, I think, the best book ever written about the British in India and their leaving of it. The whole story is rooted in a rape that happens to a young Englishwoman, whose lover is accused of the crime. I first read this when it came out in 1980, before the amazingly good TV series. There are so many unforgettable characters in it—the women, trying to survive with husbands and fathers away in the army, the missionaries and nuns, as well as the men. Scott does not in any way idealize the British—rather the opposite—and it is a feast of detail of the time and moving human stories. I have re-read it and will no doubt do so again.
This first volume opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for self-rule. Daphne Manners, daughter of the province governor, is running at night through the Mayapore gardens, away from her Indian lover, who will soon be arrested for her alleged rape.
