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Permanent Black Turns Fifteen Today

Permanent Black turns 15 today! 

About 280 titles published, of which 150 have appeared in paperback editions, and another 75 in electronic format. Copublications with the university presses of Columbia, Harvard, Duke, Texas; Princeton, Chicago, Rutgers, Indiana, Minnesota, Stanford; Uni of California at Berkeley; Cambridge UP; Oxford UP, NY; Cornell UP; New York UP, Univ of Washington Press, North Carolina UP; plus Palgrave Macmillan, Hurst, Seagull.

This year's highlights:

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 and in which we have already published Steve Wilkinson's Army and Nation and The Indian Ideology: Three Responses to Perry Anderson, a wonderfully readable denunciation of Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology by three eminent thinkers: Nivedita Menon, Partha Chatterjee, and Sudipta Kaviraj.  

The series editor is the new vice chancellor of Ashoka University, Rudrangshu Mukherjee (author of Awadh in Revolt, his revised Oxford PhD). A book by 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. Watch this space.

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