HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-04-25T08:01:07.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history
items: Michael Wood on an astonishing Hindu pilgrimage
items: “Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history
items: Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
items: War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
items: Indian experiences in WW2
items: “The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century
items: “Humans are a marvel of ingenuity, yet we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia”: Simon Schama on pandemics and vaccines
items: Why we should remember Direct Action Day

“Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history
type: item
date: 2025-04-25T08:00:33.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she explores the long-standing but now dwindling Jewish community of Kochi
encoded: In the warm winter sun of Mattancherry, a district of Kochi in Kerala, I wandered the labyrinthine streets of Jew Town. The main thoroughfare, Synagogue Lane, is lined with shops sporting names such as Shalom, some displaying the Star of David in their windows, and selling Kashmiri shawls, spices and handicrafts. This is the historical heart of India’s Jewish community – though today there are hardly any Jews living here. Kochi (formerly Cochin) has a centuries-long Jewish presence. The date of the earliest arrivals is debated; some say that the first Jews sailed to south India on the ships of King Solomon some 30 centuries ago. Certainly, references to Jewish traders in India have been found in documents dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries AD, kept in a synagogue genizah (storage area) in Cairo. A number of Jews settled in the ancient trading port of Kodungallur (formerly Cranganore) and, from the 14th century, dispersed; many moved to Kochi, around 20 miles to the south. Over the following centuries, European Jews, known in the local Malayalam language as Paredesi (literally, ‘foreigners’), began to arrive in India. Many of them were refugees fleeing the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and following the expulsion of Jews in 1492. Over later centuries, more Jews came from western Europe, as well as from north Africa and the Middle East. At its height, Kochi’s Jewish community numbered around 2,000 members. In the 19th century, though, some began leaving to pursue opportunities in Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata), and then, from 1948, to live permanently in the newly created state of Israel. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568 by Sephardic Jews, still stands next to Mattancherry Palace. As you enter the courtyard today, you can see that it shares a wall with a Hindu temple. The synagogue remains open for visitors and for worship, and is cared for by the local Indian community. The small but colourful interior features hand…

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Michael Wood on an astonishing Hindu pilgrimage
type: item
date: 2025-03-27T08:37:52.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: "We are witnessing the biggest gathering of people in world history," writes historian Michael Wood.
encoded: I'm sure, like me, readers have been both gripped and saddened recently by the pictures of India’s Kumbh Mela, the biggest pilgrimage in the world. This year, events moved from elation to tragedy with the loss of life in a stampede on 29 January. With such gigantic crowds at religious gatherings in India, there is always a risk of disaster. Every 12 years, the mela takes place at Prayag (also know as Allahabad) at the junction of the sacred rivers Ganges and Jumna. In 2001, we took our daughters, then aged 10 and 8, staying in a tent with Tamil friends. Some 25 million bathed then on the most auspicious date, and 50 or 60 million over the whole six-week festival. This time it will be a staggering 400 million pilgrims, by far the biggest gathering on the planet in history. Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India The roots of the mela lie far back in Indian civilisation. Though it only reached its present form in the British period, a Chinese visitor in AD 644 describes a huge gathering of half a million pilgrims here on the “Sands of Charity”, which he was told had “gone on since ancient times”. This may well have been the periodic “great synod” that was recorded by the Greek ambassador Megasthenes in 300 BC. Perhaps earlier still the place is the climax of the sacred circuit defining India in the epic book Mahabharata. This I think tells us something essential about Mother India: from early on it was imagined as a holy land from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Indian civilisation had many great achievements in science and mathematics, art and architecture, but its essential bent was, in the broadest sense, religious. ‘Hinduism’ as a concept is a western construct, but religion is the ‘ism’ of India. Read more | “Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history The central ritual in the mela is to bathe in the sacred rivers at the most auspicious time. This is…

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“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T16:09:01.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Danny Bird talks to historian William Dalrymple about why we need a greater understanding of how Indian ideas and culture have shaped global history – a story too often obscured by colonial narratives
encoded: Danny Bird: Your book, The Golden Road, addresses the influence of ancient India on the myriad cultures and civilisations of Eurasia. What was it that attracted you to this topic? William Dalrymple: When I first arrived in India, aged 18, I visited the early Buddhist sites at Sanchi and Ajanta [which were at their peak in the first and fifth centuries AD, respectively], and was astonished by them. They were so sophisticated, yet created at a time when in Britain – including Scotland, where I’m from – there were Picts scratching symbols, and an Anglo-Saxon putting up a wobbly church tower. During the same period in India, beautiful murals were being painted in cave temples, and profound philosophies developed. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time on archaeological excavations in Scotland and England. I always thought I’d be an archaeologist, dealing with early history. I’m now on the verge of turning 60, and I think my teenage self would be very surprised to find that I ended up spending most of my adult life writing about the 18th century. That 18-year-old would be very disappointed in the middle-aged version ‘selling out’ to modern history and writing about India, which in my teens was way beyond my horizon. In fact, this is a period about which I’ve written before in From the Holy Mountain, which is set in the same monastic milieu [as Ajanta and Sanchi], though from a Mediterranean vantage. But for the past 20 years I’ve been writing about the East India Company and the Mughals, so this is my first non-Mughal book after two decades of research in that area. It feels very nice to be writing and thinking about a different topic, although there’s also that slight anxiety when you’re dealing with something that you don’t know so well. Read more | “This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company What do you hope readers will gain from reading this book? I wanted to have a very broad, wide-angle focus spanning over 1,000 year…

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Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T14:53:44.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: "The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago," writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: I’m looking out over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heat waves, migrant crises and the atrocious wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One hundred years ago the British empire was at its height. Fifty years ago we were living under the American hegemony. Now the world order that emerged after the Second World War – economic, political and cultural – is shifting, dissolving like a giant kaleidoscope, and a new picture is taking shape. It’s ‘the great global rebalancing’, as diplomat and think-tanker Samir Puri calls it in his new book, Westlessness. It’s a good pun. The truth is the world has been getting increasingly ‘Westless’ for the last decade or two. The talk now is that although the US is still number one, a new order is arising, with a split between the Global North and Global South where the South no longer believes in the West’s hegemonial narrative and all that goes with it. In Beijing, smart thinkers now speak of US decline and China’s inexorable rise. President Xi Jinping says China’s new strength comes from the inherent greatness of Chinese civilisation, freed now from the Century of Humiliation, which stretched from the Opium Wars to 1949. Even in the movies, China bids to take over the world: no Hollywood film was in the box office top 10 in China in 2023. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? There are, of course, those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on. Till the 18th century the powerhouses of human history were the populous heartlands of humanity: China, India, Persia, Byzantium, Rome and the Muslim world. The rise of our modern world has its roots in what my old tutor Michael Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘Barbarian West’, when successive enlightenments, beginning with Charlemagne, s…

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
type: item
date: 2024-09-19T08:00:51.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she questions why we celebrate diverse histories only at particular times in the UK – like Black History Month in October and South Asian Heritage Month in July and August – rather than all year round
encoded: South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) is celebrated each year from 18 July to 17 August, although it is still a relatively new addition to the calendar. Incredibly, 2024 marked only its fourth edition. I well remember its inception. In 2017, the TV documentary My Family, Partition and Me aired on BBC One. One of its strands followed SAHM co-founder Binita Kane as she retraced the journey taken by her father, Bim Bhowmick, from East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – to India in 1947. It was a deeply affecting programme, and a transformative moment for her. Binita had grown up in Wales and had previously known little of her father’s history – the story of his migration across a border, but also of the devastating loss of family members during the partition of British India. After participating in that programme, she made it her mission (alongside her day job as a doctor) to make sure that no one else ever felt cheated of their history. I’ve watched how, in a short space of time since its launch, SAHM has gained momentum, its reach expanding from museums to blue-chip companies and media organisations as staff hold sessions on British south Asian history and culture. It is long overdue. First marked in 1987, UK Black History Month is now well established, particularly in schools. That is not the case for SAHM. It’s not helped by the fact that the designated month runs from mid-July to mid-August – timed to coincide with the anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan, but outside the school term. The 2021 census revealed that British Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Yet we are only now starting to understand British south Asian history more widely, let alone its complex nature. Rather than one homogeneous subject, it encompasses various south Asian countries, regional histories and socio-economic factors affecting different populations in Britain in different ways over the years. …

War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
type: item
date: 2024-08-30T11:49:01.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Education
description: Far from idle pursuits, games have transformed the way societies have made sense of life and death, order and conflict for centuries. Kelly Clancy picks five examples that reveal how playtime has often been a serious business
encoded: Games are among our most enduring cultural technologies. They persist, in part, because they’re a way for our brains to serve themselves pleasure for free. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, wrote about the Lydian people, who reportedly suffered an 18-year famine. He claimed they alternated between eating food one day and playing games the next – play, in other words, lessened the sting of hunger. But games aren’t just fun: they are also essential education. Animals play to practise for the serious demands of adulthood: kittens chase yarn to drill hunting skills, and young kangaroos rough-house to prepare to box their way up the social hierarchy as adults. Read more | Ancient board games: which ones did people play for fun in the past? With the invention of games, humans brought play into the realm of thought, because games exercise various mental functions. Games are especially crucial for developing social skills. Plato believed they were the foundation of civic education, arguing that children who learned to follow game rules would grow up to be law-abiding citizens. And Plato wasn’t alone: scholars across history have lauded games for a range of educational virtues. As a result, people often endowed games with cultural principles they hoped to transmit to future generations. Games are messages from the past, and can reveal the values and beliefs of the people who play them. Senet, ancient Egypt The ancient board game that served as a map for players to pass to the afterlife Senet – likely the ancestor of backgammon – is one of the world’s oldest known board games. It originated in ancient Egypt in around 3100 BC as mammoths still roamed Siberia’s Wrangel Island, hieroglyphic writing was just emerging, and camels were first being domesticated. Senet means ‘passing’, possibly referring to the game’s race-like mechanic: players vied to be the first to move all their pieces across the board by casting sticks or knuckle bones. In the earliest known record o…

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Indian experiences in WW2
type: item
date: 2024-05-02T16:34:26.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Diya Gupta explores the emotional responses of Indian soldiers and civilians to the Second World War
encoded: Around 2.5 million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. Behind this staggering number lies a complex web of emotional experiences – and Diya Gupta unpicks that tangled web in her new book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History. Diya speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about how both Indian soldiers and civilians back home felt about the war, and how the conflict impacted on their lives. View Green Video on the source website

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“The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century
type: item
date: 2023-08-09T07:23:07.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: Joya Chatterji talks to Matt Elton about her book, Shadows at Noon, charting the tumultuous course of south Asia’s 20th-century, including the violence that followed the creation of three new countries after the withdrawal of the British empire, and the legacy of partition
encoded: Your book Shadows at Noon covers what you describe as “the South Asian 20th century”. What do you mean by that term? I focus on the area ruled by the former British Raj, formally or informally. I think of there being a kind of united south Asia in which glimmers of the British empire (and the social structures that predated it) could still be made out throughout the latter half of the 20th century – long after the British themselves had left. I’m also keen to push back against the idea that the history of India, Pakistan or Bangladesh can be understood independently of that of the others. They’re too intertwined. It just wasn’t the case that they were all somehow born entirely anew after the partition in 1947 or 1971. In trying to understand the processes by which they were fashioned, and the effort that was put into trying to create new nations and new citizens so apparently different from each other, we can also see much about the parallels and the commonalities. One of the landmark political moments in this history is the 1947 Partition of India. Do you think that it is misunderstood outside south Asia? The level of ignorance is quite astonishing – even in Britain, where you might expect a greater awareness because of its close involvement in the event, not least by British prime minister Clement Attlee and [last Viceroy of India] Lord Louis Mountbatten. Of course, that’s partly because many partition migrants haven’t told their stories, so we’re missing out on a fully layered version of what happened – although this has begun to change. What do you mean when you write that Pakistan was formed almost entirely by refugees? Muhammad Ali Jinnah [Pakistan’s founder and first head of state] was a refugee, as was Liaquat Ali Khan, his right-hand man and Pakistan’s first prime minister. In fact, the core leadership of the Muslim League [the Indian political party campaigning for Muslim interests in the first half of the 20th century] all came from the United Provinces –…

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“Humans are a marvel of ingenuity, yet we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia”: Simon Schama on pandemics and vaccines
type: item
date: 2023-07-18T10:29:01.000Z
creator: Sir Simon Schama
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: For centuries, scientists have striven to combat a whole host of infectious diseases. Yet, as Simon Schama explains in his new book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, they have often met with considerable opposition
encoded: Q: You write in your new book that you are acutely conscious of being a newcomer to medical and scientific history. What drew you to this subject? It won’t surprise anybody to learn that the pandemic played a large role. I thought: if there’s a moment when nationalism needs to be set aside for the common good, it’s now, when people need to share vaccines. I was quickly disabused, of course, by nations leapfrogging over each other to secure supplies of vaccines in advance. But that disappointing moment led me, via the World Health Organization’s website, to the International Sanitary Conferences held from the mid-19th century, which were the first example of international organisation outside religious institutions, military alliances or peace conferences. On the podcast | Simon Schama discusses how scientific ingenuity and the fear of contagion combined to produce life-saving vaccines This, suddenly, felt very much like the right subject for a book. My wife is a biologist, so I asked her: “Is this ridiculous? Will I perish with a terminal case of imposter syndrome?” But she encouraged me. I think something happens when you’re a really old geezer, too: you either want to escape completely into a hobby – Byzantine coinage in the 11th century, perhaps – or, if you’re like me, you only want to do history with an immediate link to what’s happening right now. The first section of your book focuses on the fight against smallpox. How disruptive was that disease at its peak in Europe? It was extraordinarily contagious and apocalyptically terrifying. It ran amok in crowded urban environments, killing as many as one in three people who contracted it. Plague had been even more frightening in the late Middle Ages and 17th century, but had somewhat retreated by the early 18th century, so people had been lulled into a false sense of security. Within 100 years, fortunately, there was a great breakthrough against smallpox with the first mass inoculation campaign. It seemed such a co…

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Why we should remember Direct Action Day
type: item
date: 2022-08-16T10:43:04.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Why we should remember
description: Historian Faisal Devi considers the large-scale violence on Direct Action Day that put India firmly on the path to partition…
encoded: On the morning of 16 August 1946, crowds of Muslims made their way to a park in central Calcutta (now Kolkata). They were gathering to observe Direct Action Day, called nationwide by the All-India Muslim League to protest what it saw as the abandonment of India’s Muslim minority by the British colonial government and the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress. The general strike and rallies planned were intended to imitate Congress’s tactics of mass protest but, while the day passed off peacefully elsewhere, in Calcutta large-scale violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims, resulting in thousands of deaths. These riots are seen as marking a turning point after which the country’s partition into India and Pakistan became inevitable. Earlier in the year, a British Cabinet Mission hoping to secure a unified post-independence India had proposed a plan for a weak central government to serve as a meeting point for groups of provinces representing Hindu and Muslim majorities. When Congress backtracked on its support for the plan, the League’s president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, renounced constitutional methods and called for Direct Action Day. Recent scholarship has placed the killings in the context not of party politics or religion but war, famine and poverty. Calcutta hosted countless destitute migrants drawn by the promise of employment and food during the Bengal Famine, caused partly by the wartime requisition of grain, killing some 3 million in 1943. Thus the violence wasn’t indiscriminate but a reaction to the need for food and housing, leading to the looting of shops and provisions, and attacks on companies seen to be denying jobs to people based on religion. The disorder prompted other, sometimes more serious riots elsewhere, including in neighbouring Bihar province. Read more | Enduring trauma: Kavita Puri on the legacy of partition Though not entirely unprecedented – the country had witnessed smaller riots during the 1930s – the violence of Direct Action Day m…

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