Permanent Black

  The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award 2021 has gone to Partha Chatterjee's I AM THE PEOPLE. In a statement, the awarding committee said: "Chatterjee’s genealogy of populist politics, in India and around the world, is at once a significant intervention into political theory and a trenchant diagnosis of our contemporary condition. Chatterjee brings critical theory to life, using it not only to deconstruct the modern nation-state but also to excavate the more hopeful possibilities embedded in the present." The award is be given annually by the Press to a book by a Columbia University faculty member that brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse. The Press’s faculty Publication Committee members serve as jurors. Each year they will consider books published in the two full calendar years prior to the award year. The winning au...

“Fifty years ago bird watching in India was nowhere as popular, or indeed respectable, as it has become today. In my younger days I would time and again fall in with persons who left me with a feeling, as they withdrew, that they were inwardly tapping a pitying finger on their foreheads. Their first glimpse of me very often was, it is true, of a distinctly shabby khaki-clad individual of the garage mechanic type, wandering leisurely and rather aimlessly about the countryside and surreptitiously peeping into bushes, and holes in tree-trunks and earth banks” The ornithologist Sálim Ali has long been synonymous with the scholarship, appreciation, and conservation of Indian birdlife. It is not as well known that he was also the most engaging raconteur about birds. This aspect – the great ornithologist as enthralling storyteller – is most apparent in this, the first and only, collection of all his radio broadcasts. The thirty-five talks that comprise this book were broadcast between 1941 an...