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PERMANENT BLACK
Now Fifteen Years Old
(1 April
2000 -- )
On All Fools’ Day 2015, Permanent Black will be
fifteen years old. Tumultuous festivities are likely within the swarming
intelligentsia of Ranikhet, the new academic hub of international thought processing
in the lower Himalaya, which is where we are based for much of the year.
Somewhere between 275 and 280 Permanent Black titles will have been published
by then, of which 150 will have also appeared in paperback editions, and another
75 in electronic format.
Over
these years our personnel strength has increased by twenty-five per cent: one
year into our life we were, in 2001, joined by our first assistant, Biscoot
(stray road-Asian); fourteen years on there has been a second retruit, Barauni
(stray hill-Bhutia; ‘Barauni’ being the local pronunciation of Brownie), who
has also been welcomed in at the level of assistant. His promotion to
managerial rank will depend on how invitingly he barks in potential authors.
Animated
barking, accompanied by some fairly furious tail-wagging by these two
assistants, has greatly reduced our productivity and hugely increased the
happiness with which we have published. Other than the publisher Rukun Advani,
and the jacket designer and general dogsbody Anuradha Roy, we remain without
permanent staff, which helps keep us permanently in the black.
Over
the course of our fourteenth year we have published one more clutch of
first-class books in history, politics, and related areas. Sumit Sarkar’s Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s deserves
most special mention because it shows Professor Sarkar performing something of
a Lazarus act—he returned from many weeks in an intensive care unit to provide
his huge following of fans and readers this wonderfully synthesizing narrative
about the late colonial period.
Two
major books to see the light of day over the past months have been Akeel Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (copublished with Harvard
University Press), and Sudipta Kaviraj’s The
Invention of Private Life (originated by Permanent Black, copublished by
Columbia University Press). It is an achievement for us to have become the
publishers of four books by Professor
Kaviraj, an academic known for his immersion in the oral tradition (conversations
and lectures). Rosalind O’Hanlon’s
At the Edges of Empire appeared at
the start of the year and is her second with us—a great book equally for people
interested in currents of historical thought, caste and religious conflict, and
aspects of society in Western India. Vasudha Dalmia’s Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories will appear soon.
M.S.S.
Pandian, author of one of our finest academic bestsellers, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, passed away with a terrible suddenness. Professor
Pandian had been working on a book he had signed on with us, on contemporary
Tamil politics and we’re keeping fingers crossed for his JNU colleagues to work
out how that nearly finished script might be salvaged.
Nayanjot
Lahiri has made quite a name for herself as a historian who can also reach
readers outside university enclaves. We will publish her excellent new biography
of Ashoka, entitled Ashoka in Ancient
India (rights outside South Asia with Harvard University Press). And Thomas
Trautmann, the American who knows more about ancient India than any other
American, is publishing a fascinating environmental history of the ancient
world called Elephants and Kings (copublisher:
the University of Chicago Press). Both these books will appear within a new
series titled ‘Hedgehog and Fox’ (for reasons not difficult to guess) that we
have just begun with Ashoka University. The series editor is the new vice
chancellor of Ashoka University, Rudrangshu Mukherjee (author of Awadh in Revolt, his revised Oxford
PhD). A book each by Steven Wilkinson of Yale (on the Indian army), and Dipesh
Chakrabarty of Chicago (on Sir Jadunath Sarkar), will follow in this series.
Books
by two old friends of Permanent Black, Leela Gandhi and Mahesh Rangarajan, are
in the works, as is a wonderfully readable denunciation of Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology by three eminent
thinkers: Nivedita Menon, Partha Chatterjee, and Sudipta Kaviraj.
We
wish all friends happiness among books in the new year—among our books,
naturally!
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