Prachi Deshpande is the author of PRACHI Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (Permanent Black and Columbia University Press, 2007) She worked for a longish stretch as an editor with the review magazine Biblio and was for some years assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is currently with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences at Kolkata. She responds here to some of the questions earlier posed to Anne Feldhaus and Christian Lee Novetzke. Q1) An influential view of the current state of historical and literary scholarship pertaining to India is that of Sheldon Pollock, who remarks:‘the number of citizens capable of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era—or precolonial or premodern or pre-1800 era, all equivalent terms for my purposes here—will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and in