Historychatter Podcast

This episode of HistoryChatter features an interview with Dr. Shilpi Rajpal of Copenhagen University. Rajpal published a pioneering social history of insanity and madness in nineteen and twentieth-century India; ‘Curing Madness: A Social and Cultural History of Insanity in Colonial North India 1800-1950s’. In this conversation, Rajpal spoke about the changing ideas and meanings of insa...

Raja Rammohan Ray, who is often called the first modern Indian, wrote a letter in 1823 to Governor-General Lord Amherst. In the letter, he protested against the government's decision to assign special funds to promote Sanskrit learning. In this episode of HistoryChatter, we revisit that special document and recall the reasons Rammohan Ray had cited against the promotion of classical language educa...

S N Banerjea, a founder member of the Indian National Congress, had a distinguished career in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a teacher and a politician. However, he was also one of the first Indians to pass the ICS Examination in 1871. This episode of HistoryChatter revisits his early life as a bright student who went to England and passed the ICS Examination amid great difficu...

This episode of HistoryChatter is a conversation with Chicago Historian Rochona Majumdar about her new book on Indian art cinema. Majumdar speaks about how the promoters of art cinema participated in fresh imaginations about the future of democracy and development in India. She claims art cinema was also a way of doing history to the extent that it played around with the concept of time in special...

Cigarette smoking is injurious to health. But it was once promoted as a stress reliever. During the First World War in particular, cigarette smoking was in fact encouraged as a morale booster. Cigarette companies published patriotic advertisements, women were exhorted to gift cigarettes to their men in the trenches and war time import restrictions were lifted selectively for tobacco leaves. First...

Coffee houses arrived in England in the seventeenth century, probably from Turkey. By the eighteenth century, they evolved into an animated public square. Men visiting coffee houses gradually took to discussing politics, commerce and diplomacy, and media and advertising too moved in soon enough. Yet, the rise of the coffee house as a public place did not immediately lead to a corresponding rise in...

The UN has decided to celebrate February 11 as the International Day of Women and Girls In Science. In that context, this episode of history chatter recalls the pioneering role some women doctors had played in setting up and running all women’s hospitals in Europe during the First World War. Offering an outline of the life and careers of these pioneers, including some details about the recru...

Fish and chips would be usually described as the staple food of the labouring poor in the nineteenth century. Writers such as Dickens and contemporary newspapers and commentators connected it with poverty, lack of hygiene and a strong odour. In short, the middle classes in England pretty much disapproved of it until the early twentieth century. Since the 1950s, however, Fish and Chips underwent an...

The government of India has resolved to erect a statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose near the India Gate on 23 January this year. This is the 125th birth anniversary year of Netaji Bose. On this occasion, HistoryChatter recalls the political legacy of Netaji Bose and the legends surrounding his death and reappearance. How do we propose to remember one of the tallest leaders of modern India? Is it...

How food travels across time and place is a reflection of the relation of peoples and cultures over time. Khichdi had long been around in the subcontinent. But the attitude of foreigners to it kept changing across time. Some, such as Ibn Batuta, mentioned it in passing, without any special affinity. Yet others, such as Nikitin, dismissed it with contempt. The early Englishmen, however, adapted it...

The city of Bombay really took off during the 1850s. Until then, it had been growing steadily as a major port city, but the 1850s saw the arrival of the modem machines and the textile mills. This is also when the railways made their debut. Mill owner and liberal politician Dinshaw Wacha was in his boyhood at the time. Later, when he wrote a memoir on Bombay, he would recall the many changes he had...

Mumbai or Bombay looked vastly different a hundred years ago. Salim Ali, the legendary bird watcher and ornithologist, grew up in the first decades of twentieth-century in south Bombay. He has left a delightful account of his school days and summer holidays in his memoir The Fall of a Sparrow. The first episode of HistoryChatter this year looks back at some of those memories hundred years ago. &nb...

Did you know that Christmas celebrations did not begin until the fourth century AD? Or that St. Francis or Franciscans were not the first to make the crib popular? Or that the Carols were originally a collection of bawdy songs until local priests in Germany, Italy, Ireland and England turned them into divine prayers? This Christmas special episode of HistoryChatter explores a long term history of...

One was a thoroughbred patrician with an obsession with motor racing, while the other rose from a hardy farmer stock to become a self-taught mechanic and manufacturer of breakthrough technology cars and engines. What happens when two such polar opposite characters by chance met each other during the fin de siecle Britain? This episode of HistoryChatter revisits the fairy tale of how Rolls met Royc...

The game of Badminton reached New York as early as 1878. Four or five adventurous young men and women set up The Badminton Club of New York, but over the next fifty years, it evolved primarily as a socializing institution. By the early twentieth century, their best badminton player was easily enough defeated in a game by a Lawn Tennis player with some practice. It did incalculable damage to the im...

Middle-class men in Victorian Britain launched a movement between the 1840s and 1860s against shaving. They believed bearded men enjoyed divine blessing and shaving caused cancer and blindness and made men irreligious, irrational, and unhealthy at once. Their anxiety probably reflected growing imperial anxiety and a new pattern of masculinity for middle-class men who were keen to distinguish thems...

Sports and international politics and diplomacy intersect in many ways. The Ping Pong diplomacy between America and China in 1971 was probably the most high-profile instance of sports helping in the resumption of diplomatic relations between two formerly hostile countries. HistoryChatter revisits this landmark episode in international diplomacy on its fiftieth anniversary. You can follow us and le...

British secret service files on historian Eric Hobsbawm reveal their anxiety against communists and communism. They offer details on methods of espionage, techniques of information gathering and processes of record keeping and information sharing by secret service operatives. Ironically enough, spies of two warring or otherwise hostile countries often enough met and exchanged notes on common targe...

Historian Eric Hobsbawm was longtailed by the British Secret Service MI5. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which the secret service saw as a threat to the nation. The MI5 files on Hobsbawm were finally declassified in 2014, two years after his death in 2012. HistoryChatter looks into the contents of these files in two episodes. In addition, these episodes include det...

Diwali often appears to be a common Indian festival. In reality, Indians of various religions observe anniversaries of distinct events on the same day. Kali Puja, which is celebrated most widely in Bengal, and often falls on the same day or time around Diwali, also has a number of origin stories. It is observed in various forms by various communities and places. This episode of HistoryChatter look...

Falafel is now considered a typical middle eastern delicacy. Many countries, including Israel, Palestine, and Yemen claim to be their birthplace. Yet, it was probably invented in Egypt and inspired by the humble Indian Vada or Fulawri. This episode of HistoryChatter explores the appearance,  circulation, and contested nationalisation of Falafel in the Middle East and later migration to Europe...

Did you know that many children were eligible to vote in the early twentieth century England? An anomaly in voting laws in England made it possible. This episode of HistoryChatter takes up why it happened and how eventually it was set right. Hosted by Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay    Don't miss out on the latest time travel stories! Subscribe now to Historychatter to receive updates about th...

Chicago University Professor Wendy Doniger, a living legend studying Hinduism and India over the last sixth years, speaks in this special episode of HistoryChatter about her early career choices, history and myth, her new book on horses in Indian history and mythology and on distinctive approach to studying India, Hinduism, Sanskrit and texts. Hosted by Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay    Don't...

The second episode on the many histories of Qutb Minar carries shows how a good historian reads various sources of the past. It considers the ways in which Prof. Sunil Kumar had studied and interpreted the various sources which offer details about the Qutb complex. He shows, for instance, how the Hindu god Vishwakarma is present in these accounts or how the history of Qutb offers clues to the chan...

Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second Prime Minister of India, is often remembered only for his successful premiership during the 1965 Indo-Pak war and for his mysterious death while in the office soon after. This episode of HistoryChatter provides an account of his early life and political career instead. In recalling his family background, boyhood experiences, student life, and early life in politics,...