The Past is Porous| Books
In his tales from India's history, Manu S. Pillai pokes some holes and patches others
At first, reading historian Manu S. Pillai's feels like falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, though with better-researched and more engagingly written articles (some first appeared in a newspaper column). Pillai-whose previous books are a thick history of royal Travancore and an introduction to the medieval Deccan through its leaders-flits here between north and south, medieval and early modern, and even myth and fact. Social reformers like the Phules sit next to socially repressed
