TWO GREAT WORKS OF NARRATIVE HISTORY

If Indian historians have generally seemed wary of writing contemporary (post-1947) history, they have seemed even more sceptical about writing narrative history with a distinct story line that makes their work accessible and attractive to serious lay readers outside academia. Permanent Black has therefore been exceptionally fortunate in having published perhaps the two most outstanding recent works in this genre. Partha Chatterjee’s landmark history—and, by any measure, stupendously gripping account—of the strange case of the ‘Bhawal Sannyasi’ who returned from the dead (a la Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘Martin Guerre’) to reclaim his ancestral property is entitled A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism; now in paperback and strongly recommended to anyone who thinks Indian history has no connection with great murder mysteries.

Nayanjot Lahiri has made the dead come to life as well, in her brilliantly recounted history of how the Indus Valley civilization was unearthed and its puzzles pieced together by John Marshall, Daya Ram Sahni, Rakhaldas Banerjee, and other pioneering officers of the Archaeological Survey of India. Her book, Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered, has been enormously well-received.

Curiously, both these books centre themselves around almost the same time period: the first three decades of the twentieth century.

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THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

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 E...

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK FROM THE REVIEWS Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ﬀ ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . . Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak

"While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript...

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