Shoumojit Banerjee
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shoumojitb.bsky.social
Shoumojit Banerjee
@shoumojitb.bsky.social
Executive Editor@The Perfect Voice - a Mumbai-based startup daily; interests: Gibbon and Rome; Sir Jadunath Sarkar & 18th C. India; 1517,1618-48, 1756-63, 1789 & Napoleonic era;1848; 1914-45; vintage Hollywood; Spaghetti Westerns
My tribute to one of the greatest works in Indian history - Sir Jadunath Sarkar 's magnificent four-volume ‘The Fall of the Mughal Empire’ (1932-50).

🔗https://www.theperfectvoice.in/post/autopsy-of-an-empire-why-jadunath-sarkar-s-fall-of-the-mughal-empire-continues-to-unsettle
Autopsy of an Empire: Why Jadunath Sarkar’s Fall of the Mughal Empire continues to unsettle
Every empire produces at least one great historian who anatomises its exhaustion with a completeness that neither predecessors nor successors quite match. For Rome, it was Edward Gibbon who dissected ...
www.theperfectvoice.in
December 13, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
#histbookchat My latest piece in The Perfect Voice, Mumbai,
on China, hostage diplomacy, and the passing of Anthony Grey (1938-2025) - with thanks to Mister Banerjee's editorial red pen! @shoumojitb.bsky.social #sinology #journalism

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/anthony...
Anthony Grey: The Reporter Beijing Tried to Break
A young British correspondent sent to decode Mao’s China instead became one of the earliest symbols of hostage diplomacy.Anthony Grey, who passed away last month aged 87, first learned what it meant t...
www.theperfectvoice.in
November 18, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
My latest in The Perfect Voice, Mumbai!! The Casting of the Pearls: The Cholas, the Sri Vijayans, and the Song Dynasty!!! Thanks to @shoumojitb.bsky.social for allowing me to wander back in time to the 11th Century #sinology #histbookchat

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/casting...
Casting of the Pearls: A Diplomatic Puzzle that shaped History’s Course
A 1077 diplomatic mission from the Chola Empire to the Song court raises questions about ancient maritime rivalries, trade and the blurred lines between empires.In the Songshi, the written history of ...
www.theperfectvoice.in
February 7, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Thank you as ever, Lao-tse:)
August 26, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
🎵I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I've been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, "What you need is document number nine"🎵

My latest piece in The Perfect Voice, ed. by @shoumojitb.bsky.social #histbookchat

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/documen...
Document Number 9 and China’s Ideological Cold War
Xi Jinping’s secret manifesto against ‘Western values’ still shapes the Party’s battle to preserve its grip on power.In April 2013, the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) circulated a...
www.theperfectvoice.in
August 17, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
My latest piece in The Perfect Voice, Mumbai, this time on the history of fingerprinting, edited by the forensically very careful, Mister Banerjee @shoumojitb.bsky.social #histbookchat

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/how-a-m...
How a Murder in Colonial Bengal Sparked a Forensic Revolution
The murder of Hridaynath Ghosh seemed unsolvable until a brown smudge on a calendar and a classification system devised in Kolkata rewrote the rules of justice.It was August 15, 1897. Hridaynath Ghosh...
www.theperfectvoice.in
July 19, 2025 at 3:22 PM
How #Israel and #Iran went from covert allies to existential enemies. During the Shah's, a peculiar triangle of #Mossad, the #CIA, and SAVAK formed a clandestine alliance to weaponize Iran into a Cold War bulwark against Arab nationalism and #Soviet influence.

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/persian...
Persian Entanglements: How Israel and Iran went from covert allies to existential enemies
In the final part of this series, we trace the forgotten Cold War alliance between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. and their lasting political fallout.Israel and its Discontents - Part 3A forgotten Cold Wa...
www.theperfectvoice.in
June 26, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
#histbookchat William L. Shirer's is famous for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But what about his other massive work - on the fall of France? Mister Banerjee discusses...

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/how-fra...
How France Fell So Fast
William L. Shirer’s searing account of the Third Republic’s collapse remains the most readable narrative of France’s humiliation in 1940.It took just six weeks for German tanks to shatter French lines...
www.theperfectvoice.in
June 26, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Reposted by Shoumojit Banerjee
My review of The Last of Its Kind by Gisli Palsson in The Perfect Voice, Mumbai - with @shoumojitb.bsky.social 's editorial red pen at the ready! #histbookchat

www.theperfectvoice.in/post/victori...
Victorians, Volcanoes and Vanishing Species: The Great Auk’s Tragic Story
In the spring of 1848, two British naturalists, John Wolley and Alfred Newton, sailed to Iceland, propelled by equal measures of ambition and desperation. Their quarry was not just any creature but th...
www.theperfectvoice.in
January 15, 2025 at 9:43 AM
Merry Xmas @bochard193945.bsky.social and everybody else. This superb, semi-forgotten Anthony Asquith-directed WW2 thriller makes perfect Christmas viewing. #WW2 #spies
December 25, 2023 at 10:03 AM
Just arrived:The late Howard Sachar's 1,200-page masterpiece (1976; third edn. 2016) is a truly magnificent, breathtakingly erudite history of Israel narrated with phenomenal historical objectivity, penetrating insight and scintillating prose.Antidote to cretinous, reductive arguments out there.
November 6, 2023 at 9:32 AM
@milhistreader.bsky.social @lwestwoodauthor.bsky.social My latest Ian Kershaw acquisition; an elegant and highly insightful read on 12 who have made and broken Europe: Lenin,Mussolini,Stalin,Churchill,Hitler,Franco,Tito, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Helmut Kohl,Thatcher, Gorbachev. Very lucid!#histbookchat
November 3, 2023 at 10:47 AM
Weekend feast, re-watching four Italian classics - three by the great Francesco Rosi: 'Hands over the City' (1963),one the finest meditations on civic corruption, showcases one of Rod Steiger's greatest performances. Gian Maria-Volonte is brilliant in Rosi's 'The Mattei Affair' (1972).
November 3, 2023 at 6:19 AM
@lwestwoodauthor.bsky.social Another literate, wonderfully evocative thriller by Joseph Kanon. Aging Nazi hunter Max Weill spots Nazi Dr. Otto Schramm in Hamburg, 1962. Schramm, declared dead in Argentina, worked with Mengele at Auschwitz. Now, Max's nephew, a rogue CIA agent, is on one last hunt.
November 2, 2023 at 1:02 PM