Arun Kumar - The Silent Rebellion: Labour, Caste, and Education in Colonial India’ by Cambridge University Press, 2026.

We would like to congratulate CeMIS alumnus, and Assistant Professor in British Imperial, Colonial, and Post-colonial History, University of Nottingham, Dr. Arun Kumar on the publication of his book ‘

Part of the ICAS:MP book series, the book launch will take place on 26 August 2026, in Seminar Halls 1,2,3, Kamaladevi Complex, India International Centre, New Delhi. Discussants: Professor Prabhu Mohapatra, (retired) University of Delhi Dr. Hem Borker, Jamia Millia Islamia Professor Aparna Vaidik, Ashoka University Panel Host: Manas Srivastava, Assistant Editor, The Indian Express Book Abstract: The Silent Rebellion tells a history of labour subjectivity formation at the site of education and the defiance of labouring subalterns who refused to see themselves solely as labouring bodies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand, the book examines how elite power—encompassing colonial officials, employers, and caste elites—attempted to integrate caste labour into their modern projects of industrial and technical education, thereby reproducing labouring conditions and subjectivities. It focuses on the hitherto neglected social histories of industrial, technical, factory, and night schools. On the other hand, the book reveals how labouring subalterns—artisans, factory labourers, and other service-providing workers—used education to challenge their portrayal as mere labouring bodies. Focusing on their desire for literary education, book learning, and their dream to become teachers, clerks, and poets—what the book articulates as the nonwork self of working lives—the book develops new analytical frameworks to write nonworking histories of working lives. See less

Historian Chris Evan's new book, coming out soon: Slavery's Long Goodbye: Capitalism, Nationalism and Christianity in the Age of British Emancipation

Historian Chris Evan's new book, coming out soon:

AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA by Zeinab Badawi - 2026

From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence Every human being alive today is African. Not metaphorically — literally. And yet the story of the continent that gave rise to our species has been told, for centuries, by everyone except Africans themselves. This is the history they didn't want you to read in school. Not because it's too brutal — though it is: the ledgers of the slave trade, the maps carved up in European drawing rooms, the empires erased from memory to make room for a myth of an empty, timeless land waiting to be "discovered." But because it's too inconvenient. It dismantles the comforting fiction that Africa's story begins with colonizers and ends with independence, as if the twelve thousand years in between were simply silence. Zeinab Badawi doesn't ask for your comfort. She asks for your attention, to kingdoms richer than their European contemporaries, to scholars and scientists written out of the record, to the deliberate machinery of forgetting that turned a continent of civilizations into a blank space on a map. This book will make you angry. It will make you question what you were taught, who taught it, and why. That's not a flaw, it's the point. PRICE: 17,000 NGN

Stephen Grosz - The Life Examined-The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

Non-fiction – paperback; Vintage; 225 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher. In a bid to read more non-fiction this year, I picked up Stephen Grosz’s

, part of Vintage Publishing’s “shelf help” promotion. It first came to my attention when Victoria, who blogs at Tales from the Reading Room, chose it as one of her books of the year in my Book Bloggers’ Advent Calendar last December. In her review, Victoria said: “Everyone should read this book and feel it chip away any ice around their hearts, to let our admirable human capacity for love and compassion flow through.” And I concur: this book puts paid to the notion that non-fiction is boring or dull. I was entirely captivated by it and ate it up as quickly as I could. A series of case histories Written by Stephen Grosz, an American-born psychoanalyst who has a practice in London, it reads like a collection of short stories structured around five key themes — beginnings, telling lies, loving, changing and leaving. These, in turn, are broken into short chapters, some of which are are only a few pages long. Each chapter is a case history of one of Grosz’s patients — adults in psychoanalysis whom he has met four or five times a week for 50-minute sessions over several years. As he explains in his preface, “all tales are drawn from day-to-day practice. These stories are true, but I’ve altered all identifying details in the interests of confidentiality”. The book shows how Grosz is able to help people who feel trapped — whether by circumstance, poor decision making, foolishness, fear or past history, among other reasons — to change their lives and their behaviour for the better. It’s important to stress that these people are as ordinary as you and I. In fact, you will probably recognise friends, colleagues, family — perhaps even yourself — in these pages. For that reason alone, it makes for a riveting read, full of “light bulb moments”. It shines a light on the human condition and the terrible muddles we sometimes get ourselves into without even realising we are doing it.

Pema Chodron. When things fall apart-heart advice for difficult times. 2026

I wanted this book to be wrong. Desperately.

I knew what it was going to ask me to admit if it was right, and I wasn't ready to admit it, so for the first thirty pages I fought Pema Chödrön the way you fight someone you already suspect is telling you the bitter truth. I was hoping, genuinely hoping, that a Buddhist nun who'd spent decades studying the human mind had simply gotten it wrong this time. But Pema kept talking, and you could hear from her voice that she'd clearly made peace with everything she is saying. Even that bothered me. Here's the sentence that started the argument. She says the things falling apart in your life are not a malfunction. That the ground was never solid to begin with; you were never actually standing on anything, you'd just gotten remarkably good at not noticing. She says the anxious, ungrounded feeling you're trying so hard to fix is not a problem to be solved. It's just what it feels like to be a person, accurately, for once, without the usual padding. I did not want to hear that. I wanted solutions. I wanted five steps. I wanted someone to hand me the ground back. Pema, gently, yet infuriatingly, refuses. And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that refusal is the entire gift of this book. Pema has this idea, unconditional friendship with yourself, and it sounds soft until you actually try to practise it, and then you realise it might be one of the hardest things a person can do. To meet your own fear, your own shame, your own spiralling 2 am thoughts, not with another wave of self-improvement, but with something closer to how you'd sit with a frightened child: I see you. I'm not going anywhere. She tells a story about a woman who kept having nightmares about monsters chasing her, invading her space. She tries everything to get rid of them: yelling at them, barricading the door, and trying to analyze them. Nothing works, until one night, exhausted, she turned around, looked the monsters in the eye, and said, I see you. You're not going away, so let's see what you have to teach me. And the monsters froze. They had no idea what to do with someone who stopped running. I read that over and again because I knew exactly which monsters she was talking about. I have a few of my own that have been very comfortable chasing me for years, precisely because I never once turned around. And then there's the line that I think about more than almost anything else I've read: nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. I didn't want that to be true either. I wanted things to just go away, old grief, old patterns, old fears, through sheer avoidance, if necessary. But avoidance, it turns out, is just a very elaborate waiting room. The thing doesn't leave. It just keeps tapping you on the shoulder, in slightly different outfits, until you finally look at it. I need to tell you about the audiobook, too. I listened to it recently, late at night, read by Christy Meyer, and something about receiving these ideas as sound instead of text undid me in an entirely new way. I lay there in the dark and listened and felt a particular quality of quiet settle inside me, which is rare for me, and which Pema Chödrön somehow manages to produce from well beyond the page. This is the book I keep returning to, not because I've mastered anything inside it. I very much have not. I still resist. I still want the five steps some days. I still, on the bad ones, run from the monsters instead of turning around to meet them. But every single time I come back to these pages, something in me recognizes the voice, the way you recognize an old friend who never once asked you to be anything other than exactly what you are in that particular moment. What this book does to me, every time, is remind me that falling apart was never the emergency I assumed it was. That there's a way to be here, fully inside the mess, without needing the mess to become anything other than what it already is. I don't know if I'll ever stop disagreeing with parts of it. I also don't know if I'll ever stop coming back to it. And right now, that's the only endorsement that actually matters. Not what I believed after the first thirty pages. What I do when things fall apart. I reach for this book. Every single time. BOOK: https://amzn.to/4zk3UZn

Ryushun Kusanagi's The Practice of Not Reacting - Buddhism - 2026

I didn't realize I was a reactor until I read this book. Then I saw it everywhere, in my racing thoughts, my clenched jaw, my habit of replaying conversations I wish I'd handled differently.

found me at the right time. I was tired. Not physically tired, but the kind of tired that comes from carrying the weight of every small frustration, every perceived slight, every moment I let someone else's mood dictate my own. I didn't have words for it. I just knew I was exhausted. Then I read this book. And I felt seen. Kusanagi, a Buddhist monk, writes with the clarity of someone who has spent years sitting with his own mind. He offers a simple but profound insight: hardship is part of life, but suffering is a choice. It is not what happens to us that disturbs the heart, it is the desires, aversions, and judgments that arise in the mind. When we stop reacting, the mind settles and we find peace. That sounds simple. It is not. But Kusanagi does not ask you to be perfect. He asks you to practice. To notice. To observe your reactions without getting swept away by them. He writes that reactions are like waves in the ocean, they arise and pass. The goal is not to stop the waves, but to stop being pulled under by them. I started practicing. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But I started noticing. I noticed the tightness in my chest when someone said something that stung. I noticed the spiral of thoughts that followed. I noticed the stories I told myself, about what they meant, about what it said about me. And I started letting those stories go. Not all of them. But enough. The practice has not made me peaceful. It has made me aware. And awareness, as Kusanagi writes, is the beginning of freedom. This book is brief, but it is not shallow. It is the kind of book you read in one sitting, then return to again and again. It is not a book to be consumed. It is a book to be lived. Three Lessons (from the book, through the lens of my experience): 1. Suffering is not what happens to you. It is how you respond to what happens. I used to think my stress was caused by external events. Now I see that it is caused by my reaction to them. The events will happen. I get to choose whether I add suffering to them. 2. Reactions are habits. And habits can be unlearned. I have been reacting the same way for years. The book showed me that these reactions are not who I am. They are patterns. And patterns can be changed. 3. The one who can watch their own mind is the one who is free. This is the most important lesson I am still learning. Observing my reactions without getting caught up in them, without judging myself for having them, is the beginning of freedom. Read this if you are tired. Read this if you want to stop being ruled by your emotions. Read this if you are ready to practice, not perfectly, but honestly. Ryushun Kusanagi has written a book that is both a mirror and a guide. It reflects the patterns you have been carrying, and it points you toward a different way. It will not solve your problems. But it will change how you relate to them. And that, I am learning, is everything. BOOK: https://amzn.to/4xhr8he

PLATO AND THE TYRANT, acclaimed historian and classicist James Romm draws on personal letters of Plato—documents

Plato is one of history’s most influential thinkers, the “sublime philosopher” whose writings remain foundational to Western culture. He is known for the brilliant dialogues in which he depicted his teacher, Socrates, discussing ethical truths with prominent citizens of Athens. Yet the image we have of Plato—an ethereal figure far removed from society and politics, who conjured abstract ideas in peaceful groves—is a fiction, created by Plato’s admirers and built up over centuries. In fact, Plato was very much a man of the world. In

that have long been kept in obscurity—to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era: the opulent city of Syracuse. There, Plato encountered two authoritarian rulers, a father and son both named Dionysius, and tried to steer them toward philosophy. At the same time, he worked on his masterpiece, Republic, in which he conceived a ruler who unites perfect wisdom with absolute power. That dream has echoed down through the ages and given rise to a famous term, one that Plato himself didn’t actually use: philosopher-king. Combining thrilling political drama with explorations of Plato’s most cherished ideas, Romm takes us into the heart of Greece’s late classical age, a time when many believed that democracy had failed. Plato’s search for solutions led him to write his fervent plea for a new political order, and also led him to a place where he believed his theories might be put into practice. But PLATO AND THE TYRANT demonstrates how Plato’s experiment with enlightened autocracy spiraled into catastrophe, and also gives us nothing less than a new account of the origins of Western political thought. Available now in paperback. https://wwnorton.com/books/plato-and-the-tyrant Jacket Design by Sarah Bibel