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John Zubrzycki

John Zubrzycki

John Zubrzycki is the author of The Shortest History of India (Black Inc., 2022). He has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent and has a PhD in Indian history. Before becoming a full-time author, he was the deputy foreign editor at The Australian newspaper. 

John Zubrzycki reviews 'Australia’s Pivot to India' by Andrew Charlton

December 2023, no. 460 27 November 2023
In April 1990, Australia’s high commissioner to New Delhi, Graham Feakes, was in the final year of a six-year posting. Still regarded as one of Australia’s finest diplomats, he had worked tirelessly to invigorate a relationship that had been allowed to drift aimlessly for decades. Under his watch, in 1986 Rajiv Gandhi made the first visit by an Indian prime minister to Australia in almost two ... (read more)

John Zubrzycki on India's new assertiveness

June 2023, no. 454 23 May 2023
It is 1856 in a village near Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian kingdom of Awadh. Two nawabs, Mir and Mirza, are engrossed in a game of chess, oblivious to the calamity unfolding around them. Satyajit Ray’s 1977 screen adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s short story ‘The Chess Players’ captures the decadence and idleness of Awadh, whose indulgent nobility preferred reciting Urdu po ... (read more)

'The power paradox: Illiberalism and Hindu majoritarianism in Modi’s India' by John Zubrzycki

July 2022, no. 444 25 June 2022
On 15 August 2022, it will be seventy-five years since Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ had finally been ‘redeemed’. The rapturous crowds that gathered outside the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on that sultry summer night cheered as loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and f ... (read more)