Jean Dreze: Undefeated Road Scholar

Jean Dreze was gifted the first copy of his new book, Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone, at a pine-cone studded book-launch yesterday. The launch took place at the corporate headquarters of Permanent Black in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand.

A huge audience of deodar trees attended, listening to every word in rapt silence.

Chief Guest Prakriti Mukerjee has been among Jean's band of road scholars, being one of the many students who camped for days in remote villages working on NREGA and PDS surveys through baking summer weather. She is now Research and Communication Officer at Lok Chetna Manch, Ranikhet, and she took time out of her busy schedule to hand over a be-ribonned copy of the book to Jean, as pictured below.

Jean's new book, a superb combination of scholarship, passion, and commitment, is that rarest of things: a work of scholarship that is gripping and accessible. Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate, who calls Dreze "one of the world's finest development economists", has described the essays as "beautiful", and says they "illuminate the whole range of social policy in India."

Jean looked pretty happy once he'd got the book out of its red ribbons.

The man in the checked shirt to the extreme right is Rukun Advani, Jean's publisher and editor. Their almost daily correspondence during the making of this book would provide material enough for an entertaining little volume; however, editorial communication at Permanent Black is covered by the Official Secrets Act.

We can tell that the designer and general dogsbody at the press, Anuradha Roy, didn't do much more than grin in a dazed fashion.

The support staff at Permanent Black appeared more interested in the small eats than in the book, but as publishing veterans are aware, that is the norm at book launches.

The book will be in the market from 25th September 2017.

We will post more information about it in the days to come.

Comments

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay” brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in English – the f

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK FROM THE REVIEWS Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ﬀ ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . . Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarly output, limited to sev

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak

"While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript

Permanent Black

Search This Blog