Permanent Black

        Unifying Hinduism has won the 2011 award for Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion   ANDREW J. NICHOLSON Unifying Hinduism Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History South Asia Across the Disciplines Series A Short Interview with Andrew J. Nicholson whose new book Unifying Hinduism is a brilliant exploration of some of the central genealogies of Hinduism: Q1: Would it be true to say that your book provides a prehistory of modern Hindu thinkers we’re familiar with, such as Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan? Can we get a better sense of their intellectual genealogy by reading your book? A1: Yes, one of my goals in writing this book was to do just that. As important as I think Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism is for South Asian Studies, we are in a period when the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Said criticized Orientalists like Bernard Lewis for insist...

Finbarr B. Flood OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter Congratulations to Finbarr B. Flood: his book, published for South Asia by Permanent Black alongside Princeton University Press, has just won the 2011 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, South Asia Council. Objects of Translation has been praised as “[A] brilliant, far-ranging study [...] This book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter.” –John E. Cort, Religious Studies Review The prize is awarded to the best English-language work in South Asian Studies, with a preference for “broad scholarly works with innovative approaches that promise to define or redefine understanding of whole subject areas.” According to the Selection Committee Citation: “Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation is a magisterial study of material culture and community identity in South Asia from the...

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Partial Recall Essays on Literature and Literary History India’s poets have been among the finest writers of English prose—earlier, Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt; more recently, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, and Adil Jussawalla. Writers of this kind, representing the ‘common reader’ tradition of unpretentious and jargon-free writing about literature and life, are something of a rarity in India. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—renowned poet, critic, translator, editor, and anthologist—enriches an uncommon stream with this brilliant collection. The essays gathered here, rich in literary detail and accessible insight, were written over the past thirty years. Among them are Mehrotra’s homage to his friend and fellow poet Arun Kolatkar; a perceptive appreciation of A.K. Ramanujan; a scathing scrutiny of R. Parthasarathy; a radical redefinition of the modern Indian poem; a literary-historical view of Kabir; and a wide-ranging introduction to the...