Permanent Black

How wonderful that Citizenship and its Discontents , by Niraja Gopal Jayal has won the 2015 A.K. Coomaraswamy Prize. Here's the citation from the Association for Asian Studies. All the praise in the citation is richly deserved. It's about to come out in paperback with this lovely new cover. Paperback/ Rs 595

C HANCELLORS, IT SEEMS, ARE NOT BABUS EVERYWHERE.  some of them even write books. NICHOLAS B. DIRKS, FAMOUS FOR HIS MONOGRAPH THE HOLLOW CROWN (1988), knows south india intimately because he spent several years there as a child and spoke tamil fluently.  he is now chancellor, university of california, berkeley.  he must have written this book (below) before he became the burra sahib.  in fact, perhaps he got the big babu's job because he wrote it . . . Nicholas B. Dirks Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritua...

--> When the influential Marxist historian Perry Anderson ventured into Indian territory, he did not bargain for this . . . Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj, Nivedita Menon The Indian Ideology Three Responses to Perry Anderson With an Introduction by Sanjay Ruparelia When the Marxist historian Perry Anderson published The Indian Ideology —his scathing assessment of India’s democracy, secularism, national ism, and statehood—it created a furore. Anderson attacked subcontinental unity as a myth, castigated Mahatma Gandhi for infusing Hindu religiosity into national ism, blamed Congress for Partition, and saw India’s liberal intelligentsia as by and large a feckless lot. Within the large array of responses to Anderson that appeared, three stand out for the care and comprehensiveness with which they show the levels of ignorance, arrogance, and misconstruction on which the Andersonian variety of political analysis is based. C ollectively , these th...