British Empire

In numbers: Know India's military might over belligerent Pakistan

Although India had achieved conventional military superiority over Pakistan several decades ago, the Indian government under PM Narendra Modi has focussed on upgrading the fighting capability of the Indian armed forces over the past few years

Head-on | India @75: The new idea of India is forward-looking, diverse and free of past’s burdens

A new idea of India is reflected in the fearless teenagers at the Chess Olympiad in Chennai, the sports heroes at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, and innovative startup entrepreneurs in tech hubs around the country

Nigeria's looted treasures return to traditional palace after over 100 years

The return of the two artefacts comes as calls grow in Africa for Western countries to return colonial spoils from their museums and private collections

Spirit of liberty in Afghan people admirable, but rise of Taliban leaves country staring at a dark future

What Afghanistan requires is a Mustafa Kemal who modernised Turkey, or a King Amanullah, who tried to do so in Afghanistan, though he failed

Reading Mrs Dalloway: How Virginia Woolf wrote illness and isolation into the national story of post war Britain

Mrs Dalloway is a text that shows how memory and mourning work to uphold the values of the British Empire. Its attention on how emotions circulate between people allows us to understand how national structures of feeling are created through newspapers and through the orchestration of symbolic identifications.

In decoding the language of cricket, a look into the game's culture, gendered outlook and current lingual challenges

Cricket's greatest linguistic hurdle has come to the fore: the terms ‘batsman’ and ‘man of the match/series’ are now of a piece with terms like chairman, businessman and so on – gendered oddities that need a quick fix.

Why the defacement of Winston Churchill's statue in London stirs Bengalis 77 years since the famine

While there are massive statues of Winston Churchill commemorating his 'historical significance', acknowledgment of the Bengal Famine, let alone any memorialisation of it, has been ostentatiously forgone

Komagata Maru: The voyage that exposed the British Empire for what it was — a glorified profit-seeking operation

Less than two decades after the legendary Battle of Saragarhi, the much-feted soldiers of the British Empire came up against it in the Komagata Maru incident of 1914.

Migrants across eras: Exodus caused by lockdown mirrors untold suffering of indentured labourers from 19th century

Like the migrants who are currently walking back home across states, a century-and-a-half ago, many Indians — indentured labourers all — made similar travels in cattle-like conditions on steamships. Most ended up being cheated and denied a fair shot at life.

Totaram Sanadhya, an Indian in Fiji: A life defined by the indentured labour system and the fight against it

An indentured labourer sent to Fiji, Totaram Sanadhya survived near-starvation and back-breaking work to become a successful sugarcane farmer. He travelled throughout the islands, meeting labourers and listening to their tales of woe. He would go on to write a letter to Mahatma Gandhi, requesting that an English-speaking lawyer be despatched to Fiji to help the Indians get organised