Naushad's profile

Chapter I If one could pry into the lives of some of the viceroys who came to British India, one would marvel at how the British could build such a grand Colonial Empire. Viceroys were usually noble by birth: barons, viscounts, earls, marquises, and the like. Who cared to bother that nobility by itself was hardly a virtue? Lord Mortimer Edmund Griffin-Tiffin, His Excellency, the Viceroy of India, sat in his thickly cushioned chair looking at the mirror, which had a bejewelled frame, and saw i...

Chapter 1 Emilia Sedley sat in her rocking chair as she perused the pages of Joan Wallach Scott’s Feminism and History (Oxford Readings in Feminism) in her meagerly furnished flat in New York. At the age of thirty-one, she was turning towards a cause. Not having found much fulfilment in her own personal life, she would try to help other women find it. As a first step, before joining the larger movement in concrete terms, she would attempt writing on Lady Jane Grey, the British Tudor monarch ...

My Neurosis and Hers The train journey commenced on an unpleasant note. A little girl had crushed her fingers under the weight of the window-shutter. I have always been neurotic about such accidents. In fact only a few moments earlier I had cautioned a little boy, (who had narrow slits for eyes and rosy, pink, cheeks), to be careful in the train lest he crushed his fingers under the shaky shutters. I could never have imagined that just five minutes after my warning this boy, a girl would actu...

Marriages are made in India Lady Anne Ridley was getting strange thoughts about India and her prospective Indian daughter-in-law as she sat in a British Airways plane at Heathrow. A number of Indians, mostly newly rich Punjabis, had boarded the aircraft. Would Harmeet Ahuja also be like one of these women, who spoke loud enough to create a commotion and peered into each other’s bags? Why couldn’t Henry choose an English bride? Or if he had to be so unconventional, surely he could have found ...

The Rape of Ranbaxy I had never seen any place quite like it. The little patch of land with colourful rooftops, situated towards the end of Canal Road, was substantially different to the rest of the town. Socially, it remained cut off from Allahabad, though geographically it was its centre. It often aroused the curiosity of this sleepy town. But there was no real coming together of those who lived here and those who lived anywhere else in Allahabad. The only intermixing of these people that ...