Permanent Black Publisher's Serious and Spoofy Views of Academic Publishing

For a change we're featuring not one of our authors, but our publisher, interviewed here by the Times of India. He discusses academic publishing in India, how he acquisitions books, what distinguishes academic publishing from other kinds of publishing, and so on. Read the interview to find what masala the hottest selling scholarly book might contain.

The distinct possibility exists that you'll need yawn-suppressant medication after ploughing through the above worthy interview. In which case, the publisher can offer you laughter medicine in the shape of two parodies he wrote on the art of writing Indian history.

These parodies on Indian history-writing have been universally condemned, making them compulsory reading for all who wish to be seen as well read, as well as for those who wish to understand how Indian history is now written. It is also meant as a career guide for budding historians in India, all of whom—like all Indians generally—wish to migrate to the USA in order to make a vast fortune there by perfecting the art of writing unhyphenated postcolonial criticaltheoretic marxistfeminist subalternstudies histoires of revolting peasants and other such texts that are believed to inhabit the thirdworld. Dollar $alaries for such historians are now upward of $ 100 million per annum, and rising—in proportion with the degree of incomprehensibility achieved. These parodies are the most lucid demonstration available of how to achieve that nirvanic state of academic bliss known as ‘the Incomprehensible Sublime in the Ivy League’.

Read the full parodies by clicking here.

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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 English – the f

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 scholarly output, limited to sev

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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