A.M. Shah—A.N. Sattanathan—Abhijit Gupta—Agha Shahid Ali—Amit Chaudhuri—Amita Baviskar-—Amiya Sen—Ania Loomba—Anindita Ghosh—Antje Linkenbach—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—Ashis Nandy—Ayesha Jalal—Bill Aitken—Thomas Blom Hansen—Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya—Brigid Keenan—Bruce Lawrence—C.M. Naim—Charu Gupta—Chitra Joshi—Chitralekha Zutshi—Christophe Jaffrelot—Claude Markovits—D.K. Chakrabarti—D. Venkat Rao—David Arnold—David Hardiman—David Ludden—Dhriti K. Lahiri Choudhury—Dipesh Chakrabarty—E.H. Aitken—Emma Tarlo—Frances Pritchett—Francesca Orsini—Francis Robinson—Ghanshyam Shah—Ghazala Shahabuddin—Gopal Gandhi—Gyanendra Pandey—Harish Damodaran—Heinrich von Stietencron—Hew McLeod—Ian Bryant Wells—Ian Talbot—Indrani Chatterjee—Jackie Assayag—Janaki Bakhle—Joerg Fisch—Jon Lang—Jyotika Virdi—K. Sivaramakrishnan—K. Ullas Karanth—Kapil Raj—Kaushik Basu—Kaushik Roy—Leela Gandhi—Leela Prasad—Lucy Rosenstein—M.S.S. Pandian—Madhav Gadgil—Mahesh Rangarajan—Mahmood Mamdani—Manu Goswami—Mark Baker—Martha Nussbaum—Meera Kosambi—Meera Nanda—Michael Fisher—Monica Juneja—Mridu Rai—Mukul Kesavan—Muzaffar Alam—Nandini Sundar—Nayanjot Lahiri—Nicholas B. Dirks—Nivedita Menon—P.K. Datta—Partha Chatterjee—Partha Sarathi Gupta—Patricia Uberoi—Peter Heehs—Peter van der Veer—Prachi Deshpande—Pratik Chakrabarty—Priya Kumar—Rajendra Vora—Rajeswari Sunder Rajan—Rajit Mazumder—Ramachandra Guha—Raminder Kaur—Ramya Sreenivasan—Ranjani Mazumdar—Ratna Kapur—Ravi Kanbur—Richard Wolf—Rosie Llewellyn Jones—Rudrangshu Mukherjee—S. Percy Lancaster—Salim Ali—Sambudha Sen—Sanjay Subrahmanyam—Seema Alavi—Shabnum Tejani—Shail Mayaram—Sharad Chari—Sheila Dhar—Sheldon Pollock—Shonaleeka Kaul—Simona Sawhney—Srinath Raghavan—Srirupa Roy—Stuart Blackburn—Subrata Dasgupta—Sudipta Kaviraj—Sugata Bose—Sujoy Das—Sumathi Ramaswamy—Sumit Guha—Sumit Sarkar—Sunil Kumar—Sunil Sharma—Suvir Kaul—Swapan Chakravorty—Swarup Roy—Tabish Khair—Tanika Sarkar—Tapati Guha Thakurta—Tara Gandhi—Thomas Blom Hansen—Thomas Metcalf—Tony Ballantyne—Ulrike Stark—Uma Dhupelia Mesthrie—Upinder Singh—Valmik Thapar—Vasant Saberwal—Vasanthi Srinivasan—Vasudha Dalmia—Veena Naregal—Velcheru Narayana Rao—Veronique Benei—Vijay Tendulkar—Vinayak Chaturvedi—Yasmin Saikia—Zai Whitaker.
Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay” brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in English – the f
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