tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38490509447765007032024-03-17T00:23:06.924+05:30Permanent BlackPERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.comBlogger320125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-23501591903280756752021-12-17T18:17:00.000+05:302021-12-17T18:17:41.069+05:30 Wishing you health and happiness in the new year<p> </p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; table-layout: fixed; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; min-width: 100%; padding: 27px 18px 0px;"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="margin: 0px;"></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding-top: 9px;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="color: #757575; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"><img class="CToWUd a6T" height="748" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEilX71t5Nble6RdSbwjLrWKFRVPSfm_8NdQfaqfyP__8ZqGSNVCJ-PF51UMxH6ao03VUcyYxmO87cfE4j2U_Oh8vBD_yHsVpYUUP6HqAerOPRInal3bjJ2Uy3RLRYh4llJtrsX2hN92-WP2DUSO8hMh1You0nmYtl3ub3LYoiWnyIabMzJmfuvqpTsfQyFo3nuZzISLAxIx0w-Dc4mTelMArN7t=s0-d-e1-ft" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; height: 748px; margin: 0px; outline: none; width: 590px;" tabindex="0" width="590" /></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding-top: 9px;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="color: #757575; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia, times, "times new roman", serif;">The year is close to ending, and we feel very happy that, despite everything, we've managed to publish a handful of excellent books. Maybe because our three security officers -- Piku, Soda, Barauni -- and our two interns -- Jerry and Joey -- kept our morale up through these twelve months of death, illness, lockdowns, uncertainties.<br /><br />We are grateful to S.P. Dangwal, typesetter, Shyama Warner, editor, Sapra Brothers, printer, and to Orient Blackswan Publisher, our exclusive distributors. Also to Hachette India, with whom we collaborate for our Black Kite imprint, and Ashoka University, with whose support we publish the Hedgehog and Fox series of outstanding scholarly titles.</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding-top: 9px;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="color: #757575; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia, times, "times new roman", serif;">Other news: in addition to the Dharmanand Kosambi Memorial Prize for Ancient India, we have now endowed the S. Gopal Memorial Prize for Modern India, to be awarded to the best history students at Ashoka University.<br /><br />Wishing you happy holidays and a new year that feels new.</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 9px;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 9px; text-align: center;" valign="top"><img align="middle" alt="" class="CToWUd a6T" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhPusp_dEwp2nwxFsP6J8sGW24MOvyBBqTtvj4z87UXd-IUmpmyIekrjwL6APo5hgmdA0pdVeNd2o150W-6QH7cHk-4OYumsvy2DAE3vIM9vzeEgMO3Fo3xnCQE70eKCcGlQok6thvHz7v4zwnrrLc-LiNK1krEJLqJvgDfhm5uQOZxUY4XAOOG457IETzvVFPoBZBk5q7YZXygM8BUt_4-hl4P=s0-d-e1-ft" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; display: inline; height: auto; max-width: 1200px; outline: none; padding-bottom: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" tabindex="0" width="507.6" /></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding-top: 9px;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td style="color: #757575; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia, times, "times new roman", serif;">Find us on Twitter: @permanentblack<br />Follow us on Facebook: @permablack<br /><br /></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-88246930829769794402021-11-13T18:30:00.000+05:302021-11-13T18:30:33.831+05:30Partha Chatterjee wins prestigious award <p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCls878nlrp4v7E1OxdlG6bhV1Qj1rz2XSFUdfbvlZlMQjHJpk-zLWojKirYcMgDDtF9zSTq8gYLdU3MiE7JZcrkCm0dBm22IWdWBqj5T6-THRXVw6e52W65KsTv2GamEr75fTbvAQ8cgB/s250/CUP-Distinguished-Book-Award.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="250" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCls878nlrp4v7E1OxdlG6bhV1Qj1rz2XSFUdfbvlZlMQjHJpk-zLWojKirYcMgDDtF9zSTq8gYLdU3MiE7JZcrkCm0dBm22IWdWBqj5T6-THRXVw6e52W65KsTv2GamEr75fTbvAQ8cgB/s0/CUP-Distinguished-Book-Award.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><br /><p>The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award 2021 has gone to Partha Chatterjee's I AM THE PEOPLE.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-PyaxWdMfM58JndTQGfhqyhGN073y7Uypq7fp0MmbKZh9_zewhTEoyECEuQWchOc9xOJcTDAXdUNOV2eHB59ZObd5G-fZV4EzC1tP9-7qmfhpP_hsvjXaOj-hVfSQP7-XKIUUxl_-EgFB/s2048/ParthaPeople+PB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1331" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-PyaxWdMfM58JndTQGfhqyhGN073y7Uypq7fp0MmbKZh9_zewhTEoyECEuQWchOc9xOJcTDAXdUNOV2eHB59ZObd5G-fZV4EzC1tP9-7qmfhpP_hsvjXaOj-hVfSQP7-XKIUUxl_-EgFB/w260-h400/ParthaPeople+PB.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><p></p><div class="summary-wrapper">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."
</div><p>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.</p>
<p>The Press’s <a href="http://columbiapress.wpengine.com/about-us#PubCom">faculty Publication Committee members</a>
serve as jurors. Each year they will consider books published in the
two full calendar years prior to the award year. The winning author is
awarded $10,000, along with an award certificate. A reception will be
held in honor of the book at the beginning of the fall semester.</p><p> Read about the book <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2019/12/i-am-people-truly-global-account-of.html">here</a> and order your copy from any good bookshop or online retailer.<br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-67676509238418779152021-11-12T17:57:00.001+05:302021-11-12T17:57:59.809+05:30SÁLIM ALI: WORDS FOR BIRDS The Collected Radio Broadcasts<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9MqXjAOBDq04GwMmXIbaoVP-veE05YGVPtgQVLsPzgZK6Ng3AKiuXIXUjpEaaUCORWyT1_fdF8E2OxHjBIzLz6lNmsbjPtE_9DD98dH3mQXqQYG6S-UDuLsiiJSgRrYkgM3IQnDnH8NSh/s584/SALIM+3d.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9MqXjAOBDq04GwMmXIbaoVP-veE05YGVPtgQVLsPzgZK6Ng3AKiuXIXUjpEaaUCORWyT1_fdF8E2OxHjBIzLz6lNmsbjPtE_9DD98dH3mQXqQYG6S-UDuLsiiJSgRrYkgM3IQnDnH8NSh/w400-h380/SALIM+3d.jpg" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">“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”</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />The thirty-five talks that comprise this book were broadcast between 1941 and 1985 and show Sálim Ali’s exceptional skill as an oral communicator and bird propagandist. He describes the purpose of these radio transmissions: “The object of these talks is really to interest listeners, in the first instance for the healthy pleasure and satisfaction bird watching affords rather than for its intrinsic scientific possibilities.”<br /><br />The talks cover many topics – bird habits, bird habitats, birds at risk – in an elegantly conversational and informative style. Birds, he tells us, have a crucial place in nature’s cyclic processes; they benefit agriculture; they contribute to the economy in ways we neither see nor fully understand. <br /><br />While the speaker’s focus is largely on birds, it is also evident that he is interested in all forms of wildlife and contemporary conservation issues. Each talk reads like a short essay. The book does need not to be read sequentially from start to finish – the reader has merely to dip into it at random to be hugely educated and entertained.<br /></p><p>Sálim Ali’s massive corpus includes the bestselling <i>Book of Indian Birds</i> and the monumental ten-volume <i>Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan</i> (co-authored with S. Dillon Ripley). <i>The Birds of Kutch, Indian Hill Birds, Birds of Kerala, The Birds of Sikkim</i>, and <i>The Fall of a Sparrow</i>, his autobiography, are some of his other well-known books.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtu2mBCm0tBUGcFUnsXx-weSf69JeQ5tLDsFtx_gtt7Tpq_iT3Hja8oZVThHfsmBF_4JswRiHxQo1chnrpJuyu21AtWqApHKl88wJe_GgXUDLw8pxfuJo3UJKVULFuQ2CpNqVyzVJg7lax/s1082/tara+g+salim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="593" data-original-width="1082" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtu2mBCm0tBUGcFUnsXx-weSf69JeQ5tLDsFtx_gtt7Tpq_iT3Hja8oZVThHfsmBF_4JswRiHxQo1chnrpJuyu21AtWqApHKl88wJe_GgXUDLw8pxfuJo3UJKVULFuQ2CpNqVyzVJg7lax/w400-h219/tara+g+salim.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Tara Gandhi was guided by Sálim Ali for her MSc in field ornithology. She works for biodiversity conservation and conducts surveys to document birds and other wildlife in India. Apart from scientific and popular articles on nature and ecology, she has written several books, the latest of which is <i>Birds, Wild Animals and Agriculture: Conflict and Coexistence in India</i>. She is also the editor of <i>A Bird’s Eye View: The Collected Essays and Shorter Writings of Sálim Ali</i> (2 volumes, Permanent Black, 2007).</p><p>Hardback/ Rs 599/ Black Kite and <a href="https://www.hachetteindia.com/TitleDetails.aspx?titleId=47353">Hachette India</a></p><p>Buy from good bookshops, online retailers, or <a href="https://www.hachetteindia.com/TitleDetails.aspx?titleId=47353">Hachette India </a><br /> </p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-46324830971753371322021-10-10T12:34:00.006+05:302021-10-10T14:21:43.080+05:30Niraja Gopal Jayal: Citizenship Imperilled; India's Fragile Democracy<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisdCpXv5M3XDcsdkOAEfk8WGaeNlP9Y_qUhKQggmkLdJdI1YnHxJBp0zDHuudlmxqdGtzUl5Mk10nNV74PuwuZhEEfxsu4YAx4B-OBRIg451nX3nlyiqFAR03fNPjt1Xilaooi98CgCuXk/s584/nirajajayal+3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisdCpXv5M3XDcsdkOAEfk8WGaeNlP9Y_qUhKQggmkLdJdI1YnHxJBp0zDHuudlmxqdGtzUl5Mk10nNV74PuwuZhEEfxsu4YAx4B-OBRIg451nX3nlyiqFAR03fNPjt1Xilaooi98CgCuXk/w400-h380/nirajajayal+3d.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Who is an Indian? For the first time since independence, the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 brought Indians face-to-face with this question. In line with the idea of a Hindu Rashtra in which only Hindus are fully worthy of being Indian citizens, the amendment suggests Indian citizenship should be faith-based. It attempts to diminish the value given to religious diversity and equal citizenship, regardless of religion, by the Indian constitution.</span><br /><span> </span>With this, India has turned its back on the civic nationalism, however fragile and imperfect, forged over the anti-colonial struggle and largely sustained since independence. Its civic nationalism is now threatened by cultural nationalism in the form of religious majoritarianism. <br /><span> </span>This book examines how the constitutional guarantee of equal citizenship has been imperilled. It traces changes in the law and practices of citizenship advanced by Hindu majoritarianism. It examines the implications of these changes for India’s secular democracy; for its minorities, especially Muslims vulnerable to state violence and social discrimination; and for the very understanding of what it means to be an Indian citizen. <div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8dKi3w6u4B2edL-HMpe2drCfMI5a1fvih8q3-7uylrMtLB7TQghIloatveBFoqCxCMp2AldTH1ZlboZhAzHCJvRQzhukJG6p5zSLUL3ZISYC1Modb5SrVclQXdZncCFN7B1XaA6tYou3o/s640/NGJ_HighRes.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="426" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8dKi3w6u4B2edL-HMpe2drCfMI5a1fvih8q3-7uylrMtLB7TQghIloatveBFoqCxCMp2AldTH1ZlboZhAzHCJvRQzhukJG6p5zSLUL3ZISYC1Modb5SrVclQXdZncCFN7B1XaA6tYou3o/s320/NGJ_HighRes.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>NIRAJA GOPAL JAYAL is the author of the internationally acclaimed <i>Citizenship and Its Discontents</i> (Permanent Black and Harvard University Press, 2013). She has been Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is currently Centennial Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, the London School of Economics. Her recent publications include <i>Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions</i> (2006), and <i>The</i> <i>Oxford Companion to Politics in India </i>(co-edited with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, 2010).<div><br /></div><div><i>Published in the Hedgehog and Fox series, with Ashoka University. Series editor: Rudrangshu Mukherjee</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Hardback/ Rs 795</div><div><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-901oao r-18jsvk2 r-37j5jr r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-rjixqe r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" dir="auto" id="id__3h9dp27vabq" lang="en"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">You can order from any good bookshop or online retailer or our associate,<a href="https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9788178246451"> Orient Blackswan</a></span></div></div></div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-60647739867703822032021-09-18T09:30:00.000+05:302021-09-18T19:41:53.051+05:30SHERALI TAREEN: DEFENDING MUHAMMAD IN MODERNITY<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">WINNER OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PAKISTAN STUDIES BOOKS PRIZE 2020</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Finalist for the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, Analytical-Descriptive Studies</span></span></div><p><br /> </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip32c3HEetiY99B5QsvXhTEfYsWH9dDBbTZqOsPHnVK-H_qqROx-2ObSEbl3Xl0LQd7KC4c7inoa5aGF0FiGAEAaYWQ3vFbb_Pn3Txn-IjTtHGgDEo-diwuB7B0vDXf63AtGA7sb3Vubpj/s752/sherali+3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="752" data-original-width="644" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip32c3HEetiY99B5QsvXhTEfYsWH9dDBbTZqOsPHnVK-H_qqROx-2ObSEbl3Xl0LQd7KC4c7inoa5aGF0FiGAEAaYWQ3vFbb_Pn3Txn-IjTtHGgDEo-diwuB7B0vDXf63AtGA7sb3Vubpj/w549-h640/sherali+3d.jpg" width="549" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen offers the most comprehensive account of the longest running dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī–Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations with beginnings in colonial South Asia almost two hundred years ago, yet their differences haunt the religious sensibilities of South Asian Muslims even today.</span><br /><br />Tareen challenges those who see intra-Muslim contest through the prism of liberal-secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. He argues that the Barelvī–Deobandī polemic was animated by “competing political theologies” – contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on a close reading of unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, his book marks a major intervention in the fields of Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies, and Political Theology.<br /><br />“. . . beautifully written in a language accessible for students and colleagues . . . If you can only read three books on Islam in South Asia, <i>Defending Muhammad in Modernity</i> needs to be one of them”<br />Margrit Pernau, Max Planck Institute <br /><br />“No book offers a richer, more illuminating guide to the origins and the complex theological relationship of the Barelvi and the Deobandi orientations . . . [a] remarkably accessible study . . .”<br />Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University<br /><br />“. . . a major contribution to the literature on the history of Muslims (and Islam) in South Asia . . . The book is also noteworthy for its deep engagement with Urdu, Persian, and Arabic sources”<br />David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0DmDTaHOcy_gW0Vuc5_mn0H6WysaYj73GJevFH01q7hBxzXuKLOzS0kWCFWp9LAEoCNLRB8J3p8cklUpoxAe8CLLQSRy7zSEhEN8w8Md-lCLdzAVQbpCRX87DwBEqmvqHlmNiLa10iMad/s471/sher.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="471" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0DmDTaHOcy_gW0Vuc5_mn0H6WysaYj73GJevFH01q7hBxzXuKLOzS0kWCFWp9LAEoCNLRB8J3p8cklUpoxAe8CLLQSRy7zSEhEN8w8Md-lCLdzAVQbpCRX87DwBEqmvqHlmNiLa10iMad/w200-h198/sher.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>SherAli Tareen is associate professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He is co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia.</p><p><br /> </p><p><br /></p><p><i>Hedgehog and fox series; series editor: Rudrangshu Mukherjee</i></p><p>Paperback/ Rs 795/ </p><p><br /> </p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-39108643655914040792021-09-09T19:14:00.000+05:302021-09-09T19:14:00.264+05:30"Every nationality has its own distinct stench": by G. Kanato Chophy<span style="color: #38761d;"><i>A wonderfully written and deeply moving new book on society and history in Nagaland over the past couple of centuries has just been published by Permanent Black and Ashoka University in collaboration with the New India Foundation. Its young author, G. Kanato Chophy, is one of the brightest Naga scholars on the Indian horizon from the north-east. Permanent Black asked Kanato to reflect on what’s in his book and why he wrote it. </i></span><br /><br /><br />For some time now I’ve been wanting to work on a book called “constitutional Indians” – a concept that I have briefly touched upon in the conclusion of the book you’ve just published. My argument in it is that, for a putatively renegade ethnic community like the Nagas, the “idea of India” hangs precariously in the balance, supported by a piece of paper, the Indian Constitution, which we have until recently understood as a guarantee of equal rights to Indian citizens irrespective of religion, ethnicity, class, and gender. <br /><br />I belong to an emerging class of educated Nagas who consider themselves “constitutional Indians”; many of the young in my community, and perhaps the north-east more broadly, are culturally conservative, proud of their region’s distinctive history, tradition, language, and ethnic identity, but at the same time seeing and desiring common ground with fellow citizens in other regions of the country that have their own – sometimes almost incomprehensibly different – language, history, and culture. For a Naga, this common ground is the idea of a modern and secular India – as the truly Ambedkar-inspired Constitution defines it – not the largely elite and Brahmanical notion of a timeless Indian civilisation and tradition dating back thousands of years. <br /><br />“Traditions”, as has been established, are often invented to serve a political purpose at particular historical conjunctures. The are never “age old”; on the contrary they are often dubious notions so subtly perpetuated by the powerful that they lodge for generations in the social psyche and hold sway over a whole populace over long stretches of time. The all-encompassing idea of some singular Indian civilisation was necessary as a nationalist invention during the struggle against British rule. It is untenable when scrutinised analytically, but there is no doubt that it is attractive within a world of competitive “civilisations” and has taken hold in the general mind. If the Greeks, Egyptians, Germans, British, and Chinese can boast of being the inheritors of a civilisation, Indians may have seemed to lack muscle if they failed to make the same claim. Most such claims, however, are the bloated proclamations of elites to showcase the high intellectual achievements and cultural artefacts of past elites. The absence of the ideas and creativity of religious and ethnic minorities, the subaltern and the oppressed, and folk traditions is, in such grand concepts, transparent. <br /><br />I am a student of Indian history and society, enthralled by its rich heritage; at the same time I see that there are communities and cultures, mostly minorities, which do not fall within the ambit of pan-Indic civilisation. These communities, occupying the so-called fringes of the Indian mainstream, are also and equally the inheritors of modern India. Submitting to this idea of modern India, the philosopher-statesman Radhakrishnan had, as the nation’s president, assured my tribesmen in 1963: “The highest position in the country is open to every Naga: in the parliament, in the central cabinet and in various services, military and civil.” <br /><br />Of course, the making of post-independence India has not been without difficulties and challenges. In 1963, when Radhakrishnan in Kohima was assuring the Nagas of their place in modern India, my parents were little children growing up in an Indian military internment camp: a fallout of the Naga armed struggle. My family had borne the brunt of those tumultuous decades. My paternal grandfather was short and sturdy; he was not a well-travelled man like my maternal grandfather, but he had once walked for weeks as a hired hand of the Allied forces during WWII. But being imprisoned in a dug-out pit for months can be very debilitating. He was arrested and tortured for running a mess for Naga fighters; in clarification, I should say that the role of a mess keeper rotated among the villagers, and he happened to be plain unlucky when Indian government troops arrived. For many illiterate cultivators like him, the idea of a modern state was very new, and what the Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian mainstream called the “integration process” often meant for people such as him, quite straightforwardly, a loss of dignity and livelihood. <br /><br />As for my maternal grandfather, his encounter with modernity was relatively smooth. His own father, a small-time itinerant trader, sailed to France as part of a Labour Corps during WWI; on his return home, he was exempted from paying taxes to the British for having served the Crown. This man, my maternal grandfather, lived long enough to narrate his experiences to his grandchildren. He had never entered a classroom because the American Baptist mission in Nagaland had opened a school where he lived only in the late 1930s. And yet he belonged to an emerging class of natives who were breaking the mould. He spoke Assamese fluently, and a smattering of Bengali and Hindi. He would proudly tell us how, armed with a Lee-Enfield rifle he had scouted for the Allied forces during WWII. After the British left in 1947, his “exploits” became mere stories. There are many like my grandparents whose memories have gone unrecorded; but behind these unwritten personal life stories is a whole history – often oral but also in stray untapped archives – of Naga people in modern India awaiting an unfolding. <br /><br />It was an arduous process researching and writing this book of mine, a social history of the Naga Baptists, because fact and fiction in the Naga universe often collapse into a single reality. As with most Indian tribes, past memories and stories, at times bordering on the mythic, shape Naga identity and destiny. I remember a witty tradition-keeper from a certain Naga community tactfully evading a question on the origin of his tribe. He was asked during a large gathering if his ancestors had emerged from stones or had arrived in a migration. Bewildered and puzzled, something told him that denying autochthonous origin from stones might get him into trouble, and agreeing on an origin myth he didn’t know much about might make him look silly. So, to uproarious laughter from the crowd, he replied: “I wasn’t there when it happened.” <br /><br />In this book, I have dwelt on certain issues that are bound to raise new questions and ruffle some feathers. Issues such as cultural loss, conversion, identity politics, and the Naga political movement are inherently sensitive and polemical, specially so if you start cutting them open and peering through a microscope. In this sense, my stance is precarious, for I look at several of the contentious issues of Naga society and history from both within and without – even though I have felt and known myself as an insider. In oblique and often unconfessed ways, enterprises such as this book are also quasi-autobiographies. Listening incessantly to stories, then arranging and recording them within an inherited analytic framework that is also reshaped by the writer to suit what he sees as the narrative needs of his material, is deeply personal. I have in this book tried to write about an ethnic community of faith – Nagaland’s majority, the Naga Baptists – that I consider unique; more broadly, this is one Naga researcher’s account of among the least studied regions of South Asia. <br /><br />Despite the ineluctable homogenising juggernaut of modern education, Naga society still thrives on a story-telling tradition which subtly shapes public opinion. I remember a surreal story told by one Naga elder to the effect that our Naga ancestors were runaway slaves from China; apparently, they had left China to escape back-breaking work during the building of the Great Wall of China, and the Naga tradition of ear-perforation was thought an antique mark of their slavery. Almost every ethnic community of Mongoloid stock in the Indo-Myanmar frontier points their origin eastward. The oral tradition about the China connection, as I discovered during my research on a chapter about the Naga Baptist faith and Maoism, had not evaded the notice of the Chinese Politburo. A certain China-returned Naga “rebel” told me that his group’s Chinese handlers had, in the late 1960s, assured them that a billion Chinese people would back their struggle because the “Chinese and Nagas are brothers”. But the Chinese connection was unpromising as an origin myth, primarily because of the Christian religious preference of the ethnic Nagas: communism and Maoism are an odious philosophy in Naga Baptist circles. <br /><br />The umbilical cord connecting Nagas with mainland India runs into a variant of this problem. I argue in this book that the connection is not in tune with the hosannas of Indian nationalism: it is not the cord of a shared ancient history, religion, or culture. The link is tenuous, and has to do with the ideas of equality, justice, and liberty enshrined in the Indian Constitution. I interviewed hundreds of people over the course of three years writing this book, and I can safely say that Nagas, despite their complex history and ethnic distinction, feel they are better off under India than China – and this is so primarily because of what the Indian Constitution has until recently promised. <br /><br />Guy Delisle, in a hilarious graphic novel called <i>Shenzen: A Travelogue from China</i>, observes incisively that “every nationality has its own distinct stench”; this may be one way of sniffing (or you could say sniffing at) every country, the version in which the glass is seen as half empty rather than half full. There is a better way: barring the smell of open sewage familiar from Dimapur to Daman and Diu, and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, every region and part of India also has its own distinct fragrance (most detectably, says my palate, from food and regional cuisines). I find India fascinating because every state and region offers a unique experience, and every attempt to tamper with or homogenise its religions, cultures, and languages has resulted in the malodorous vapour of recent years. An ideologically driven construction of common history, religion, or culture for a nation as varied as ours, no matter how creative the effort and no matter how small or large the community forging it – cannot contain the irascible diversity intrinsic to Indian social life. There is bound to be a blowback. No ideological onslaught against cultural difference, left or right, can hold a candle to the mind-boggling variety that is India. The Nagas wish to be seen and appreciated and warmed to as Nagas: they will feel more Indian if they are. The commonplace stupidity of the modern nationalist is to refuse to acknowledge this simple truth, to not recognise that the Tamilian, the Malayali, the Mizo, the Naga, and everyone else is far more likely to be committed to the idea of India if they do not feel bulldozed in the direction of the cow belt. My book is in this sense about the challenges of diversity facing modern India: its protagonist is the ethnic Nagas, the population it historicises afresh runs to about three million people straddling the Indo-Myanmar frontier. <br /><br />India has long been a land hosting several religious “mavericks” and “renegades” in the shape of numerous cults and sects, breakaways, or divergences from all the major faiths. How many Indians know that the world’s single-largest Baptist state, population average-wise, is not Mississippi or Texas in the United States but the small hilly state of Nagaland in north-eastern India? <br /><br />India houses every Christian denomination and sect imaginable, but the Baptists, who occupy the fervent end of the evangelical spectrum, have been eye-catching – even controversial – in Indian history, starting from the end of the eighteenth century. The social history of Naga Baptists is even more compelling because, up to Indian independence, many Naga groups were considered “primitive headhunters”. This book chronicles the rise of ethnic Nagas as a formidable community of faith and a politically assertive group of people in modern India. One of the notable legacies of the American Baptist mission was the maintaining of archives, and their archival records have allowed a keen element of historicity to structure competing Naga narratives, especially in relation to the Naga encounter with British colonialism and the American Baptist mission. <br /><br />That this book is written in English speaks volumes of my Baptist mission heritage. As a practising Baptist – though my personal faith is much more mellowed than the mainstream Naga Baptist faith – I have consistently argued throughout it that the Baptist faith has significantly shaped the modern outlook, worldview, and identity of Nagas. Here I might cite an important teaching of the Baptist faith: that all human beings have been created in the image of God. This religious idea has instilled in modern Nagas the truant notion that, given their creation in God’s image, it is irrelevant that they fall outside the four-tiered varna of Brahmanical Hinduism since they have been endowed with the same capabilities as those within that fold. Is this a novel religious belief or a simple assertion of human equality? “As whetstone our opponents sharpen us” are the words etched in A.Z. Phizo’s tombstone in the outskirts of Kohima town. This epitaph of the most famous Naga nationalist – in mainstream Indian nationalist eyes the most recalcitrant Naga rebel – echoes an idea in the Book of Proverbs 27:17. As one Allahabadi, Trilokinath Purwar – a Gandhian, Nehruvian, and close friend of some well-known past Naga ethnonationalists – observed (see Chapter 8 of my book), religious belief, particularly the Baptist faith, had a great liberating influence on the mind of the Naga tribals. <br /><br />Undeniably, there is a downside to the staggering dimensions of Indian diversity, which the Naga political issue offers evidence of. Its overwhelming diversity perhaps makes Indian democracy the most onerous for diehard nationalist zealots. Western democracies never had to deal with a cultural melting pot of such epic proportions. In this book on the Nagas, I have analysed India’s cacophonous post-independence democracy in order to delineate multi-faith issues, multiculturalism, and ethnicity-based political movements. Indians of the North and the South have in the main ignored the Nagas, or seen them as a kind of pestilence best tackled by the army. My hope is that this book will, by showing something of the history, society, and character of the Nagas, show people everywhere why it is necessary to see and understand my wonderful region and its people more empathetically. <br /><br /> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg82hUzgSy3-gwLtg4XVM0b7YMXVlTG4e66FAvyX8he7GlBXHyrcmljcSiQcYF0khCaq3nG7mNdIA-8uJ7u4ahkryHXlJD3yJ6ZZcApeinUJ2fNZjPHSMQA8lh6yFM-hl3UQYvySDhu-QGU/s2048/1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1664" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg82hUzgSy3-gwLtg4XVM0b7YMXVlTG4e66FAvyX8he7GlBXHyrcmljcSiQcYF0khCaq3nG7mNdIA-8uJ7u4ahkryHXlJD3yJ6ZZcApeinUJ2fNZjPHSMQA8lh6yFM-hl3UQYvySDhu-QGU/s320/1.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IN">A contingent of Naga leaders at Raj Ghat in
the early 1960s. Courtesy DIPR</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IN">President S. Radhakrishnan being
felicitated by a Naga tribesmen during the inauguration of Nagaland in 1963.
Courtesy DIPR</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IN">Angami Naga villagers casting
votes during the first Nagaland Legislative Assembly election in 1964. Courtesy
DIPR </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IN">Naga Baptist church leaders with
Rev. Michael Scott. The Baptist church continues to play an important role in
the Indo-Naga peace process. Courtesy DIPR</span></p><p> </p><p><style>@font-face
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IN"> </span><span lang="EN-IN">A women Baptist choir from
different Naga tribes.</span></p><p> </p><p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipr2XrF04FQrOoHb8GV12hkBPByL5ac2AfS4J4Si2xlOrBEANTMoBtOrekNcForyGjwJ-RCA6h1fYms8JhDoWLnld8Rs6yHceaKyvmjU8ab4i9mOAxlnw7CSt43eyojBjD1yvgMeIZejs-/s2048/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="2048" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipr2XrF04FQrOoHb8GV12hkBPByL5ac2AfS4J4Si2xlOrBEANTMoBtOrekNcForyGjwJ-RCA6h1fYms8JhDoWLnld8Rs6yHceaKyvmjU8ab4i9mOAxlnw7CSt43eyojBjD1yvgMeIZejs-/s320/6.jpg" width="320" /></a><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A Baptist church in the heart of Mokokchung
town. This Protestant faith plays an important role in the Naga social and
political life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><p><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b>Christianity and Politics in Tribal India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism</b> <i>by G. Kanato Chophy is out now. It was acquired and edited at
Permanent Black. We have sold
rights for the world except South Asia to State University of New York
Press (SUNY) which will publish it for North America and elsewhere. Our
edition is for sale in South Asia only. </i> <br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><b><span style="font-size: small;">Hedgehog and Fox Series, Ashoka University / Copublished
with the New India Foundation</span></b><p>Hardback; Rs 1095; 478 pp. <i>Available from all good
bookshops and online retailers.</i></p><p><i>Find out more about the book <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2021/09/christianity-and-politics-in-tribal.html">here</a>.</i><br /><br /> </p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-38397579829753554522021-09-06T14:10:00.003+05:302021-09-06T14:13:24.422+05:30CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS IN TRIBAL INDIA by G. KANATO CHOPHY<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Richly researched and stylishly written, Kanato Chophy’s social history of Naga Christianity is a major contribution to the literature on a vital, fascinating, yet massively under-studied part of South Asia. This book will be read, and its arguments debated, for years to come.” </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">RAMACHANDRA GUHA</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdBJmSUr3MxfxHlge6UGax6OAcDjwyX1Ijj_qa1k2SbRpbEA9cjYawSVlqvP8M5mEnaOoPCVVJB0EuDB6359Er5UZFmnIiEuwhn5eXaVeUWLD8REDNv7acNwPojk4-U188LyDlUSb4YJV/s584/kanato+3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="608" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdBJmSUr3MxfxHlge6UGax6OAcDjwyX1Ijj_qa1k2SbRpbEA9cjYawSVlqvP8M5mEnaOoPCVVJB0EuDB6359Er5UZFmnIiEuwhn5eXaVeUWLD8REDNv7acNwPojk4-U188LyDlUSb4YJV/w640-h608/kanato+3d.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Landlocked and remote, the mountain state of Nagaland in north-east India has, within a century of missionary contact, become the most Baptist state in the world. Nearly 80 per cent of Nagaland’s two million people are devout Christian adherents of this sect. This makes Nagaland the religious outlier of India – a country in which about 80 per cent of the population is Hindu.<br />How has this come to be? G. Kanato Chophy chronicles the historical and socio-cultural processes by which Naga tribals – known a century ago as “primitive headhunters” – were transformed into a vibrant and politically assertive community of the Christian faith in colonial and post-Independence India. <br />Besides outlining the role of British colonialists and developments in Victorian religious policy, this book analyses the remarkable success of American Baptist missions of the nineteenth century in a backwater of the British Raj. It shows that even as the power of Christianity has declined in the secular West, the culture and politics of Nagaland continue to be strengthened by Baptist ideas of Jesus within a country increasingly majoritarian and suspicious of “alien” faiths. <br />Analysing the peculiarly unapologetic and assertive strain of the Baptist faith in Nagaland, this book also speculates on the future of Protestant missions and the American evangelical movement in this ardently anomalous state of India. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9PN1Oi5ocEJSFAaAucO_XuLCrNry8hBdot5WNI938F5mO119bhtYS8OJBemrvor1EN8QFOlTQL8DJbCTIiR0D5wwEiJLIjtCvfdQmFwCGKGkVOJUzzzupgx_sNqdCDsZFoLDFBsmRf4D/s1105/kanatochophy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1105" data-original-width="827" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9PN1Oi5ocEJSFAaAucO_XuLCrNry8hBdot5WNI938F5mO119bhtYS8OJBemrvor1EN8QFOlTQL8DJbCTIiR0D5wwEiJLIjtCvfdQmFwCGKGkVOJUzzzupgx_sNqdCDsZFoLDFBsmRf4D/s320/kanatochophy.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>G. KANATO CHOPHY is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Centre of North East India Studies, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. <br />After a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Delhi, he taught at the Central University of Jharkhand in Central India. His special interest is the history and social life of Indian tribes, and he is the author of <i>Constructing the Divine: Religion and Worldview of a Naga Tribe in North-East India</i> (Routledge, 2019). <br />He wrote the present work on Naga Baptists and ethnic groups of the Indo–Myanmar frontier as a Fellow of the New India Foundation. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>This book was acquired and edited at Permanent Black. We have sold
rights for the world except South Asia to State University of New York
Press (SUNY) which will publish it for North America and elsewhere. Our edition is for sale in South Asia only and available from all good bookshops and online retailers.</i> <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: small;">Hedgehog and Fox Series, Ashoka University / Copublished
with the New India Foundation./ Jacket photo from Unsplash, by Tiachen
Aier/ Courtesy of Lalsawmliani Tochhawng</span><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">Hardback; Rs 1095</div><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-75874757972011017902021-09-06T14:06:00.006+05:302022-01-11T12:02:47.470+05:30Reading Savarkar: Vinayak Chaturvedi<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRp8F8JrYjO6rwcPvM6Q0U81jh_7m1AP51NSmdgOBJ1BA3MQW6L3YYabosKKnAL2KkSm2hVSMQZx2GC3J6ClQwHtAdWm6yHK2dmPadTC_kfP9J-u_yYtRqogab9FOLWXcQ7cQkn3I05y6z/s855/Savarkar_571_855.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="571" data-original-width="855" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRp8F8JrYjO6rwcPvM6Q0U81jh_7m1AP51NSmdgOBJ1BA3MQW6L3YYabosKKnAL2KkSm2hVSMQZx2GC3J6ClQwHtAdWm6yHK2dmPadTC_kfP9J-u_yYtRqogab9FOLWXcQ7cQkn3I05y6z/w400-h268/Savarkar_571_855.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Vinayak Chaturvedi's <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><i>Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History </i>will be published in 2022 by Permanent Black and Ashoka University, and subsequently by the State University of New York Press. Here is a taster, out now in Scroll.</span> <p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Reading Savarkar: Was the Hindutva icon actually Hinduphobic?</span></p><p>Accusations of Hinduphobia in those who do not see eye-to-eye with Hindutva have reached new heights in recent years. An obscure 19th-century concept is now the default mantra for Hindutva-vadis against all critiques of their ideas. <br /><br />The recent furore against the upcoming conference called “Dismantling Global Hindutva” (September 10-September 12) has made me wonder whether, ironically, these same individuals might also – if they had the patience and capacity to read his large corpus of writing – need to identify Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as Hinduphobic. </p><p>After all, a basic truth made clear in Savarkar’s writing is that <i>Hindutva is not Hinduism</i>.
They are not equivalents. In fact, you do not have to read Savarkar all
that carefully to see the clarity with which he argued that Hindus
should consider “abandoning” the concept of Hinduism as part of their
lexicon.</p><p>One does not need to search deep into his oeuvre to discover Savarkar’s distinction between Hindutva and Hinduism. In <i>Essentials of Hindutva</i>,
published in 1923, he begins by clarifying that “Hinduism is only a
derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva”. He declared Hinduism as one
of the many “isms” that had plagued modernity, by calling it a
“spiritual or religious dogma or system”.</p><p>He not only argued that
Hinduism was inferior in comparison to Hindutva, he also stated that it
was “more limited, less satisfactory and essentially a sectarian term”.</p><p>Read the rest of the article <a href="https://scroll.in/article/1004641/reading-savarkar-was-the-hindutva-icon-actually-hinduphobic">here</a>. <br /></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-74554164889762374052021-08-20T12:07:00.001+05:302021-08-20T12:07:32.166+05:30PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak<p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>"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. On a closer look, that indeed turned out to be the case…"</i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmwi1gI8A17zWuszuCq7RMJP8gz-8WBRxmI25CFMYk1V3AaJ0DX6XNXsCSV1ECvDs4xOdBJr_3BGBZXjxzJ6ExWJPXJ848ca-ZLlTOiQ6bYUkfLdXEKWUHZMHVXMLwq2CNl_aO1rDuw4AS/s584/partha+3D+copy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="608" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmwi1gI8A17zWuszuCq7RMJP8gz-8WBRxmI25CFMYk1V3AaJ0DX6XNXsCSV1ECvDs4xOdBJr_3BGBZXjxzJ6ExWJPXJ848ca-ZLlTOiQ6bYUkfLdXEKWUHZMHVXMLwq2CNl_aO1rDuw4AS/w640-h608/partha+3D+copy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>This book is intended for a general readership and is utterly free of academic jargon. It is meant to be read by anyone wanting to understand what “nationalism” and “democracy” mean in the Indian context. It is essential reading for everyone worried about India’s future.<br /> Partha Chatterjee has translated and edited a manuscript of mysterious origin which presents a completely new way of telling the history of Indian nationalism. Resolutely criticising the doctrines of Hindutva as well as pluralist secularism, the book examines ongoing debates over Indian civilisation. Making new connections, it provides a detailed and original account of how the present borders of India were defined by British colonial policy, the Partition of 1947, and the integration of the princely states as well as the French and Portuguese territories. <br /> What is emphasised is not so much a state machinery inherited from colonial times but the moral foundation of a new republic based on the solidarity of different but equal formations of the people. After a trenchant analysis of current conflicts over religion, caste, class, gender, language, and region in India, the book proposes a new politics of revitalised federalism.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-e6JTC8Oqd6ApZeYZgUo4Lq_nD-Nf3aGJUvRJhj30nedUqrFHw_Bc0LZa4siNPGTkdmh12PCcjJCvu3CzK44tgOzN81cMeEfQCHvmrMF-cTLNJylRybH_8Z_UFxMAIAeNUpDix2kqGnvU/s2048/partha+mugsht+2021.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1356" data-original-width="2048" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-e6JTC8Oqd6ApZeYZgUo4Lq_nD-Nf3aGJUvRJhj30nedUqrFHw_Bc0LZa4siNPGTkdmh12PCcjJCvu3CzK44tgOzN81cMeEfQCHvmrMF-cTLNJylRybH_8Z_UFxMAIAeNUpDix2kqGnvU/w400-h265/partha+mugsht+2021.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>PARTHA CHATTERJEE has been internationally recognised as one of India’s foremost political theorists. Rooted in the intellectual milieu of Kolkata, he is also Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His many books include <i>A Princely Impostor? </i>(2002), <i>The Politics of the Governed</i> (2004), and <i>The Black Hole of Empire </i>(2012). He has been a founding editor of Subaltern Studies, and is the editor of <i>The Small Voice of History: The Collected Essays of Ranajit Guha</i> (2009). </p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Hedgehog and Fox Series, Ashoka University. General editor: Rudrangshu Mukherjee<br /></span></b></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>This
book was acquired and edited at Permanent Black. We have sold
rights for the world except South Asia to State University of New York
Press (SUNY) which will publish it for North America and elsewhere. Our
edition is for sale in South Asia only and is available from all good
bookshops and online retailers.</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> <span> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jacket: ‘Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill’, oil on wood, 1628, by Pieter Claesz. Courtesy of the Rogers Fund, 1949, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.</span></div><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: medium;">HARDBACK, RS 795</span><br /></span></p><p></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-25931985437345820402021-08-03T11:16:00.002+05:302021-08-03T11:17:06.497+05:30THE MUGHALS AND THE SUFIS: Read an excerpt in Scroll.in<p><i>In this new book, Muzaffar Alam synthesises two major areas of
his expertise – Mughal History and India Islam – to show how rulers
interact with religious figures and institutions. In the present Indian
context, where the ruling regime is closely connected with religion,
Muzaffar Alam’s book is startlingly relevant in showing similar
iterations of such strong associations – and some of their consequences –
between religion and rulers during the Mughal Period.</i></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBJaonGjihUIzhDtWnukCOgTocVeHl2PmKejvvShn4Loy7iw5Ecjkc5EByLL8XXOcz0SQoadFzL3BwROePUxnYXetpoGygMDER2RiJdM5pkICAC0nZEv_uD93apo_pGTG5rOBHFUhptWvb/s630/Untitled.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="458" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBJaonGjihUIzhDtWnukCOgTocVeHl2PmKejvvShn4Loy7iw5Ecjkc5EByLL8XXOcz0SQoadFzL3BwROePUxnYXetpoGygMDER2RiJdM5pkICAC0nZEv_uD93apo_pGTG5rOBHFUhptWvb/w466-h640/Untitled.png" width="466" /></a></div><p></p><hr class="block-break" /><p>Like
imperial dispensations in many places and times, Mughal India involved a
complex nexus between political elites and religious divines. They had
mutual sympathies as well as differences – sometimes apparently
irreconcilable – regarding the management of politics and the social
order. In this book I have tried to show the trajectory of these
differences, historical and political, as well as the efforts on each
side to accommodate and adjust with the other.</p><p>Amongst both political and religious elites, there were varieties of
voices and positions. If one group of religious leaders made a plea to
implement the injunctions of the shari‘a – with little consideration for
prevailing social realities – there was also a powerful counter-impulse
to maintain local tradition and be amenable to the demands of a
different time. In the process of contestation and negotiation, then,
there was a regular effort to invoke past practices and ideologies. The
chapters of this book examine the fine grain of these efforts and
debates. <br /></p><p><a href="https://scroll.in/article/1001708/how-did-the-mughals-in-india-reconcile-political-expediency-with-religious-forces">Read the rest of the extract in Scroll.in </a><br /></p><p><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-71108482243105643412021-07-22T11:28:00.004+05:302021-08-28T11:01:37.302+05:30Just out: Muzaffar Alam's THE MUGHALS AND THE SUFIS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQI0Reyixm5RxIPNXyk2v7xz94QC2_rGoD0tWCuMTp1bxYNzhEzwqAWXbpTUykwhcyciRC0jHgplSOs8d9zFVHO6QMRQDozrpqWPHLdgkBEBzG7nyKB2Mn0Yyxp5qpIccEkH_pEL8xf345/s584/muzaffar3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="608" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQI0Reyixm5RxIPNXyk2v7xz94QC2_rGoD0tWCuMTp1bxYNzhEzwqAWXbpTUykwhcyciRC0jHgplSOs8d9zFVHO6QMRQDozrpqWPHLdgkBEBzG7nyKB2Mn0Yyxp5qpIccEkH_pEL8xf345/w640-h608/muzaffar3d.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="color: black;">"In his new book, <a href="https://scroll.in/article/1001708/how-did-the-mughals-in-india-reconcile-political-expediency-with-religious-forces"><em>The Mughals and the Sufis</em><em> – Islam and Political Imagination in India: 1500–1750</em></a>,
Alam once again breaks new ground, this time by harmonising two major
domains of scholarship – Mughal History and Indian Islam – honed with
painstaking care over a lifetime of study. What emerges is a highly
nuanced and complex examination of the relationship between Mughal
political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam’s Sufi
traditions in South Asia: one centred around orthodoxy, the other
focusing on a more inclusive and mystical spirituality" AVIK CHANDA, <a href="https://scroll.in/article/1003908/this-book-breaks-new-ground-in-history-by-bringing-together-mughal-politics-and-sufi-spiritualism">Scroll</a></span><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><br /></span></span></p><p>This book examines the complex evolution of relationships between the Mughal court and two dominant modes of Islamic mysticism in early-modern India: one centred around conservative orthodoxy, the other around a more accommodating and eclectic approach to spirituality. <br /><br />Based on Persian texts, court chronicles, epistolary collections, and biographies of Sufi mystics, this book outlines and analyses Islamic religious and theological worldviews. It does so in order to show their influence on – and differences with – Mughal political culture and imagination.<br /><br />The relationship between Mughal power and Islam’s Indian variants has long been oversimplified. The Mughals and the Sufis complicates and nuances the connections and disconnections between thrones and theocracies. Muzaffar Alam’s penetrating reflections reveal an intricate and intimate picture of the calculated strategies of mystics and rulers, their negotiations, conflicts, and reconciliations. They show also a shifting terrain – from the relatively liberal outlook of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) to the greater rigidities of Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). <br /><br />Offering yet more evidence of Professor Alam’s vast and sustained scholarship, this book provides possibly the most cogent and comprehensive modern account of Indian Islam under the Mughal Empire.</p><p>Cover: Interior of the Dara Ganj mosque, Allahabad. The mosque was built by Dara Shukoh at the khanqah of one of his close friends, a noted Chishti Sabiri, Shaikh Muhibb-Allah of Allahabad. (Photograph courtesy Sohail Akbar)<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSMnM8nzbDcTek5V4YJtbrT1Yf6_GYNvltt0IAWtbeq8PwtoXDqk4QKlRNvN9Y6NxXdKKEZG1fxc-MITeNQv2AuszC3w6g7d0LDW1LWJugKcWGUSzcrqu4fQ4wZew3HNfJGGvx0SOe2q6V/s1354/muz.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="1354" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSMnM8nzbDcTek5V4YJtbrT1Yf6_GYNvltt0IAWtbeq8PwtoXDqk4QKlRNvN9Y6NxXdKKEZG1fxc-MITeNQv2AuszC3w6g7d0LDW1LWJugKcWGUSzcrqu4fQ4wZew3HNfJGGvx0SOe2q6V/w400-h189/muz.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><br />MUZAFFAR ALAM is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His several books include <i>The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800</i> (Permanent Black and the University of Chicago Press, 2004); <i>Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Political Culture</i> (co-authored with Sanjay Subrahmanyam; Permanent Black and Columbia University Press, 2011); and <i>The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India 1707–1748</i> (Oxford University Press, 1986).</p><p><b>This book was originated and edited here at Permanent Black, and we have sold
rights for the world except South Asia to State University of New York
Press (SUNY) which will publish it for North America and elsewhere.</b> <br /></p><p>Hardback| Rs 1095| <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Mughals-Sufis-Political-Imagination-1500-1750/dp/8178246392/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1J77XF160J1JK&dchild=1&keywords=muzaffar+alam+mughals+and+sufis&qid=1627132915&sprefix=alam+mugh%2Caps%2C345&sr=8-2">B<span></span><span></span>UY</a> <br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-31623364724786861112021-07-14T13:56:00.003+05:302021-07-15T11:02:12.622+05:30WHEN DOES HISTORY BEGIN?<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Religion, Narrative, and Identity in the Sikh Tradition</b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnH3Ve4CezWg-6C6IX9BAl7ODbcJwu9-toi9bQvhCUNQFvnh2GCizp5awuAW6HPhqUJJPMCv7kvpmwJvpKHRfcG1qbhZuDcSUwc7PdOUTIadRrM7TjqLqQyH5kRUrpXKiTUUo4B8yWwS-9/s584/harjot+3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="608" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnH3Ve4CezWg-6C6IX9BAl7ODbcJwu9-toi9bQvhCUNQFvnh2GCizp5awuAW6HPhqUJJPMCv7kvpmwJvpKHRfcG1qbhZuDcSUwc7PdOUTIadRrM7TjqLqQyH5kRUrpXKiTUUo4B8yWwS-9/w640-h608/harjot+3d.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /> <br /><br />After a spell away because of lockdowns and printing holdups, we are back with long-awaited title. It was originated and edited here at Permanent Black, and we have sold rights for the world except South Asia to State University of New York Press (SUNY) which will publish it for North America and elsewhere.<br /><p><i><span data-offset-key="fou64-0-0"><span data-text="true"></span></span></i></p><p><i><span data-offset-key="fou64-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span>Read an excerpt in <a href="https://scroll.in/article/999911/what-the-connections-of-sacredness-with-valour-and-identity-in-the-sikh-tradition-reveal">Scroll</a></i><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p>Indian historiographical praxis has long been problematic. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled by how people in the subcontinent treated the protocols of history, not seeing that Indian narratives of the past, embedded in kavya traditions, represented a radical departure from historical narratives in the Islamic, Sinic, and Greco-Roman worlds. Where others tended to search for “facts”, people in South Asia looked for “affect”. This alternative for comprehending and evaluating the past – through aesthetics and gradients of taste – generated a different variety of historical consciousness. <br /><br />Focusing on important issues in Sikh religious identity and memory, Harjot Oberoi shows what modern critical narrative achieves when it moves away from classical models of historiography. His examination of the Sikh tradition traverses significant moments in colonialism, encounters with modernity, coercion and protest in the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern notions of the self within and outside India. <br /><br />This book on the variousness of truth-telling practices, ideas of the sacred, and sentiment-laden presuppositions asks us to look afresh at the writing of history – centrally in India, but also across the world.</p>HARJOT OBEROI, Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, is the author of <i>The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition</i> (University of Chicago Press and OUP Delhi, 1994), a classic work of modern Indian history which was awarded the Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize by the American Academy of Religion in 1995. His writings have appeared in <i>Studies in History, Modern Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Panjab Past & Present, Journal of Sikh Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Biblio,</i> and <i>The India Forum</i>. <p>HB/ Rs 795/ <a href="https://www.amazon.in/When-Does-History-Begin-Narrative/dp/8178246449/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=when+does+history+begin&qid=1626251105&sr=8-1">BUY</a><br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-772826419282897092021-02-04T11:30:00.003+05:302021-02-04T15:22:03.073+05:30Love and Laughter in Lockdown<p><span style="font-size: large;">ARITRA GHOSH, <i>winner of the <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-kosambi-memorial-book-prize.html" target="_blank">Kosambi Memorial Book Prize 2021, awarded every year by Permanent Black</a>, gives us a student's guide to surviving final year locked away from friends. </i></span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i> "</i></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I suppose the story of my experience of the pandemic year as a student
is still a work in progress. Too early to pin down, as we say in
history" </span></span> </i></span></p><p><span><span style="font-size: x-large;">When I had to return home to Delhi for the mid-semester break</span></span> around February-March last year, I had no idea that I would not be returning to the University for the whole year and more. By May, I was in disbelief and denial. Maybe that is why I chopped off my hair. It was a terrible decision. </p><p><span> </span>By June, I was fuming and by August, I was considering how and who to bargain with so that the virus would simply cease to be. By September, my humour had begun to become like, you know, the kind of strange stuff you expect from tired adults. Clearly, that was because I had spent a significant amount of time around my parents. By December, as best as could be expected, I had come to terms with the fact that life would not be returning to its mundane normalcy anytime soon. What brought the realisation home was the fact that my sister and I had begun to speak in-sync. </p><p><span> </span>To me, the past year has been quite amusing and interesting for a number of reasons. I used to be quite poor with technology. Even now, sometimes, I forget how to operate simple functions on my laptop such as, how to access and change the contacts lists on my email account. Or even as to how to automatically generate ‘contents’ on Microsoft Word. But at least I know these things now. If a year ago, someone had told me that I – of all people – would be able to use and rely on technology for my work, I would have humoured them with a wry, disbelieving smile.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGzlcXXRapOj3GeXqpOZfomHb3DjqW7LInvlv-9wS9VjKHGcXV7KJHwaO0Nvoox1vjmVAPHzAeOU-JKWToXTXAL3fci3X1zGaMB9xMKe32S7eXOz5ZRKeFhDJ21xyPYHrxC4eXiIPiCu0M/s591/aritra.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="591" height="556" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGzlcXXRapOj3GeXqpOZfomHb3DjqW7LInvlv-9wS9VjKHGcXV7KJHwaO0Nvoox1vjmVAPHzAeOU-JKWToXTXAL3fci3X1zGaMB9xMKe32S7eXOz5ZRKeFhDJ21xyPYHrxC4eXiIPiCu0M/w640-h556/aritra.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span> </span>Then there is the fact that remaining cooped up with my work, music and books has given me a certain perspective I did not have before this moment. You start relating to what you work with and what you study more deeply. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the barriers between what is one’s student life, and what is one’s social and personal life have broken down in the past year. <br /><br /><span> </span>And so, I must admit – if I had not taken the course on ‘Love and Laughter in Antiquity’ with <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ancient-india-historian-nayanjot.html" target="_blank">Nayanjot Lahiri</a> last year, I wouldn't have been able to feel amused about most things. I now realize that it is a very important skill in life – the ability to perceive dissonance and to find that humorous. I am supposed to be in University in this last year of my undergraduate degree, holding discussions, speaking and interacting with friends and peers in real life, and making the most of things. And yet here I am at home, doing my work from my bed. The irony of the situation is certainly not lost on me – and I do find it rib-ticklingly funny. <br /><br /><span> </span>Then, there is the fact that last semester I took on six high-level courses, assuming that the extra time I now had on my hands would allow me to breeze through. I learnt quite a lot – mostly about the importance of perspectives and learning to work and re-work history. It was both rewarding and exhausting. In that sense, it has been the best of both worlds. For instance, I did my undergraduate thesis with <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-chanda-yakshi.html" target="_blank">Upinder Singh</a> last semester, and I remember how on the day of the submission, Professor Singh had to actually ask me to stop my tiresome incessant revising and to let the thesis go. It really was an exacting task, but very fun as well. <br /><br /><span> </span>Now that I am actually reflecting on the year that has gone by, I realise – perhaps belatedly – that we create and mould our own narratives in order to make sense of our experiences. We imagine that life has order and meaning and direction and accordingly, frame our bigger pictures. It seems like such an amazingly human thing to do. Viewed in that sense, at the moment, I suppose the story of my experience of the pandemic year as a student is still a work in progress. Too early to pin down, as we say in history. I have not begun to think of all that has happened in terms of a narrative. When I do, hopefully, it will be a good story. <br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Aritra Ghosh (centre) being awarded the Kosambi Memorial Book Prize yesterday. Nayanjot Lahiri (lowest row, right) spoke on Kosambi; Upinder Singh (middle row, left) read from his autobiography, <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2011/04/kosambi-kosambi-and-kosambi.html" target="_blank">Nivedan</a>; <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2015/08/nature-and-nation.html" target="_blank">Mahesh Rangarajan</a> (top row, right) gave away the prize.</span></i><br /></p><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEice24aR0-dshHuMgKPn5a0-aiJVWe8a7Dq0aFjPtq7UuenJCHkoq4LFNcl26aqJJ9G1H_xqkyI6m3tbEB0m5uo-2_rav2eGLGeQwm2r8cXJo8NDm9UQEGqvirl2Ft2oiLau_lKWasGUaNe/s945/e9aa1718-89cc-4874-bd39-26905a49fccb.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="661" data-original-width="945" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEice24aR0-dshHuMgKPn5a0-aiJVWe8a7Dq0aFjPtq7UuenJCHkoq4LFNcl26aqJJ9G1H_xqkyI6m3tbEB0m5uo-2_rav2eGLGeQwm2r8cXJo8NDm9UQEGqvirl2Ft2oiLau_lKWasGUaNe/w640-h448/e9aa1718-89cc-4874-bd39-26905a49fccb.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /></div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-16815835618485838492021-01-29T14:48:00.025+05:302021-01-29T17:42:56.469+05:30THE KOSAMBI MEMORIAL BOOK PRIZE 2021<div style="text-align: left;">Last year we turned 20 and to mark our birthday, we started a history prize. </div><div style="text-align: left;">The Kosambi Memorial Book Prize.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfaGpguwpE8yvSdT9t5clPW8ggeHuQpqgixt-Q5wrRsoJNhiv9vuFOgCIcPU-r3WdRiL88szwOfqp_fQAnDK3gWuziYf4jQN9Ph4UV8ztB83zJAmLukhVA6CDN_j50h09FFop-vlyPIxHS/s2048/ashoka.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfaGpguwpE8yvSdT9t5clPW8ggeHuQpqgixt-Q5wrRsoJNhiv9vuFOgCIcPU-r3WdRiL88szwOfqp_fQAnDK3gWuziYf4jQN9Ph4UV8ztB83zJAmLukhVA6CDN_j50h09FFop-vlyPIxHS/w640-h360/ashoka.jpg" width="640" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The prize also celebrates the excellent series of scholarly books we co-publish with Ashoka University. The Hedgehog and Fox series is edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee and now has 81 titles. </div></div><div style="text-align: left;">The prize is given to the best student of ancient history at Ashoka University. It is partly funded by a bequest from the historian Meera Kosambi and is given in memory of her grandfather, the historian Dharmanand Kosambi. The winner is nominated by the university.</div><div style="text-align: left;">In its first edition the prize was awarded jointly to Revanth Ukkalam and Haritha Govind. <a href="https://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-press-on-roof-of-world.html" target="_blank">(Read our post about it here.)</a></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><i>This year the value of the prize is Rs 25,000 and the winner is . . .</i></span><i> </i></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>well, you have to wait till Wednesday 3 February to find out.</i><b><br /></b></span></span><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b></b></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /> </b></span><p></p><p><br /></p></div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-20627464775647495932021-01-18T11:00:00.004+05:302021-01-18T11:30:26.771+05:30Sunil Kumar: In Memoriam<p><b>SUVIR KAUL<br /></b></p><p></p><p>Yes, I know that Sunil did a great deal to change the way in with the period of early Islamic rule in North India is understood: he thought of authority in terms of processes and flows, not as singular and unchanging; he did not think of the imposition of Muslim rule over a Hindu land, but demonstrated the multiple motivations that guided local rulers to consolidate their power, including their attempts to define themselves against the confessional, juridical, and philosophical ideas they had inherited; he believed in reading archives creatively and fully, rather than mining them selectively for evidence to buttress prior, and inevitably, partisan, ideas. <br /><br /> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqGsDCFH92cWkXuM7MrY8bQ-P3tqWq7cBYZSrnXOyYpLPEuawEfrzds2j72Z0Icy4nNPZe6KhO8cpP6g9PZON6P-4acF-s4wNIbVQ3wjwyHjfmzdZkCe-E_xodSwCekaYfkteNxeJbhys2/s1176/basketball-2258650_1280+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1176" height="408" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqGsDCFH92cWkXuM7MrY8bQ-P3tqWq7cBYZSrnXOyYpLPEuawEfrzds2j72Z0Icy4nNPZe6KhO8cpP6g9PZON6P-4acF-s4wNIbVQ3wjwyHjfmzdZkCe-E_xodSwCekaYfkteNxeJbhys2/w640-h408/basketball-2258650_1280+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /></div><p>But there is so much more before all that: <br /><br /> There is the walk on the roof of the dining hall at St. Stephen’s College, where both of us, dressed in black trousers and white kurtas, acted as the minor guards bringing up the rear when Hamlet and Horatio see the ghost of Hamlet’s father (we cowered most effectively, we thought!). Why trousers and kurtas, you ask: well, some students who thought that the Shakespeare Society was uppity had purloined all the costumes for our production of Hamlet (this is 1972) and so we had to make do. <br /><br /> There is Sunil, then beginning to be known as Saddy, pounding a good hundred yards ahead of the rest of us on our training runs for the basketball team, dragging us along. I hated him then, as I brought up the struggling rear! And once he was captain, and we did well in tournaments, there was his quiet leadership, and his effective, soft, jump shot. And a good metaphor for his mode in life, I think now. <br /><br /> There is my room, with several of us yowling along with Mick Jagger as he sang “Angie”—I had a cassette player (courtesy a brother in America), and the album Goats Head Soup, and since Saddy had declared his devotion to Anjali, how could all of us not chime in? I remember him walking in late one evening, after he had spent some time with her that day, saying simply, “Kya ladki hai.” And so we yowled together, “Angie”! And then they become fixtures on our campus, and when Winter Festival happened, and spirits were high, there she was, perched on his shoulders, and a lovely reminder that the world was young and open to wonders. <br /><br /> It is now many years later, and I am putting together a collection of essays that became <a href="https://www.orientblackswan.com/details?id=9788178243221"><i>The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India</i></a> (Permanent Black, 2011). Sunil works counterintuitively, and gives me “Qutb and Modern Memory,” which rewrites the history of the Qutb Minar complex to show that far from symbolizing Muslim triumph over Hindus, or even the consolidation of a singular Muslim state, the complex showed how feudal rulers—of all religious persuasions—rebuilt each other’s monuments, and thus elevated their own standing. He showed why the Partition and its processes of identity formation have to be understood as part of a much longer process, but even more importantly, he showed us how to understand those processes differently. <br /></p><br /> We would meet periodically, when he came to the US to give talks, or when we visited Delhi, but now it feels that we didn’t meet often enough. When we met we talked history, literary reading, the mess that Delhi had become, the toxic air, the lives our children were leading, and—occasionally—we giggled over the past. He still played basketball at Saket, and said I should join him as he took on kids two generations younger. I should have gone, if only for old times sake. But there was always too much else to do. <br /><br /> Dunno if they have courts where you are now, Saddy, but I’ll wait for you to pass me the ball there, and perhaps I will be able to bounce it back as you cut towards the basket to lay up and score fluently. Go well. <br /><br /> <i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNxfmILTqCTGE9_BIcNYBRU5_dwQxvdzBdXsmd4swNfA70K_sFFBPfbE7yheHOX3BnXeL9rzbvNhzXnbMRu-Ysllx7bgMuMXv3cjsyyVmSGbJFE6lENFK7v-7A1cGNtUYTTIB0JdfOmaX/s777/9788178243221.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="777" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNxfmILTqCTGE9_BIcNYBRU5_dwQxvdzBdXsmd4swNfA70K_sFFBPfbE7yheHOX3BnXeL9rzbvNhzXnbMRu-Ysllx7bgMuMXv3cjsyyVmSGbJFE6lENFK7v-7A1cGNtUYTTIB0JdfOmaX/s320/9788178243221.jpg" /></a></div>_____________________________________<br /></i><p></p><p><i>(photo courtesy varun kulkarni/ pixabay)</i><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /></p><br /><br />PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-60652871081983102852021-01-17T18:14:00.007+05:302021-01-19T21:28:20.643+05:30Four Recollections of Sunil Kumar (1956–2021) <p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPxlmklZrdYAfZ_ELluGbZsU8IW26Z4jth3RyxY9lIeYWP_93ygOw7PppMZCIZj4sXKlFLmicaGAd98AHBNG2c7HhKrVqK6tU3dc0ddEjf5h29AESxk9EA7HwRD9WsMXuJJ3YtOutwTydW/s482/sunil.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="285" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPxlmklZrdYAfZ_ELluGbZsU8IW26Z4jth3RyxY9lIeYWP_93ygOw7PppMZCIZj4sXKlFLmicaGAd98AHBNG2c7HhKrVqK6tU3dc0ddEjf5h29AESxk9EA7HwRD9WsMXuJJ3YtOutwTydW/s320/sunil.png" /></a></span></div><p><i><span style="font-size: large;"> <br /></span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: large;">by Muzaffar Alam, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Nayanjot Lahiri, Rukun Advani</span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br /><a href="https://vimeo.com/67780919">WATCH: Sunil Kumar speaking on Delhi </a><br /><br /><b> </b></p><p><b>RUKUN ADVANI </b> </p><p>Fourteen years ago, Sunil Kumar held a copy of his first big book in his hands: <i>The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate</i>
(Permanent Black, 2007). He hadn’t bothered trying to publish it with
any of the big American or British university presses, though they’d all
have taken it like a shot. It had been very long since anything
substantially new and eye-opening had been written on the Delhi
Sultanate, and Sunil, reckoned a dilatory perfectionist whose motto was
much too fervently “Better Never Than Now”, was known to have been
writing it for more than a decade. He could have had his pick of
publisher. <br /><br /> Some years later, he emailed saying he’d
had enough of being a Reader at SOAS. He could have been in London
forever, or moved on from there to the redder-leaved pastures of the Ivy
League. By this time his book had brought him recognition as a scholar
and his teaching a repute for devotion to students in an area of
specialisation which had very few of his calibre. He knew Persian and
Urdu and could have had his pick of university departments in the West. <br /><br />
Looking back, I think there were several reasons for his
decision to be with Permanent Black as his publisher and to the city of
his Sultanate as a teacher, and they suggest what he was like as a
person. He was, first, part of our pre-Facebook generation in a real
sense – in that he did not want to draw daily attention to himself. I
don’t know how much he used social media, but I see him as the kind of
old-world person who uses it only in the larger interest of furthering
knowledge and keeping students abreast of new information. <br /><br />
Second, I think Permanent Black was his choice because even the
tenuous bonds of an old friendship meant more to him than international
fame: he and I were in the same batch of the same school in Lucknow in
the early 1960s. His father, a policeman, was posted there off and on. I
recall Sunil – he was not known as Saddie until his college days –
joining and rejoining our class, depending on when his father happened
to be posted in Lucknow. His appearances and disappearances struck me
when editing his book as not dissimilar to those he ascribes to the
Delhi Sultanate – one of his arguments in the book is that the Sultanate
was less a solid political entity than a fluid formation which could
fade into the landscape before resurfacing (perhaps an inspiration of
sorts to the Congress Party now). <br /><br /> Later we were
college batchmates, and though we did not move in the same circles our
passing dining-room exchanges were always affectionate. The reason I saw
quite little of him over our college days was that he had acquired a
terrific and enviable reputation in two fields: basketball and romance.
It was difficult to tell over our three years of living within five
minutes of each other (1972 to 1975) whether Saddie was more devoted to
holding a basketball or his tiny college girlfriend Anjali, over whom
he, 6 ft+, towered. He was usually spotted carrying her around on his
shoulders near a basketball court. By this time Sunil was
universally called Saddie, after the comic-strip character Sad Sack, on
account of his habitual expression of melancholy. The melancholy may
have been caused by the difficulty of smuggling his girl into his hostel
room; or else because, with one hand forever holding a basketball, he
was finding himself handicapped while also having to attend to her; or else
because he’d tried throwing her through the net and missed, and she had
made it known his future was either her or basketball. <br /><br />
We emailed each other fairly often over books that he needed for
review in the <i>IESHR</i>. Everyone knew he was the journal’s mainstay, the
other editors having all found professorships abroad. He swore he was
working on other books and would send them all to me to be published. I
thought that was very generous of him: his book had been so meticulously
written that I’d editorially contributed not a word to it. <br /><br />
Or perhaps because, as he told me on a visit to Ranikhet with
Anjali, because I had in fact contributed just one word to his book: the
word “Sweetie”. Almost everyone who has read Saddie’s book has remarked
on the first sentence of the book’s Conclusion. Here is the sentence: <br /><br /><span style="color: #cc0000;">Conclusion <br />An
impatient reader of this book might justifiably ask with exasperation
at this moment: “So, Sweetie, when did the Delhi Sultanate emerge?” </span><br /><br />This
unacademic sentence, he said, was the consequence of one of my
exasperated questions to him while editing, and he had wanted it worded
exactly so in the book. It lightened the mood of a heavy monograph, he
said. Subsequently, during one of our chance meetings, he said the
sentence had once flabbergasted even the mighty of Aligarh: during his
professorship interview at Delhi University, one of them had opened his
book on that page and asked him how he could have allowed such a
sentence to pass. Saddie said he had smiled sweetly back at the
interviewing Sweetie and told Her it was the result of a conversation
with his editor – the fellow had called him Sweetie when asking him the
question, and this had made him decide to retain it in the same form on
account of their old friendship. <br /><br /> When Saddie told me
this I felt as elated as his basketball, thrown cleanly and happily
through the high net for which he always aimed. My unhappiness at his
early departure runs much deeper. Despite our physical distance from
each other, we were instinctively close; in fact I have seldom been as
instinctively fond of an academic friend because Saddie, I felt, was the
ideal academic: quietly scholarly, forthright in his opinions,
selflessly caring with students, full of warmth for those he liked, and
politically sane in an ethos within which so many have succumbed to the
vileness of people in power. </p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgapGLl0pOTTYppYDQ4JZ1KCmOVqLGl4SZ4N5p0LinFc2vopAJpxlXdfWdVDCJMx7D0nbyZpwLSqWRjeQkqBY09-kDj6QYvMjA5jjXUkhsPsusjsq-MhQ1Oei36Pqq_r4SktZXi4ljMBykZ/s710/delhi+cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="710" data-original-width="455" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgapGLl0pOTTYppYDQ4JZ1KCmOVqLGl4SZ4N5p0LinFc2vopAJpxlXdfWdVDCJMx7D0nbyZpwLSqWRjeQkqBY09-kDj6QYvMjA5jjXUkhsPsusjsq-MhQ1Oei36Pqq_r4SktZXi4ljMBykZ/w410-h640/delhi+cover.jpg" width="410" /></a></div> <p></p><p><b>MUZAFFAR ALAM </b><br /><br />Sunil was a great friend, a perfect gentleman. Whenever I would be in Delhi, he would insist on having a long and relaxed meeting with me to talk about my work and Chicago teaching experience. He would listen attentively to the problems I faced with the limited resources of my areas of interest, to my desperate effort to make some sense out of them, and to whatever I would think of relating to my work. In response he would come up with a beaming smile with suggestion that I should prepare a draft early and send him for discussion and consideration for publication. <br /><br />He knew that I am slow, even lazy, and that I would not act on his advice so efficiently. He would still be very kind and generous and interpret my failure and slowness in terms of my being a perfectionist. Then I would have my turn, feel encouraged to remind him of his long-time promise of finishing an excellent piece he had on Tughlaqabad. I read it decades back in the 1990s, when I was in JNU and incorporated it in my classes on medieval India. Even then it read like a nearly full monograph, well researched and well argued on this historical ruins of pre-Mughal Delhi. <br /><br />Sunil was very helpful to our younger friends, students, and colleagues too, who had recently written excellent dissertations on social and cultural history of South Asia. He encouraged them to send him their papers for publication in <i>IESHR</i>. He did indeed publish several good articles, and thus gave, together with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a new direction to <i>IESHR</i>. One of the last conversations he had with my friend Rajeev Kinra was about his Mughal Indian sulh-i-kull article, and wished that Rajeev had sent it to him to <i>IESHR</i>. Another friend, Manan Ahmed Asif, writes that he was “ a model of an ethical historian who stood tall against majoritarian politics. He was a meticulous scholar and kind mentor.” <br /> </p><p><b>SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM </b><br /><br />I never thought I would write about my friend Saddy, Professor Sunil Kumar of Delhi University, in the past tense. A big, loose-limbed athlete, who played basketball not only for his college, but for years afterwards with kids much younger than him in the playgrounds of Saket (in south Delhi), I always thought he would outlive me and most of our contemporaries by many years. But now we get the shocking news that he has passed away in the early morning of 17 January in New Delhi, just a few months short of retiring from his position as Professor of History at the University of Delhi at the age of 65. In the past months he had been complaining periodically of feeling unwell, a situation compounded by his having to take on the incredibly stressful and thankless job of chairing the Department of History in the last some years. That was always going to be a hard task, but it was made far worse by a combination of the ambient political circumstances, and the very difficult context of the pandemic, which has had an impact on everything from teaching to examinations to admissions. When he finally finished his stint as chair just a few months ago, all of his close friends breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that at last he would be able to turn a page from the extremely stressful existence he had been leading. We all looked forward to his spending long stints in his second home in Goa, turning back to his projects on urbanism in Tughlaqabad, and related subjects. Alas, how wrong we were! <br /><br /> I first met Sunil in the mid-1980s in circumstances that, as he often jokingly said, resembled those of a Hindi film. We were both taking the 501 bus from ‘Bus Adda’ (or more formally the Inter-State Bus Terminal) towards south Delhi, and seated in the same row, when he casually pulled out a cigarette and lit it. I at once objected because we were in a ‘Non-Smoking’ section of the bus. After a sharp exchange of words, he apologized (somewhat reluctantly, I might say) and added that he had seen me somewhere, such as the Delhi School of Economics café. We introduced ourselves, and the next thing we knew, we had become good friends. I learnt that he was a lecturer in history in St. Stephen’s College, and that not long before he had returned from the United States, where he had been in Connecticut and Chicago. He had wanted to pursue a PhD in Indo-Islamic medieval history but found little support for the project at the time (except from the Iranian and Central Asian historian at Chicago, John Woods). Soon after, he joined the main Department of History in the University of Delhi as a lecturer, and we began discussing the prospects of his resuming his PhD plans. He eventually decided that his best bet was to contact the specialist of Mughal history John Richards at Duke University, and to his great relief John happily accepted him as a student. Sunil finished his dissertation in 1992 and built close ties with his advisor. He was undoubtedly an unusual student. For one, he was thirty-one when he began his PhD anew, already married for a decade, and had two children. John Richards once laughingly remarked to me that when he taught a graduate seminar with Sunil in it, it was as if they were jointly running the seminar. He then returned to Delhi, where he taught throughout the rest of his career, as Reader from 1994 to 2005, and as Professor from 2005 on, except for a brief stint in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, from 2008 to 2010. <br /><br /> Sunil’s principal passion in terms of his research was the history of the Delhi Sultanate. That was what his dissertation was about, and it became his big book, <i>The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286</i>, published by Permanent Black in 2007. Of course, he knew a lot about the Mughals and their history and taught those subjects whenever he had the opportunity. But he remained steadfast in his loyalty to pre-Mughal history, and especially the history of northern India in that period. He had realized early on that the subject was one that required definite rereading and reinterpretation, beyond what had been provided by Muhammad Habib and his disciples (including his celebrated son, Irfan Habib). Of course, the history of the Sultanate had not been entirely neglected in the 1980s and 1990s, either in India or outside it, by scholars such as Peter Jackson. But much of what was being written was pretty traditional in its orientation as political or religious history. On the other hand, Sunil understood very quickly that new directions could be developed, especially if – as he was – one was alert to developments in the larger field of Islamic history in the ‘Abbasid and immediate post-‘Abbasid period. Sunil’s reading was always voracious and covering a wide horizon, from medieval Europe to medieval China at the very least. He put books and articles on reading lists in the University of Delhi that I am quite sure had never been there before. In the process, I am pretty certain he irritated some of his colleagues, who would surely have preferred a standard history, dynasty by dynasty, of the Sultanate between the Ghurids and the Lodis. What a pity that he never polished his work on the morphology and ideological interpretation of the layout of Tughlaqabad to his own satisfaction! <br /><br /> Sunil’s other passion was in reading Delhi’s past from its present. He was an indefatigable and brilliant guide to various sites in the city, as his students as well as many colleagues and visitors will testify. When, on his return from the US in the early 1980s, he settled in the south Delhi area of Saket (where his wife Anjali and her family had their home), he began closely exploring the area, with its nearby sites such as Jahanpanah and Khirki. He discovered a fascinating palimpsest, which he realized was constantly being read and reread by a variety of contemporary actors with conflicting motives and understandings. This led him to write his 2002 volume, <i>The Present in Delhi’s Pasts</i>, which I consider an indispensable guide not only to Delhi but to the layered past of practically any South Asian urban center. I would have loved to visit some of those sites as the proverbial fly on the wall with Sunil and his friends Simon Digby and Muzaffar Alam, each with his own reading and interpretation of every building and inscription. <br /><br /> But Sunil also had quite another dimension to his academic personality. From the mid-1980s, I had been associated with the <i>Indian Economic and Social History Review</i>, edited by the formidable economic historian Dharma Kumar. In the latter half of the 1990s, Sunil joined the editorial board of the journal at a time when Dharma’s health began to deteriorate. His diplomatic and administrative capabilities then proved indispensable. He was able, with the help of the other editors, to discreetly manage the difficult transition of the journal over the next years, and eventually took over as its joint managing editor when Dharma passed away in October 2001. In the ensuing two decades, Sunil has been the beating heart of the <i>IESHR</i>. Two other editors – myself and G. Balachandran – have officially manned the tiller with him, but both of us will freely admit that Sunil was the one who really bore the brunt of the work. As always with him, he threw himself heart and soul into the work of the journal. When we decided to launch the <i>IESHR</i> Lecture series, he provided all the infrastructural work necessary, while always insisting that he did not want to appear at the forefront. I don’t doubt that there are quite a few scholars in India and abroad who have dealt with Sunil as a journal editor, and who will have their own stories to recount. <br /><br /> As his work with the journal brought out, Sunil Kumar’s great character trait was his lively generosity. His nickname from youth was “Saddy”, because he allegedly had a sad face, but his personality was anything but sad. You could always count on him to read an essay or a book manuscript and give you pertinent comments. In his own personal life, it was always Sunil who was there to manage family crises, rushing off to Lucknow, Benares, or Bihar, or wherever he was needed. He was always available, always there when you needed him, as an advisor, as a colleague, as an editor, and indeed as a friend. I sometimes even think that this great strength was his weakness. Why did he throw himself into the administration of a department which expressed little or no appreciation for his efforts, and where no effort was made to relieve him of his duties when he was clearly suffering and in bad health? I will also confess to my own sentiments of guilt. Should I not have paid more attention to the signs of his failing health? The fact is that we had all become so used to Sunil caring for us, that we probably failed to care enough for him. That is and will forever remain our loss. <br /></p><p><br /><b>NAYANJOT LAHIRI </b><br /><br />Sunil was first described to me as the tall basketballer ‘Saddie’ who had a girlfriend half his size. Anjali was her name and he had to lean across to put his arm around her. They soon married and had two children. By that time, or even before this, Sunil disappeared to study for his Ph.D. and it was only when he returned that I met him formally for the first time. <br /><br /> I was studying for my Ph.D. at the History Department of the University of Delhi that he had newly joined. Considering that the Department was then made up of a lot of middle-aged fogies, much like us today, his youthful persona and his American way of speaking was a wonderful change. I would later join the Department and we became colleagues, remaining so till 2015. In the early years, we used to sit in on an M.Phil seminar on works of history that we felt were worth chewing upon and it was because of him that I read and loved Georges Duby’s <i>The Three Orders</i> and Peter Brown’s <i>The Cult of the Saints</i>. I also remember the enthusiasm with which he would take history students, his own and those from other institutions, to visit medieval sites in Delhi. On many occasions, I heard vivid descriptions of how much they enjoyed being with him at Tughalakabad and the Qut’b complex. <br /><br /> What I remember most about Sunil was that he expressed his opinions freely about the discipline, about history books, and about colleagues. Around 2007-2009, when many talented historians had been appointed in the department, he was on leave. However, when the new course for the Masters Program were sent to him, he wrote to say that ‘the infusion of talent’ had made ‘such a difference to the academic environment of the institution’, ‘I can smell the change and vitality in the air and can’t wait to be back’, he added. In the same email, he simultaneously objected to the names of some college teachers who he described as forming ‘<i>dal mein </i>cockroach’ and pleaded that patronage positions which had earlier been created for such teachers do not linger on. <br /><br /> Sunil was much loved and respected by students and scholars but above all, it is this – his proclivity to shoot from the hip – that I will always remember. <br /> <br /> </p><p>________________________________________</p><p>(The memorial by Sanjay Subrahmanyam was first published on <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/remembering_sunil_kumar.html?fbclid=IwAR2nvc3285LB79ekUFUSFiJl83hsJ-1ozK4yixFap2aV6VVgz1lYIFkC3u0"><i>Chapati Mystery</i></a>)<br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-29222564903954617932021-01-16T12:07:00.003+05:302021-01-16T12:18:05.612+05:30Premchand and a bunch of keys <div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">The new year is off to a good start with two great reviews of The Book of Indian Essays by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra:<br /><br />"The names here are very good, and their work is delightful. The subjects dealt with are varied..." C. P. Surendran in <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-the-book-of-indian-essays-edited-by-arvind-krishna-mehrotra-101610714042016.html"><i>Hindustan Times</i></a><br /><br />"You find within the purview of the anthology the sparkle of academic intellect alongside humour, personal opinions and reflections that engage both the critical eye as well as a non-academic audience" <a href="https://scroll.in/author/2352">Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury</a> in <a href="https://scroll.in/article/984159/the-success-of-this-anthology-of-200-years-of-english-essays-from-india-is-that-it-is-for-everyone"><i>Scroll</i></a><br /><br />The book is like a jar of sweets with many different flavours. If you put your hand in, you pull out something delightful and different each time. Here is an extract from Sara Rai's ON NOT WRITING in which she writes -- with great eloquence -- about finding a voice, language, and subject. About this essay, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra says:<br /><br />"Coming, on her mother’s side, from a feudal Shia Muslim background, similar to Hosain’s, Sara Rai’s Hindi is laced with Urdu words, but her reading is mainly in English, the language in which she has the first stirrings of what she writes. But then it gets more complex. While she is a bilingual writer, there is always more than one language pressing down on the one that she’s doing her writing in. Out of this linguistic confusion, or linguistic richness, comes the title of her essay, “On Not Writing”. <br /><br /> <br /><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM7PuE7cdkg5klK-VXzj2-w5wWIenRemM2aHxUMvv47foFh-OVi2v5ZC4FYZRxPqgp3XNN9lJ605eDAQbZ-hj382JE_Q3fyKvwAnDf2sGqXW2dRgYaTmK0_x9dcjVF_WblbjqGju9RfT7E/w400-h225/external-content.duckduckgo.com.jpg" /><br /> <br /><br />Our family had a certain linguistic pride. I knew that Premchand was famous, but I had not at the time realised the extent of his popularity. In the Hindi class at St Mary’s Convent School, where I studied in Allahabad, the teacher would point me out to the other children when we came to the Premchand story, and everyone would turn to look at me. These were moments I dreaded from the beginning of term. And they were only the beginning. <br /><br />The fact of Premchand, that I was his granddaughter, followed me everywhere. Everyone had a story to tell about their personal engagement with his fiction – the shopkeeper who said she went with a candle to dusty bookracks overhung with cobwebs in a dark and neglected village library in Bihar to find his books; the long-time cook in my father’s Delhi house who wept over Premchand’s story “Alagyojha” (Divided Hearths) which he read between cooking meals; the cyclist whom my family and I met at a wayside tea stall in Gopiganj, where we had stopped while driving to Varanasi, who recited whole passages from a favourite story. The list was long, for there was practically no one who had not read something by him that had moved them. However, it was this very ubiquity, the reverence and love that he inspired in people, that made of him something too large for me to comprehend in the early years of my life. It led also to the strange feeling that, without having read him and just by being related to him, I had somehow inhaled his writing. The reading happened much later . . . <br /><br /> But as things stood, I spent years searching for the writer in me who was nowhere to be seen. It was like having a starcrossed lover. The writer and I could never meet. I would look at the shape of my hands to see if they looked like a writer’s. I stared into my eyes in the mirror, wondering if they would reveal to me the writer that I was convinced I was, though there was little evidence to support the idea. When my father asked me to write down his words about Katherine Mansfield, one of my Hindi short-story collections had already been published. But that was where my writing aspirations seemed to have ended. I had not written a thing in months. And here was my father, asking me to do something more than just writing those words down. Something too large for me to grasp, something that I kept trying to escape from and that kept escaping from me, slipping through my fingers like glittering particles of mica. I wanted to hold on to it even as I wanted to flee from it. <br /><br /> My flight from the act of writing fiction went on for years. I could not face it; I thought that writing was all about not writing. After my father died, I wrote in my story “Biyabaan Mein” (In the Wilderness) about the struggle of writing fiction: <br /><br /> “I try to write. I want to focus my attention on writing. But my mind is empty like the sky that stretches in front of me. Sometimes groups of broken sentences, indistinct faces, the rags of days long past move across my mind in a procession. I am unable to grasp the forms and mould them into something that is whole. The images fly away into the sky like birds.” <br /><br /> It took me a long time to realise that the process of writing begins much before one has put anything down, that one has, so to speak, always been writing. It was while chasing butterflies in the garden as a child or watching a tortoise-shell cat slink away into a dark alley that the writing was taking place. Like an invisible letter written with lime juice that only shows up when a hot iron is put to it, the impressions that have been written on to the memory all the while that life is being lived are revealed in the catalysing moment when pen meets paper. The city buried underground and long forgotten about is chanced upon, and not without a shock of surprise. <br /><br /> And so it was that, years after the house of my childhood had slipped into oblivion, I found myself writing: “Suddenly there was an army of mice in the house. Signs of their presence could be found in all the rooms, and especially in the storeroom. The scraps of nibbled paper, the pieces of roti, the mouse droppings inside the cupboards, under the chairs and behind the black iron trunk, were evidence of their being around.” <br /><br />When I wrote those words, the colour of the light from that buried time, the clinking sound of the bunch of keys that my mother carried tucked into her sari, the whole breathing quality of the house as it was then, came back to me as though the past could never quite be past. <br /></p></div><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkEvbWcZMrPlROMLTgkhafX8HLExm10piFPYbifa95t2p3mDYhoyao19O3tkdg89ip_A8MNm1hQvtYJyn245tXAZjJydG31Rak3BwyR7BhoiMyymW7emFtzsl_m995KcbOIyuxEWmBZFpJ/s584/mehrotra+essays+3d.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkEvbWcZMrPlROMLTgkhafX8HLExm10piFPYbifa95t2p3mDYhoyao19O3tkdg89ip_A8MNm1hQvtYJyn245tXAZjJydG31Rak3BwyR7BhoiMyymW7emFtzsl_m995KcbOIyuxEWmBZFpJ/s320/mehrotra+essays+3d.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.in/Book-Indian-Essays-Hundred-English/dp/9389253632/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1610778769&refinements=p_27%3AArvind+Krishna+Mehrotra&s=books&sr=1-1">BUY</a><br /></div> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><p></p><br />PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-24040622347000593822020-12-23T18:17:00.025+05:302020-12-24T18:30:47.397+05:30A foretaste of HARJOT OBEROI's second book, WHEN DOES HISTORY BEGIN?<p><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;">THERE AREN'T TOO MANY HISTORIANS</span></span> who write such a fine first book that the recovery time needed to write the second is twenty-five or more years. Harjot Oberoi's <i>The Construction of Religious Boundaries</i> (1993), won the Best First Book Prize of the American Academy of Religion and the Killam Prize, the highest research prize of the University of British Columbia. His book was widely recognised as pathbreaking for Sikh Studies in the way that, a generation earlier, Hew McLeod's pioneering work had been. <br /><br />Thereafter, however, Oberoi was (as is well known) besieged by problems: the orthodox did not merely disagree with the argument of his book -- that modern Sikhism had been constructed from a fluid variety of identities in the Punjab region by the Khalsa Panth over a relatively short period in the eighteenth century -- they also threatened to silence him for marshalling the evidence for such an argument. And they sought actively to terminate his professorship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. <br /><br /> It was the classic case of, on the one hand, a historian of religion unearthing historical roots and the social processes by which doctrines and communities coalesce into a clearer and more distinctive shape, and on the other ardent believers, upholders of the faith, apostolic elites, vested interests, and fanatical fringes determined to keep the sanctity of the Word of God free of forensic examination. The Hindutva opposition to A.K. Ramanujan for "Three Hundred Ramayanas" and the Shiv Sena hostility to James Laine on Shivaji were foreshadowed by the uproar over Harjot Oberoi's book in the mid 1990s. Oberoi had to remain steadfast, stick to his guns, and keep a low profile. Backed up by the university fraternity and friends, as well as by the University of Chicago Press who refused to buckle and discontinue his book, he rode out the storm. No wonder it has taken an unusually long time for Oberoi to strike out with a second book, and within roughly the same fraught field.<br /><br /> Harjot Oberoi's second book, provisionally titled WHEN DOES HISTORY BEGIN? RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND NARRATIVE IN THE SIKH TRADITION will be published by Permanent Black in 2021. Read an extract from it in <a href="https://scroll.in/article/981839/gurudwara-rakab-ganj-which-pm-modi-visited-sparked-an-anti-government-agitation-100-years-ago"><i>Scroll</i>, "Gurudwara Rakab Ganj, which PM Modi visited, sparked an anti-government agitation 100 years ago"</a>, to see its relevance in the politics of the present. <br /><br /> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir_YM76_t6AN85_W3D-BkL6nAwo_oxQvDAvU6YPpJYIlDRL7bDsZj1jrE5J5-zYwqC9d-RLt7xWe2T0Ero6vnXTs14CebytzCIRzQZN3IyY6MbbnTAiar9okU4Yp-ZGtYN7PN1c9_UoAR5/s772/Gurdwara_Rakabganj_Sahib%252C_Delhi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="772" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir_YM76_t6AN85_W3D-BkL6nAwo_oxQvDAvU6YPpJYIlDRL7bDsZj1jrE5J5-zYwqC9d-RLt7xWe2T0Ero6vnXTs14CebytzCIRzQZN3IyY6MbbnTAiar9okU4Yp-ZGtYN7PN1c9_UoAR5/w640-h398/Gurdwara_Rakabganj_Sahib%252C_Delhi.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Permanent Black asked Oberoi for any reflections he might like blogged in connection with his work. He sent us these: <br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">I'd say that I was among the early lot of historians from the subcontinent who took the category and discourse of religion seriously. This goes back to the late 1970s. It was a time when, generally speaking, the leading historians were preoccupied with peasant resistance and strategic cycles of Indian nationalism. Here, economic history too occupied centre stage, but not religion. The famous debates in the pages of the <i>IESHR</i> and other such scholarly Indian journals were devoted to questions of colonial economy and what existed in India before the Raj . . . <br /><br /> Perhaps because of the horrors of Partition and India's secular departures, no one really wanted to look all that closely at religious consciousness. Also, the Orientalists like William Jones and Max Müller had been so obsessed with religion that postcolonial thinkers swung the pendulum the other way and an amnesia seemed to have taken hold in relation to religion. But this made it hard to understand things like riots and pogroms. They were explained away as legacies of false consciousness and socioeconomic deprivation. <br /><br /> However, some of the Western historians of the subcontinent in the postcolonial period continued to take an interest in religion. I think the prominent names here are Robert Frykenberg on Christianity in South India; Richard Eaton on Islam and Sufism; Kenneth Jones on the Arya Samaj; and my own PhD supervisor J.T.F. Jordens on Dayananda. And then there is W.H. McLeod on Sikhism. <br /><br /> . . . Some of these scholars were sensitive to religion because of their missionary backgrounds: Jordens was an ex- Jesuit, Frykenberg's family, if I recollect right, were part of the American missionary enclave. My point here is that Indian scholarship in the post-independence period should have stayed connected to understandings of religion, but the opportunity was missed. And this is rather ironic because of Gandhi's deep interest in questions of faith and religion . . .</span><br /><br /> Oberoi's book has just been edited. It will appear mid 2021. The facets of Sikh history and religion the author unearths, and the care and complexity with which he lays out his findings, will make his book seem worth the wait.<br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-82861062753540408602020-12-09T12:30:00.005+05:302020-12-09T14:02:02.024+05:30JUST OUT! SHEKHAR PATHAK: THE CHIPKO MOVEMENT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsnyOU7jHxjsm1V4Rh4_CWkbea0hR6bnV9RimkGGjkm7BtqeOAf0Gh9aiotDe7POqgcXXkW6z6nL6JUs3p-3FICAVBiLJiNidP3byd4HAJA2pLoKG4U6whtDWeXIerDN5luRAIlXseA_Bm/s584/pathak+3d.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsnyOU7jHxjsm1V4Rh4_CWkbea0hR6bnV9RimkGGjkm7BtqeOAf0Gh9aiotDe7POqgcXXkW6z6nL6JUs3p-3FICAVBiLJiNidP3byd4HAJA2pLoKG4U6whtDWeXIerDN5luRAIlXseA_Bm/w400-h380/pathak+3d.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><span style="color: #0b5394;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>“The definitive history of the Chipko Movement”</i><span style="font-size: small;"> RAMACHANDRA GUHA</span></span></span><br /></p><p> </p><p>In India, modern environmentalism was inaugurated by the Chipko Movement, which began in 1973. Because it was led by Gandhians, included women participants, occurred in “spiritual” Himalayan regions, and used innovatively non-violent techniques of protest, it attracted international attention. <br /><br />It also led to a major debate on Indian forest policy and the destructive consequences of commercialisation. Because of Chipko, clear-felling was stopped and India began to pay attention to the needs of an ecological balance which sustained forests and the communities within them. In academic and policy-making circles it fuelled a wider debate on sustainable development – on whether India could afford to imitate the West’s resource-intensive and capital-intensive ways of life. <br /><br />Chipko’s historians have hitherto focused on its two major leaders, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna. The voices of “subalterns” – ordinary men and women such as Gaura Devi who made Chipko what it was – have not been recorded. Shekhar Pathak has lived in their valleys, studied the landscapes, talked to protesters and communities, and trawled local newspapers of the time. He shows that in leadership and ideology Chipko was diverse and never a singular Gandhian movement. <br /> <br />Every scholar and serious student of Indian environmentalism will need to engage with the empirical richness and analytic solidity of this path-breaking book.</p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBGZs4h1b6_r-sjqapFdwxUd0rTF11McHqH0gC81yXLHVp_GGCi6HhCn40WmnPh1xHAkOxZSMEiMWUX89yFp4edFyTQhPbiF9Q5r-09LRh_MH99yQvIdHVCyTQv3apUdFhh7DIIeT1F8T2/s527/shekhar.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="527" data-original-width="394" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBGZs4h1b6_r-sjqapFdwxUd0rTF11McHqH0gC81yXLHVp_GGCi6HhCn40WmnPh1xHAkOxZSMEiMWUX89yFp4edFyTQhPbiF9Q5r-09LRh_MH99yQvIdHVCyTQv3apUdFhh7DIIeT1F8T2/s320/shekhar.png" /></a></div><br />SHEKHAR PATHAK has travelled to virtually every hamlet of Kumaon and Garhwal, and his knowledge of the Himalaya is widely acknowledged to be encyclopaedic. He is an indefatigable mountain-walker who has been traversing 1100 kilometres on foot once every decade, starting in the village of Askot on the Nepal border in the east and ending in Arakot in Himachal Pradesh. He established the People’s Association for Himalaya Area Research (PAHAR) in 1983 and is the author, with Uma Bhatt, of <i>Asia ki Peeth Per</i> (On Asia’s Back), a biography of the Himalayan explorer Pandit Nain Singh Rawat. He has published numerous pamphlets and several issues of the journal <i>Pahar</i> over the years. He has also been a professor of History at Kumaun University, Nainital, and Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. <br /><br /><i><br />Translated from the Hindi by Manisha Chaudhry/ Edited and with an Introduction by Ramachandra Guha</i><p></p><p>Hardback/ Rs 895/ <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Chipko-Movement-Peoples-History/dp/8178245558/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=chipko&qid=1607502661&sr=8-6">BUY</a><br /></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-451927244928620242020-12-09T11:57:00.004+05:302020-12-09T14:04:15.129+05:30The Arvind Krishna Mehrotra interview: First Post<p><span style="font-size: large;">The Arvind Krishna Mehrotra interview | 'There’s a lack of historicity in way we think, talk, write about Indian literature' </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">by Aditya Mani Jha</span><br /><br /> In <i>The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of Indian Prose</i>, Mehrotra collects some of the best Indian essays of all time — including works by old favourites like GV Desani, RK Narayan, Nissim Ezekiel and Shama Futehally, all the way up to contemporary luminaries like Pankaj Mishra and Amitav Ghosh. <br /><i></i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmY9SGpc6EVkSSNWREaHuRPpvdyYTaf0JLJiN42DDhWvtGXhfbODAjLN-ZG336KfLz5Y5a1IX3CKlD4hT1W5K9AZprVkSIhVNZPK-CiRVYyKP_D59Oau9r5QdtBGtMigSxfRGDGgeHyr0C/s584/mehrotra+essays+3d.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmY9SGpc6EVkSSNWREaHuRPpvdyYTaf0JLJiN42DDhWvtGXhfbODAjLN-ZG336KfLz5Y5a1IX3CKlD4hT1W5K9AZprVkSIhVNZPK-CiRVYyKP_D59Oau9r5QdtBGtMigSxfRGDGgeHyr0C/s320/mehrotra+essays+3d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i><br />Your introductory essay ‘When the Gas Cylinder Comes’ talks about Indian ‘little magazines’ with a great deal of affection, acknowledging the role that they played in nurturing literature. During your teens you published one such magazine, damn you, along with your friends Amit Rai and Alok Rai. In the book Partial Recall, you characterise this phase as one of discovery, wherein you were exploring different literary universes, “trying to inhabit each as my native place”. Could you tell us a bit more about what that line meant to you? </i><br /><br />Amit and Alok were Amrit Rai’s sons, Premchand’s grandsons. We were neighbours and Amrit Rai’s publishing house, Hans Prakashan, bought out Premchand’s books. At home, the atmosphere was culturally eclectic and literature was almost a way of life. But at the same time, in 1964, the idea of an Indian literature in English was in its infancy. Where was a sense of tradition going to come from? It wasn’t going to come from Sri Aurobindo and it wasn’t going to come from Sarojini Naidu. Hindi, a relatively new language, had poets like Nirala and Muktibodh. But we [English writers] had to look towards Europe and the United States to discover traditions to which we could belong without quite belonging to them. We read the Beats, people like Corso and Ginsberg, and felt closer to the language they used, the spoken idiom, than to anything that we saw around us. <br /><br /><i>‘When the Gas Cylinder Comes’ takes its name from a phrase used by Shama Futehally in the 1970s, to describe her search for Indian English writers who were in touch with the texture of lived reality in the country, who wrote in an approachable register (“writers who would be out when the gas cylinder comes”). It is a quintessentially middle-class image, and yet, it’s not restricted by that, is it? I remember when my mother would send me out for the cylinder I’d see richer people sending their domestic workers (and not their kids). </i><br /><br />As you say, it is an image a lot of us can associate with, whichever part of the country we may be from. It makes literature “approachable”. I also linked this image to the Anita Desai essay in the book, ‘A Secret Connivance’. She writes that truth is “often ordinary, commonplace, colourless and dull”. In the 1960s and 1970s, if you wrote in English, finding Indian writers who sounded like regular people was a problem. The poets felt it, the fiction writers felt it. Who are we writing for, they’d ask themselves, as Shama did. VS Naipaul or Kamala Markandaya would obviously not have awaited the arrival of the cooking gas cylinder van as anxiously as we did and still do.<br /><br /> <br /><a href="https://www.firstpost.com/art-and-culture/the-arvind-krishna-mehrotra-interview-theres-a-lack-of-historicity-in-way-we-think-talk-write-about-indian-literature-9091541.html">Read the rest of the interview here in First Post</a><br /><p></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-351531986892922672020-12-05T18:25:00.000+05:302020-12-05T18:25:03.501+05:30The quiet in which thoughts are born has been snatched away<div><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigzZcCUxCRFvPmRCO5yYeOlXvuUOnMxYtRFroSlM_JlkZogMgZ4y2ro2IXuGEQ17psK2nu9QRPzT7LFMaayFqoUAqvUxGCXPKXstwJ_k57CpaFC8cXijc-T1sxhoqyW1eLBK-k2ZF7bq78/s1000/Vanishedworld1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1000" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigzZcCUxCRFvPmRCO5yYeOlXvuUOnMxYtRFroSlM_JlkZogMgZ4y2ro2IXuGEQ17psK2nu9QRPzT7LFMaayFqoUAqvUxGCXPKXstwJ_k57CpaFC8cXijc-T1sxhoqyW1eLBK-k2ZF7bq78/w400-h266/Vanishedworld1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Photo: Getty Images)</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Arvind Krishna Mehrotra tells Nandini Nair about India’s changing relationship with English and the essays that will last and those that will not.</span><br /></div><div><br /><b>Let’s start with the dedication of the book. Why Ram Advani, who had a bookshop in Lucknow and was an institution in the city? </b><br /><br />A lot of people who are in the anthology—Ruskin Bond, for instance—knew him personally and some of the others would have visited the bookshop. Meena Alexander’s husband David Lelyveld sent me a picture which showed him and Ram Advani standing outside it. It was a picture taken to remember an occasion. This is one reason why the book is dedicated to him. The other reason is that booksellers are an unsung part of the book trade. And now with online buying even less so. Ram Advani would know your interests in much the same way that Amazon does, but he’d even know the latest books in your narrow academic field and drop you a line when they arrived. Scholars who lived and worked abroad valued this immensely. It is not that I knew him very well, but I visited the bookshop whenever I went to Lucknow. I look upon the dedication as a collective one, from all the contributors to the anthology. <br /><br /><b>In a 2014 interview you mentioned the “growing ugliness” and “increasingly provincial” nature of Allahabad, where you lived for many years. Can you expand on that? How do you see it now that you live in Dehradun? </b><br /><br />The ugliness happened over many years. At first the change was imperceptible. But the decline of the Indian city is not limited to Allahabad. More and more Indian cities are becoming unliveable. Maybe cities in the south are better. But the south is a different country. I still don’t know why the south chooses to be a part of a nation that includes the wretchedness of north India. <br /><br />Where do I begin telling you about the decline of Allahabad? The big bungalows were the first to go. And as far as I know, no one took pictures or made drawings to tell us what they even looked like. Those bungalows existed from the late 19th century to about the 1980s, say a hundred years. In my book The Last Bungalow (2006) there is a fair amount on this, on life in those houses. Things change, but there could still have been some record kept, not for the purposes of nostalgia but as urban history. What replaced the bungalows was So-and-So Colony or So-and-So Vihar. Recently I was told that part of the bungalow in which I grew up, 20 Hastings Road, has been turned into a mithai shop and a party hall is coming up on the grounds. The last blow was when they changed the name of the city to Prayagraj. The Hinduisation of north Indian cities is more than painful. It is also disorienting. I was born in the year of independence and now I can barely recognise the country in which I was born.</div><div> </div><div></div><div><a href="https://openthemagazine.com/lounge/books/arvind-krishna-mehrotra-words-of-a-vanished-world/?fbclid=IwAR1EuDRqgW41di3jaHmUFptC2jxVH0QKEig7N1L153M2smFjI32RoWq55Lg">READ THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW HERE IN OPEN THE MAGAZINE<br /></a><br /> </div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-28816503692573749712020-12-03T11:17:00.004+05:302020-12-03T11:17:58.872+05:30PRACHI DESHPANDE WINS INFOSYS PRIZE<p>We are celebrating at Permanent Black today. </p><p>Prachi Deshpande, whose first book CREATIVE PASTS we published years ago, has just won the Infosys Prize. As reported by the <a href="https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/2020/dec/02/lone-woman-among-winners-as-infosys-prize-awarded-for-contributions-to-science-and-research-2230978.html"><i>New Indian Express</i></a>:</p><p>"Winners from six diverse fields -- Engineering and Computer Science, Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences -- received a pure gold medal, a citation and a purse of USD 100,000. They were picked from among 257 nominations. The lone woman among the winners this year was Prachi Deshpande from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS), Kolkata who won the Humanities award for her nuanced and sophisticated treatment of South Asian historiography."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS8KHSySgdToo3iPpr65flsQ9WIXag-lAPIk6nKWnPsrgzaUAmjQsY3EvuBbvVgg728FaAAaleGNDbPQMfVD9wPD_ivLGQu2-d4trzIZ0FrEm7-lBzv9s0kg5Zh7OmV1NV04vxSZPHvfAq/s400/prachi_deshpande.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS8KHSySgdToo3iPpr65flsQ9WIXag-lAPIk6nKWnPsrgzaUAmjQsY3EvuBbvVgg728FaAAaleGNDbPQMfVD9wPD_ivLGQu2-d4trzIZ0FrEm7-lBzv9s0kg5Zh7OmV1NV04vxSZPHvfAq/s320/prachi_deshpande.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>You can read our original post on Prachi's book <a href="http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-book-in-opus-one-series.html">here</a> and an interview with her <a href="http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2012/06/prachi-deshpandes-view-of-pollock.html">here</a>.</p><p>The book is available in paperback.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTwiC31X7b5PQuxF3FBTccIwdDyvo4NAO4spWQEooytdzCbgqmLvZoqDAeqZAtO4UfZk1Z8wtTEZVBc7MKpcRCPH4hqDibE_S8rtsxDyawW0p9UO2INCEN9gGGBrsHw-VY1PDZ9H9gvgLH/s584/prachi3d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTwiC31X7b5PQuxF3FBTccIwdDyvo4NAO4spWQEooytdzCbgqmLvZoqDAeqZAtO4UfZk1Z8wtTEZVBc7MKpcRCPH4hqDibE_S8rtsxDyawW0p9UO2INCEN9gGGBrsHw-VY1PDZ9H9gvgLH/s320/prachi3d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /> <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Creative-Pasts-Historical-Identity-1700-1960/dp/817824375X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=creative+pasts&qid=1606971867&sr=8-1">BUY</a></p><br />PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-42223540782282394702020-12-01T12:12:00.007+05:302020-12-01T14:05:28.582+05:30Listen: Sumit Guha on History and Collective Memory in South Asia<p></p><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZQemvTx1-rZBm4U9XGZ47NVpFbGe16DRL0L7t7UCFh-QzFYZ-YpFfqwxrfUVsH4rX6DuXTk_wagMHM7zndSsO5BJzFEfAC_LrLbtGc7zHSlJKwGsN0BWjBoWLZCWxMwO62AuoBXqvyI1/s300/sumit+copy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZQemvTx1-rZBm4U9XGZ47NVpFbGe16DRL0L7t7UCFh-QzFYZ-YpFfqwxrfUVsH4rX6DuXTk_wagMHM7zndSsO5BJzFEfAC_LrLbtGc7zHSlJKwGsN0BWjBoWLZCWxMwO62AuoBXqvyI1/s0/sumit+copy.jpg" /></a>In <i>History and Collective Memory in South Asia</i>, Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. His thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world. <br /></p><p>You can read more about the book <a href="http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2019/10/sumit-guha-history-and-collective.html">here.</a><br /><a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/history-and-collective-memory-in-south-asia-1200-2000">In this fine interview</a> Sumit Guha discusses his book with Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D., a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel.</a></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.in/History-Collective-Memory-South-1200%C3%A2%E2%82%AC/dp/8178245523/ref=sr_1_14?dchild=1&keywords=history+and+collective+memory&qid=1606811607&sr=8-14" target="_blank">BUY THE BOOK</a> </p><p></p><p></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-77157769696680299552020-11-11T10:18:00.019+05:302020-11-15T15:09:20.023+05:30The Unfamiliarity of the Past<div><span style="font-size: large;">Joya Chatterji's most recent book is </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="font-size: large;">PARTITION’S LEGACIES </a><span style="font-size: large;">. It was published by Permanent Black in June 2019. </span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />In this wide-ranging conversation about her books and her career as a teacher, she begins with talking about what drew her to history in the first place.<br /><br />She answers questions put to her by Uttara Shahani (a research scholar at Cambridge University) and Sohini Chattopadhyay (a history researcher at Columbia University) </span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4T52iYXu5_b1sywW8FRfp9TXoNJ-bkBj5bTkn3Xl3Gp8VITv67Ni-kGtdB5n7CO83NOy0BcAnFx7sLTa2GiT40Cs0Gr75WUbuCcAy-osCUkBirEc8L-MdytGRzTSpXbkxfuysGO6gYHWo/s320/joya.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="248" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4T52iYXu5_b1sywW8FRfp9TXoNJ-bkBj5bTkn3Xl3Gp8VITv67Ni-kGtdB5n7CO83NOy0BcAnFx7sLTa2GiT40Cs0Gr75WUbuCcAy-osCUkBirEc8L-MdytGRzTSpXbkxfuysGO6gYHWo/w310-h400/joya.png" width="310" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>1. Why did you become a historian? Let’s start at the very beginning . . . </b></i><br /><br />. . . A very good place to start. But before I launch into my answer, I want to thank you both for such excellent questions. They all force (or encourage) me to reflect on a lifetime of work. From a personal standpoint, this is a great moment for me to think backwards and ask myself: what did it all add up to? So I am grateful for your critical but generous-spirited questions. <br /><br />Why History? Why indeed. My relationship with the subject is best likened to a love affair. I was introduced to a primary source at an impressionable age, and that was that. I read science and mathematics at school, with enjoyment mind you, but my passion for History was already so serious that during the break I would ask my friend who had gone to History lessons what she had learned that day. I am not joking, even though it’s hilarious in retrospect. <br /><br />Who can explain an attraction of this intensity? It had something to do with the unfamiliarity of the past: it involved a sense of travel of a different kind, the sudden access to a novel, jaw-dropping, fascinating, vistas. That is all I can say. I don’t understand it myself. But it has been a steadfast companion, the most constant of friends. <br /><br /><i><b>2. How did you come to choose what you would focus on for your doctoral thesis, which became the basis of your first book Bengal Divided, now a canonical text in Partition Studies? The book questioned several decades of existing historiography that had disproportionately made the Muslim League the sole arbiter of Partition. Why Hindu bhadralok communalism in Bengal and why Partition? </b></i><br /><br />That was, to begin with, an accident of research. I started off on my PhD intending to investigate a (perceived) decline in the influence of Bengal in India’s politics after the 1920s. It was, after all, the largest province/presidency, so there seemed to be a question to answer. (I turned back to it later, in <i>The Spoils of Partition</i>.) <br /><br />But then I stumbled across some files in Teen Murti Library’s research room, in my second year of research. They were mislabelled, or rather the index entry was misleading, (probably because the material was mainly in cursive Bangla). The index entry was unexciting, but I thought I would requisition some of these files, just because there were so many of them. These contained thousands of letters and petitions signed by Hindus, all demanding the partition of Bengal. In a word, the opposite of what I had expected to find. <br /><br />So then I changed direction in my PhD research – it happens all the time, I have since realized! I tried to dig for the roots of this movement. And <i>Bengal Divided</i> was the outcome of my research, and of mulling over my sources. You must understand, I was as surprised by what I learnt as those Hindu, and Hindu Bengali readers who have been furious with me ever since. (I am not generalising here, don’t get me wrong. But I have experienced verbal attacks, deaths threats, and a more insidious forms of academic marginalisation since the book was published. I continue to receive threats to this day.) But I paid attention, then, to the sources, not least because it was part of my training to be as true as one can possibly be to the voices of the past; even if what they are saying makes one uncomfortable and forces us to question everything we thought we ‘knew’. <br /><br />That’s why I am always buried in files, (or photographs, or maps, or paintings, or interview transcripts) myself; and why I encourage my students to have the same deep engagement with those traces of the past, above all when they challenge us. <br /><br />As for my method of engagement with sources: I was trained (at Cambridge) to read to pay attention to context, authorship, type of source, self-representation, who was trying to influence who and how, their relationship to power, and so on. I had read Marx, Althusser, Hegel, E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Foucault and Hayden White, Pierre Bourdieu, James Scott, the Frankfurt School and a lot of Hannah Arendt by the time I started my PhD, and was much influenced by them as a young scholar. (Spoils’s architecture is in fact based on Hayden White’s notion of tropes – you might have noticed it’s used the trope of irony.) But I was not trained to position myself theoretically (or at least to trumpet that location) as historians are under pressure to do now. My line is quite simple here. History challenges theory, however great. History is messy whereas theory is tidy, and, for the most part, seamless. History has its own work to do, and that is, fundamentally, to stand in opposition to, and in a critical location towards, theory. We must allow the ‘mess’ to come through. If I have grown ever more concerned with chaotic agency, this is the reason why. <br /><br />The other ‘method’ I pursue, and encourage students to pursue, is to recognise the importance of the variety of types of sources. No single source (or run of sources of the same type) represents the ‘truth’: it only represents what appears to be true from one angle of vision. The juxtaposition of a range sources reveals a variety of views about ‘what is going on’. Then you, as a historian, try to make sense of the babel of voices to impose something like a pattern that feels true to the sound, and the sudden silences. That’s my ‘method’. <br /><br />I should admit that in my process of listening to the sounds of the past, I have a politics. I am attentive, and I hope sensitive, to the weak, the marginalised, those whose sounds are barely discernible. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in my work in <i>The Bengal Diaspora</i> and the recent articles on immobility, but it has been there from the start. You will find that every historian has a politics, however quiet or understated. Even those whose only claim is to be ‘impartial’ are locating themselves, willy nilly, within the politics of knowledge. <br /><br /><b><i>3. Could you reflect on the significance on the work you did on Hindu nationalism and Partition to where India finds itself today? </i></b><br /><br />Hindu nationalism dates back at least to the 1880s. Its political influence has waxed and waned, but Hindu nationalist organisations have been with us for over a century (while by no means remaining static in their ideology or structures.) I did not discover them: I merely showed how influential they became at a time and in a place: Bengal in the run up to Partition. <br /><br />I have not studied Hindu nationalism in its more recent iteration. My hunch, though, is that we are not talking about exactly the same phenomenon. Its new leadership in the late 20th century represents sections of the elite and middle classes - often trading and mercantile groups – which have been around for a long time but have grown more powerful and influential with the liberalisation of the economy and the shrinking of the state. If I am correct, the very meaning of Hindutva today is not the same thing as the sentiment expressed by say, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee in the 1930s and 40s. It is important to consider the shifts and realignments of a (changing) ideology as well as its bases of support. <br /><br />But the fact that Hindu nationalists were powerful enough in the 1940s to support the partition and even take on (and kill) Gandhi, indicates a hubris at the core of the ideology that is palpable today; the hubris of ‘majoritarianism’; it is as dangerous for the country, its social fabric and above all its minorities, as it was in the 1940s. <br /><br /><i><b>4. Was the interest in refugees and migration a natural progression from Partition? <br /></b></i><br />Yes, it was. I pursued it in <i>The Spoils of Partition</i>, and in articles. I was a historical interloper, then, in the field of refugee studies, which had until then been the arena of sociologists such as Aristide Zolberg. In the 1990s I would find myself at large conferences at which there were only one or two historians amongst dozens of sociologists and anthropologists. But this was good for my intellectual growth – it was the start of a period when I began to dive deep into other disciplines and learn from them. I am still learning. <br /><br /><b><i>5. Your anger at the harsh conditions Partition’s refugees had to confront and what passed for government ‘relief and rehabilitation’ policy is palpable. At the same time, you refuse to ever see refugees as passive victims. Apart from demonstrating how caste, class, and gender mediated the experience of migration at Partition, you show how refugees were always doing something, even if refugee agency was never completely free. They participated in street battles to win ‘rehabilitation’ as a right, resisted government attempts to ‘disperse’ them and occupied evacuee property. You demonstrate how refugees changed and shaped a rapidly changing legal, social, and political landscape ‘from below’, sometimes violently. This persistent emphasis of yours, on refugees as active and not always sympathetic characters can be at odds with other accounts of Partition. Why do you think that the Partition refugee is so often cast as a passive subject? </i></b><br /><br />Partition refugees suffered a great deal due to ‘critical events’ over which they had little control. One must recognise that suffering and bewilderment, and the sense they shared of a loss of grip over their own lives. Refugees often (though not always) represent their histories in this way: Partition happened to them. In that sentence, the refugee is not a subject. The refugee herself is denying her agency to convey to the researcher her sense of confusion, her loss of control. Historians have listened to that, and paid great attention to it. It is very important, and I give credit to all the scholars who have made that the focus of their story. My anger derives from my empathy with that subjectivity. <br /><br />But that was the personal narrative of the refugee. It has come to us through the memoir, or the personal interview (as in Urvashi Butalia’s <i>The Other Side of Silence</i>.) These represent only one kind of source. Going back to my ‘method’, I have always tried to gather a variety of types of sources, and their ‘truth’ was different. In those sources I saw refugees at their angriest, most belligerent and violent. I don’t think it’s an either/or: a sense of lost of control can make one not just, or not only, a passive object, but an angry citizen, demanding a particular type of citizenship. That’s what I have been trying to get at. <br /><br /><i><b>6. Some might take exception to your assertion that ‘forced migrations’ caused by political upheavals such as Partition are not fundamentally different phenomena from the ‘economic migrations’ driven by the demands of labour markets. They might point to situations such as communal riots that force people to move. Why and how did it become clear to you that there are no definite conceptual divides between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ migrants - between ‘illegal immigrants’ and refugees and between ‘economic’ migration and ‘forced migration’? </b></i><br /><br />My argument is a little more subtle than the way you put it, and perhaps that’s why it has sometimes been misunderstood. I suggest that people who later became refugees or ‘forced migrants’ were often the very same people who moved, historically, in response to labour markets (in the broadest sense.) These people already had in place the physical capacity, intellectual capital and social networks needed to move when they faced political upheavals and violence. They had what I describe as mobility capital already in reserve. This allowed them to flee and become refugees in response to persecution. Those who did not have such capital to begin with were in a far more precarious position, because they could not leave sites of violence: they lacked the wherewithal so to do. They were ‘stuck’. <br /><br />That’s the nub of the argument. It links the study of migrants with refugees over a longer durèe, not just at the moment of crisis. I think if you shift your focus of study from crisis to crisis, or study only critical events (as many sociologists and aid organisations are prone to do) without seeing the place and people through the historical lens, you miss this other, and quite critical, dimension. <br /><br /><b><i>7. In ‘Migration Myths’ you critically analyse two histories ‘written with a view to enabling the ‘assimilation’ of the community they claimed to speak for, and to seek rights and recognition for that ‘community’ in its place of settlement’. Those histories are very different from the ones you write. Yet, as a historian of migration, frontiers, minority-formation, and citizenship, you are, albeit from a significantly different angle, also constantly striving for a sort of recognition for your subjects whether migrated or stuck. Your work seems to be driven by an intense impulse to enrich your readers’ understanding of why people are where they are. What drives this impulse? Do you see in your oeuvre an ongoing argument against the modern nation-state that seeks to control movement and render certain categories of people lesser citizens or ‘illegal’? </i></b><br /><br />You are right. This is what I meant by my politics: I have been drawn to certain themes for much of my academic life. Yes, there is an ongoing critique in my work of the modern nation state and its relationship to equality and dignity. I am no fan of ‘national sovereignty’ which expresses itself by putting people in cages at borders, ghettoising religious (or other) minorities and pitting them against (constantly constructed) majorities. I was disillusioned by nationalism long before most of my contemporaries. Moving from India to Britain to live with a ‘brown’ son, I experienced, in my gut, what it meant to be seen as ‘lesser’ every day, having to talk to my son gently about how to negotiate this landscape, and to live in a society that condoned this. So my intellectual preoccupations were further energised by personal experience. It has driven not only my academic work, to date, but also my public engagement activities (e.g. the ‘Bangla Stories’ and ‘Our Migration Stories’ work on curriculum development). I felt it was vital for British children of all stripes to learn ‘why people are why they are’ from a very young age, before they learnt the harsh stereotypes about migrants and are immersed in the discourses about migration that waft around them. <br /><br />If I have achieved anything tangible in my life, it is this work, I believe, that will count. <br /><br /><i><b>8. You have written about how the concept of an inclusive, territorially defined India emerged alongside communal nationalisms and other ‘ethnic’ ideas of nationhood and nationalism, but pointed out it was never inevitable that this ‘civic’ notion of nationalism would triumph over these other ideas of India. A malevolent and authoritarian brand of nationalism commands India today. Both the executive and the highest levels of the judiciary are invested in perpetuating it. What does this latest authoritarian turn tell us about the process of decolonisation in South Asia? Do you think Indians can resist it with resources from their own nationalist and constitutional traditions or does one reject nationalist frames altogether? </b></i><br /><br />India is not the only country that is undergoing this shift: India does not exist in isolation. So there’s a danger in assuming that those who wish to resist this form of authoritarian Hindutva nationalism can do so solely by drawing ‘from within’. There’s a problem with such notions of authenticity: there never was a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ Hindu/Indian past which has its ‘own’ intellectual traditions or laws – we cannot draw upon this ‘thing’ because it does not exist. Even the Constitution is a hybrid construct – it’s our own in a limited sense. So yes, I do think we have to reject nationalist frames in thinking this through as a problem. In addressing the challenge of the present moment, though, we need to use a whole bag of tools - some of which have some potency because of their association with the fight against imperialism (e.g. constitutional and case law – as you have shown, Uttara - and later writ petitions; rallies, strikes, dharnas, and fasts, for instance). But this will not be enough. There is a whole new arsenal of tools, a whole new arena of politics, which is the web. The Hindutva brigade, scholars have shown, has invested huge resources in mobilising it. Its opposition must fight back in this area too. There should also be a more conscious effort to include the diaspora (whose numbers rival those of the Chinese diaspora) in this fight-back: again, let’s act outside nationalist frames. <br /><br /> <br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB1fpttkqbVx1saK8IpLQ9FHYQnfe113iKSGK85T4ixFpBgl4KjA6c7h4fSGTgMD4jd4HAidPOaedpqQ1MpQ_DPg2JJXl0zLW7bAM9ew0qMWwp0xw7wUx4XQKFQRimuOn4GFOntV0mCuHq/w640-h640/JOYA+3d.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /><i><b>9. You point out "Partition’s effect on the minorities it created on both sides of the border – minorities who for a variety of reasons chose not to emigrate to the ‘right’ new nation – has not often been examined." Scholars predominantly analyse Partition as involving the mass movement of people across international borders, but, as you have shown, there was also a significant level of internal displacement (often caused by incoming refugees) leading to clustering around the borders and ghettoization among national minorities. Reading social media at the time of the anti-CAA protests I was struck by how little is known about how these phenomena affected internal communal topographies. I kept thinking about your essays on clustering, ghettoization, ‘mobility capital’ and ‘being stuck’ that discuss internal displacement and the processes of economic and social minoritisation bound up with it. Do you think clustering and immobility have been given the attention they deserve in Partition histories? How do you think historians can build on your work on the Eastern border to understand that region better but also South Asia and minoritisation more widely? </b></i><br /><br /> I do think that this could, and should, grow into a huge field. My hunch is that ‘stuck people’, who lacked the wherewithal to flee violence, outnumber the world’s refugee population. They are to be found everywhere in violence-torn (or partition-scarred) nations, from South Asia, (Sri Lanka included) China, South-East Asia, Cyprus, Turkey, Bosnia, Serbia, the Middle East and North Africa. But it’s not just the scale of the problem that makes it as important to study as mobility. It reveals much about the way nation states work. The concept of immobility itself must be refined, critiqued and developed. (Scholars like Humaira Chowdhury are now developing a thesis on ‘immobilty capital’ that shows great potential.) The ingredients that make up the glue of stickiness need to be better understood. I have only scratched at the surface. <br /><br />Here again, a quick return to your question about my ‘method’. I started this work (on The Bengal Diaspora and related articles) searching for migrants and refugees. Everywhere I found people who were ‘stuck’. Given that I believe that it is the historian’s duty to listen to voices of every kind, even when they are shadows, or silent presences, I began to be drawn deeper into that history. It was not part of the plan. Yet it produced something more novel, perhaps, than the project’s initial goals. <br /><br /><b><i>10 The West has been the focus of new theories of diaspora, but it is in the global south that the vast majority of the world’s migrants live. What are some of the implications of this focus on the West for research on migration and what are some of the questions you think scholars of diaspora and the global south should be addressing? </i></b><br /><br />I have found it very hard, even without my own University, to raise funds for a ‘strategic research initiative’ tackling this problem; this reality, and the series of questions it raises. The West seems obsessed by what it sees as its own ‘migrant crisis’, and to have little concern, even at an intellectual level, in ‘elsewhere’. Some of us located here will continue to try to put together a global team to work on this problem. I hope, going forward, that it will include me. Until such bids succeed, scholars must start working on their own patch on this subject, but in conversation with colleagues around the world. <br /><br />I cannot draw up a manifesto for such research at this stage. But my own questions – those that intrigue me – are about issues of physical debility and mental health, as well as provision of care to persons and places, which I concluded were vital elements of ‘being stuck’. There are ways in which, therefore, this research has connections with the history of medicine in the global South, and also the growing field of the economy and cultures of ‘care-work’. <br /><br /><b><i>11. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and the National Register of Citizens are seen as tectonic shifts in Indian citizenship law moving away from the criteria of birth and residence to a religion and descent-based conception of citizenship. However, Indian citizenship law has been moving in this direction for a while, particularly with the amendments of 1985 and 2004 to the Citizenship Act. You have argued that after the mass migrations of Partition, minorities emerged as a distinct legal category. They endured a peculiar form of citizenship you call ‘partial citizenship’, where ‘the ‘the minority citizen’ was neither citizen nor alien, but a hybrid subject of new national regimes of identification and law’. Is jus sanguinis now finally triumphing over </i>jus soli<i>, challenging even the limited safeguards of citizenship attached to the hybrid status of partial citizenship? </i></b><br /><br />Yes, that would be my initial response. There was much wrong with the hybrid model, but it is far better than the <i>jus sanguinus</i> model India now, under its leaders, is seeking to embrace. Israel is one country which has a full-blown <i>jus sanguinus</i> model of citizenship based on blood, religion and ethnicity. I urge every concerned citizen to look at its citizenship laws. <br /><br /><b><i>12. After the Indian prime minister announced the Covid-19 lockdown with very little notice, streams of migrant labourers began to walk across the country to get home and others are stuck in cities living in inadequate accommodation or suffering from starvation and homelessness. Jean Drèze suggests that one of the reasons behind the resistance to allow migrant workers to return home was that employers in host states did not want to lose their ‘pool of cheap labour’. As a historian of Partition, migration, and immobility how do you see this crisis? </i></b><br /><br />When governments prevent ‘exit’, it often has to do with the need to hold on to labour of a particular kind. (In South Asia’s Partition, we saw this in the Sindh government efforts to stop the departure of sanitation workers from Karachi.) But whether the ‘West’ acted in a concerted manner to protect its cheap labour supplies is far from plain. Every government has produced its own plan, all of them pretty incoherent. You could argue that the British government’s furlough schemes have been designed to help employers as much as workers, but that it has protected the latter to a degree in a harsh economic climate. (As I write this, the politics of furlough, voluntary and involuntary redundancy are being played out in my own College. It’s clear in this context that government furlough schemes have offered workers protections too.) <br /><br />Coming to your larger question, the crisis has challenged me to think harder about immobility. At a time when Covid-19 immobilized even those with private jets, and whole cities (and their elites) were locked down overnight, I think there’s more work to be done on what the state does, or fails to do (on exit). My original thesis must be reworked to ‘bring the state back in’ in a more careful and serious way. It also needs to consider how quickly health can dissolve into poverty and debility, as with the migrant workers. That’s the next article… <br /><br /><b><i>13. Your histories are rich in economic, social, and political analyses. Although it does subtly weave in and out of your observations you don’t seem that keen on cultural history. Why? </i></b><br /><br />Really? I think there’s quite a lot of cultural history in <i>Bengal Divided</i>! That may have been written before ‘the cultural turn’, but it worked with a notion of the ‘construction of culture’ well before the ‘constructivist turn’, if my timeline is correct. And then there have been essays like ‘Migration Myths’. Surely that’s full-blown cultural history? Perhaps because it engages with arguments that differ from the Chicago-Columbia-Columbia-Kolkata view of Indian cultural history, it has fallen beneath the radar? Since my work on migration began, I have been more in conversation with sociologists (e.g. Zolberg) and anthropologists (Pierre Bourdieu) who work on other parts of the world…. But still? The very word ‘Disposition’ in the title of an essay surely gives the game away? Who but a self-conscious cultural historian (steeped in the anthropological work of Bourdieu) would use this word? Which other brand of historian would go wandering about graveyards in Kolkata in July and August, and interviewing custodians of shrines? Who would take Sunni practices of Moharram so seriously? Surely that’s grist to the mill of cultural history? <br /><br />Let’s put it another way. I get curious about subjects. Questions pop up, unbidden. I follow the trail in whichever direction in takes me, to an Imambara in Dhaka, a graveyard in Kolkata or a restaurant in Brick Lane. The terms ‘cultural’, economic’, and ‘social’ history are just heuristic tools. Life does not work like that, ergo, the historian must use the techniques and archives that all of these types of history have deployed, while recognising that they are just that – tools – incapable of grasping and making sense of the mess of lived and felt history. ‘Lived and felt’ history is cultural history. It takes on board the meaning people ascribe to their own, or others’, actions: it is the opposite of the ‘dry fact’. I think I have always been attentive to cultural history. My colleagues laugh at me these days, questioning whether I am a historian or a cultural anthropologist! So your question surprises me. <br /><br /><b><i>14. You are profoundly aware of general historical patterns and links across time and space; indeed, you seem to have an uncanny ability to sniff them out. But as David Washbrook says in his introduction to </i>Partition’s Legacies,<i> your eye keeps coming back to Bengal, ‘Divided, Spoiled, or Migrated’. What is your relationship to Bengal? Have you recently started migrating away from Bengal? How does your work on Bengal inform what you are working on now? <br /></i></b><br />That’s a witty line by David Washbrook! <br /><br />I was curious about Bengal as a probashi Bangali - a (‘lesser’) Bengali, in exile. My father spoke about it a lot, and I had a hunger to understand more about this place where I spent summer holidays, which was both strange and familiar. My ‘ancestral home’ was in Siliguri, in the district of Darjeeling. I never once saw a Muslim enter the compound of our household. My father had plenty of Muslim friends, but few in Calcutta. A thought bubble began to grow in my head, and I grew curious about society in Bengal before Partition. I think most first books start out with autobiographical questions. <br /><br />By the time I co-wrote <i>The Bengal Diaspora</i>, though, my questions were larger, and less intrinsically located in Bengal, or in my own history. I had questions which had been thrown up by Spoils, but which resonated with migration theory more broadly speaking. I located the project – sprawling, multi-sited, multi-disciplinary and transnational though it was – in Bengal and Bengalis, only because I had a reasonable grounding in the region’s history. It would have been a challenge to bring as much historical knowledge to the project if I started afresh in say, Punjab. It was a practical decision. <br /><br />There are two books on the boil at the moment, neither of which are rooted in Bengal. The first is a history of South Asian citizenship, which travels the whole of the subcontinent, Ceylon/Sri Lanka. East and South Africa, and Britain. I hope I will be able to finish it. I did most of the archival work for this work without setting foot into my familiar haunts in the Writer’s Building, although my old notebooks will come in handy. Bengal (and Assam) do figure, since they represented, for a long time, a hybrid within the hybrid mode of citizenship that existed from 1950-1965. <br /><br />The second is a most peculiar ‘general work’ on ‘South Asia’s twentieth century’. Obviously it is not, and cannot be, focussed on Bengal. <br /><br />Nonetheless, while writing these different works (and indeed the work on migration), it has been very useful to have a deep knowledge of one region of the world. It need not make you narrow. It can give you a secure perch from which to view the wider world, moving forward. (And as I am fond of reminding my readers, Bengal in 1947 was the size of France; there’s no reason for anyone to be ashamed of gaining a level of expertise about a place of considerable size for a significant chunk of time.) The pressure to go ‘global’, and to become ‘world historians’ before one knows any history at all is building up in many departments, not least at Cambridge. Its effect has not been salutary. <br /><br /><b><i>15. There is a deep empirical granularity to your writing and underlying your theoretical insights, indicating many hours spent in the archive. You do not do history without the evidence. Yet, you have always pushed us, your students, not to write like our sources and assume the official passive voice. This isn’t just a stylistic warning you issue periodically to your brood – you want us to read against the grain and embed our archival work in an analytically rich framework. Could you reflect on your own historiographical practice, both on the stress you lay on archival research but on how you read your sources against the grain? </i></b><br /><br />I have said something about this above, but I will go further, since you press me to. <br /><br />Let’s just look at some of the archives created by the state. They tend to exist because the state (or its local bureaucratic representative) is threatened by a person or a movement. One can see a lot through that archive, because it tells us what the state is worried about and why. (We can get a good view of these anxieties, represented without much bias other than – perhaps – a junior official’s wish to get ‘noticed’ or promoted.) States have their internal structures, and they create little whirlpools and eddies through which information of this type can get over-amplified or distorted. Aim off, just a bit, for such whirlpools. <br /><br />Take with large grains of rock salt the ‘information’ they throw up about the person/movement under scrutiny. (It is useful, if inaccurate and limited, so don’t bin it.) Usually bureaucrats get their information about otherwise unknown actors through police intelligence. This is apt to be flawed by reliance on paid informers. Informers had to generate something, so they might be prone to exaggerating, and sometimes even to inventing. <br /><br />The nature of ‘facts’ at the disposal of the state are always thus unreliable. The historian would do well to aim off for the structural problems (for instance by cross-checking with sources that might have different biases) as well for ‘institutional bias’, (e.g. racist), imperial and casteist projections that colour the vision of the author of the reports. <br /><br />It is not really that difficult, once you have studied a great number of sources of different kinds and gained an instinctive understanding of the limitations inherent to that type of source. Every source has limitations of bias, positionality and emphasis. The more you work, the better you ‘read’. <br /><br />Then there’s another kind of problem, where there are few, or no, written sources available. Or when you personally, or scholars in general, are denied access to official sources. Here I have resorted to taking life histories and interviews, looking at photograph albums and framed pictures on walls, deciphering genealogies. Historical anthropology – which Nick Dirks pioneered and Aye Ikegama continues to practice – has good ‘tool-boxes’. Oral history has come a long way since Jan Vansina. I use its methods when I need to. <br /><br />That said, I am sure you have even surer techniques; this is just how I, personally, have approached it. I tend to encourage my PhD students to adopt this approach too, because it is far from unfathomable. They are already daunted by the time they start out at Cambridge; and my aim as a supervisor is to be supportive and explain how they can develop this ‘mysterious’ skill just by using their considerable intelligence and common sense. <br /><br /><b><i>16. What has always leapt out at me is your ability to arrive at a fundamental, unasked question in what is now the crowded field of Partition studies. With the benefit of hindsight, it always seems to be an obvious question, but no one has thought to ask before. For instance, I remember when I had gathered all this archival material on Sindhi Partition refugees going to the princely states and was trying to make sense of it; fortunately for me, you had started writing your B.R. Nanda Memorial Lecture which turned into the essay ‘Princes, Subjects and Gandhi: Alternatives to Citizenship at the End of Empire.’ In that essay, you showed that thousands of people chose not to go to India or Pakistan but to a princely state, challenging the long-held assumption that people faced a binary choice between migrating to the two republics and that there was a history behind why they should make the choice to go to a princely state and choose subjecthood instead of citizenship. This is the crucial part of the historian’s craft – asking good questions leading to insights that we did not have before – even on a seemingly well-documented subject. How do you arrive at your questions? </i></b><br /><br />Most of my questions, good or not so good, have arrived just by going through materials. Sometimes you notice something that isn’t a part of any story you know. To begin with, your tendency might be to say to yourself ‘file for another time’. But then more and more of these strange signs come up so that you feel that you would be doing an injustice to the subjects in question if you ignored the questions they raised. That was the case with princes (and rani sahibas), and the migrants who flocked to their states. They (the princelings) may be unpopular people whom history has passed by, and whom historians have damned. But if there were migrations to princely states, and floods of petitions to rajas and jam sahebs from artisans guilds and leatherworkers, how can you not ask yourself what they mean? <br /><br />So sources of all kinds have provided my best questions. I am not sure the answers are great, but I keep at it and do my best. Sometimes you get the ‘answer’ by hard work; more usually you work hard and then it arrives when you are having a (brief) break. I insist that my ‘answers’ are provisional. I always hope someone will come along and provide better ones. My PhD students have cut gaping holes through my arguments. It’s been, and continues to be, the best part of teaching. <br /><br /><i><b>17. You are a much-loved teacher and have lectured and supervised undergraduates for several years. You have supervised over thirty PhD theses on a huge range of topics. You have also been involved in projects on teaching the history of empire and migration in British schools and helped to conceptualise the ‘Our Migration Story’ website which has won several awards. It has been a long career of dedication to teaching. What were the challenges you faced, teaching South Asian history in the UK? How have your pedagogical methods evolved over the years? How does your life as a teacher relate to your life as a historian and a writer? </b></i><br /><br />Teaching South Asian history in Britain has been both challenging and easy. It is easy because there is already a considerable appetite to learn among the university students I have had the privilege to teach. My courses have always been options, rather than core courses, so people were there because they had chosen to be there. <br /><br />The challenge comes from the unfamiliarity of the material. Some students start out with only the vaguest idea of South Asian history, never having learnt any at school. (This is beginning to change, thank goodness.) Others know something, but through the prism of their grandparents’ personal histories of migration to Britain, or to India. (‘Sikhs did terrible things to our family’, or ‘Grandpa Washbrook served in India in World War II’.) You cannot even depend on students knowing where Kanyakumari is in relation to Karachi. So there has to be a steep learning curve, but the ease comes in because most students start with little baggage of preconceived ‘truths’. I usually encourage students to find large maps of the region and pin them up in their rooms, and absorb, almost by osmosis, its geography by glancing at the map a few times each day. <br /><br />The London School of Economics taught me the rudiments of pedagogy when they hired me to teach (I feel fortunate to have had that training). I learnt that students are different; they rely to different extents to oral, visual, and auditory stimuli, to you had to mix it up, providing all kinds of stimuli through a lecture or seminar. I learnt about concentration spans: the dreaded five minutes; and how to break a class down into five-minute bites by pivoting (to a slide or film) or asking a question, or even leaving the room. But I loved teaching, and never stopped being excited by the moment when I could see students sit up, their eyes sparkling with questions. Sometimes ‘research questions’ popped into my head while I was giving an undergraduate lecture – you make freer links as you are ‘winging it’. I can say, looking back with some sadness, that after each day of teaching I felt uplifted, even ecstatic (in the deep meaning of the word). I remember my last undergraduate lecture at Cambridge before my sudden and premature retirement: I announced at the end, ‘thank you everyone, you have made my last class a joy’. The students looked at each other bemused, and at me in a concerned way: my illness was of the barely visible variety. That was a year ago. I will miss undergraduate teaching, going forward. It enriched my life by allowing me to give to others, to pay careful attention to them, to focus all my concentration on them. <br /><br />From the school teachers who helped us with <i>Bangla Stories </i>and <i>Our Migration Stories</i>, I gleaned the bare bones of pedagogy for teaching younger people. I tried to integrate some of this into my own teaching, and though I never was anything close to perfect, students appreciated the effort. The basic rule is that if you respect students enough to put all of yourself into making something happen in the classroom, they will respond well. Be honest with them. <br /><br />My PhD students taught me far, far, more than I taught them. It has been a great pleasure learning and growing alongside them. <br /><br />In terms of my writing, I suppose that when you have had to teach thirty PhD students and at least twice as many MPhil and MSc students to write dissertations, helping them with issues of structure, flow of arguments, and elements of style, you raise your own game on these fronts. My experience as editor of Modern Asian Studies also made me more aware of issues of readability; of the need to show concern for the reading experience. <br /><br /><b><i>18. Could you speak about the work of some other historians, or scholars from any field, you think your writing is in conversation with or building upon? </i></b><br /><br />This is tricky territory. It’s been so long, so I will talk about on-going work only, if I may. I am lucky to have had the most generous and critical of sounding boards: Tanika Sarkar, David Washbrook, Prasannan Parthasarathi and Peter Mandler have read each chapter or essay I thrust upon them and told me what was wrong with it. <br /><br />My work on citizenship is in conversation with that of legal historians, not only of South Asia but of Africa and the old White Dominions, or settler colonies, as well as historians of immigration to Britain. I would not describe myself as a legal historian though, and in that tension lies the trade-off, in my view. Off the top of my head, there’s Rohit De and you yourself, Uttara, as well as Emma Hunter, Caitlin Anderson, Adam McKeown, David Feldman and Keechang Kim, and – since citizenship and sovereignty are so intimately connected – Lauren Benton. More recently, the contribution of Alison Bashford, Lake and Reynolds, M. Karatani and Radhika Mongia has been useful for me to think with, and around. And then there’s always the majestic Zolberg. <br /><br />On the chaotic resistance of the refugees, we could start with Partha Chatterjee (although I have been having a conversation with him in my head since I was writing <i>Bengal Divided</i>. I am not sure he has participated in it, though!). Hannah Arendt was a huge influence here. Vazira Zamindar, Uditi Sen, and Anjali Bhardwaj Datta each put forward different and exciting models of refugee agency, and they have helped inform my notion of mobility capital. <br /><br />On the immobile, I have drawn on the work of historians and anthropologists of medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, (Julie Livingstone and Megan Vaughan) and on ‘care-work’ (Samita Sen). This is still a conversation waiting to develop, I think. Thinking about its converse, mobility, the work of labour historians has been an influence, Ravi Ahuja and Raj Chandavarkar in their different ways, as also Henri Lefebvre. Willem van Schendel has been a constant interlocutor: we seem to be drawn to the same subject from different perspectives. <br /><br />The sociologist Claire Alexander has been my comrade-in-arms for many years; together we have tried to bring to history of ‘the migration crisis’ in Britain together with the study of migration in the ‘source’ regions, in the same analytical framework. We have also been collaborators in public engagement and curriculum development in Britain, although since I grew more ill, Claire has borne more and more of the load. Working with her for fifteen years has changed me. I leave you to judge whether that change has been for the better or the worse! <br /><br /><b><i>19. You read a lot of fiction. Could you name six literary works you have particularly enjoyed reading? </i></b><br /><br />Oh dear. I am a ‘constant reader’ and have been one since I could read, this is a hard question. I can give you an answer that is whimsical at best, since it reflects only my most recent bout of (re-) reading. Hemingway’s <i>Old Man and the Sea</i> probably rises to the top of that particular pile. Mohammed Hanif’s <i>Our Lady of Alice Bhatti</i> is a triumph, and I rate Vivek Shanbagh’s <i>Ghachar Ghochar</i> as a masterpiece. No lover of books and life could fail to be captivated by Jonathon Franzen. I love Alice Munro: every writer should be required to read her. I return again and again to Iris Murdoch, Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble. <br /><br /><b><i>20. Sohini: My personal favourite is ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos’, and it has been an important springboard to my own research. So, from extremely selfish reasons I want to ask, how does one write the material history of death, when the stories must be wrapped in such sensitivity and empathy? Like the hour-glass and the peeling of the onion that you describe in your introduction, what metaphoric methodology did you use to write this essay? </i></b><br /><br />In writing ‘Of Graveyards’, my intention was to describe what I saw and felt. The serenity, indeed beauty, of these graveyards took me aback. Like many an ignoramus, I had until that point thought of graveyards as macabre places. I was concerned to conjure up for readers the very different feelings that pervaded these ‘social spaces’. I thought that this affect was generated by the custodians of graveyards and the ancestors of the dead, who tended the graves so that they maintained some of their majesty, even if the physical fabric of grave stones was eroding and the space occupied by graveyards shrinking. <br /><br />Here I was trying to capture both the (surprising) visual quality of the graveyard itself, as well as the depth of feeling it conjured up in an observer who had no relationship to those departed. <br /><br />I head read Jon Parry on death rituals, (Heonik Kwon’s masterpiece had not yet come my way). But I had not given serious thought to how the death of a loved person changes one, filling the bereaved with new feelings of responsibility and intense attachment to the community of mourners. Death is a creative force, I sensed. The relationship between the bereaved and the dead is powerful; often more powerful than relationships between the living. <br /><br />I am seeing these things far more clearly in hindsight, I must admit. Then I only ‘sensed’ them. Sometimes historians must pay heed to their instincts and intuitions. (This was a case when I did.) Pulling those glimmers (rather than ideas) down to the page is not easy, unless you adopt some of the tools of the participant observer. That is how I approached the writing; at least for the first part of the essay. <br /><br />I hope this answers your question, at least in part! <br /><br /><b><i>21. Your projects are deeply marked by the ‘minutiae of events’, as David Washbrook has characterized it. What global parallels have the minutiae revealed? I am thinking of historians on citizenship and refugee making such as Frederick Cooper (whom you cite on p. 492) Zolberg and Benda, (p. 222), Engseng Ho (p. 226) in other decolonized countries. What makes the South Asian case study distinct? </i></b><br /><br />The obvious factor in the South Asian case is Partition. In this sense its closest parallel is with Israel. Students of mine who have worked on refugee camps in Israel have observed similar dynamics within them. (One observes similar processes of minority formation post-Partition with respect to the Arab population that stayed on: Arab–Israeli scholars have noted a similar grab of ‘evacuee property’ and ghettoization of Arab communities). Lisa Malkki’s work on Hutu refugees in Tanzania is most revealing too. South Sudan and divided Eritrea may well be witnessing similar processes on the ground. I have not yet seen any granular study of the horn of Africa, perhaps it is still too early and unsafe. <br /><br />That is not often the realm of historians, amongst whom only a handful examine the ‘minutiae of events’ with as much zeal as I do. Anthropologists, like Malkki, do stay close to the ground, attending to little people and every acts; so it will take scholars working in many fields to build up meaningful comparisons. I am talking of early signs here – conference papers still unpublished – on Israel, and so on. <br /><br />But I think that if you were to read these studies together, the South Asian example will not appear so distinct after all. Several post-colonial nation states were born while societies were being ripped apart: they bear similar (though not identical) scars. <br /><br /><b><i>22. You have noted how the terms of transnationalism, hybridity and networks cloud the increasingly firm clasp of nation-states in sealing and controlling its borders. As someone living in New York at the time of the coronavirus pandemic, I have noticed how nation-states micro-manage their immigrant population even within their borders: through policing, counting, and withholding access to basic health rights and economic resources. Simultaneously, migrants evade the state by giving up on resources and evading documentations. Migrants slip out of official records, only captured in our archives when the nation-state reigns them back in. Are they then the true transnational subjects, the exception to the rule? How does one write these slippery characters back into history? </i></b><br /><br />There’s been excellent work on the paperwork of citizenship and access to its goods (for instance Kamal Sadiq’s Paper Citizens). He finds that ‘paper’ is quite easy to get, forged documents can be bought all the time. (I found the same with the permit papers issues for cross-border movement between India and Pakistan.) But do not over-emphasise official bureacratic paperwork if you want to ‘see’ these migrants, particularly those the state is trying to get rid of, and those who are trying to evade its clutches. For the very reasons that you suggest, the state’s ‘biopolitics’ can never be as powerful as some believe it to be, because ‘little people’ are resourceful and determined. You might see them in news coverage of small skirmishes at borders, where say, India, is trying to push ‘East Bengali (read Muslim)’ ‘migrants’ across the border. These people often have all the papers, they even have graves, to prove domicile. The state disregards this. See court cases, which often yield rich personal biographies of ‘absconders’. Go to borderlands, where they tend to cluster: take life histories. These people are the transnational subjects of our time, since most have far-flung networks and attachments in all sorts of places. You are right, and courageous, to be pushing at this question. The study of elite transnational sojourners continues to throw up much to think about, (see, for instance Tim Harper’s recent <i>Underground Asia</i>). But without unearthing the transnational lives of the poorer migrants, who are a vast and ballooning population, we are never going to get our heads around this subject. <br /><br /><i><b>23. You note how the Bengal Government after Partition expressed the need for able-bodied men to work and not subsist on charity. This resonates with famine relief programs of the colonial government in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies in the late nineteenth century where able-bodied men came to cities to work in the factories. These parallels tell us about the enduring relationship between famine, labour history and citizenship (or claims to urban spaces). The desire to pick able-bodied men of course tells us about how famine set in mass debility among others, particularly women and children. How does one accommodate the history of debility, ‘weakness’ and morbidity into the history of citizenship in postcolonial India and Pakistan? </b></i><br /><br />There are many ways to approach this. Note the rights (or lack of them) of people with certain listed diseases to travel, or marry, and to exert other forms of autonomy. Epilepsy and leprosy still figure as barriers to mobility, in and of themselves. It gives you an idea of what manner of ‘rights-bearing subject’ the disabled person is, and has been for centuries. (Bashford is illuminating on this point.) Note the access to the ‘goods’ of citizenship: the right to serve in the army (height and weight rules have applied, and continue to apply), or access to rations at low prices (proof of identity and place of residence are needed to avail these provisions). How does a displaced and disabled woman vote? (It is hard enough for the elite woman to exercise this right freely.) How does an orphan child, displaced by riots in Gujarat, say, gain access to these goods (or ‘BPL’ provisions) since she cannot prove either her identity or place of residence? This child will become weaker, and ever more debilitated, to the point that she cannot even do days of work now guaranteed by the NREGA scheme. <br /><br />If you throw caste into this mix, which you must, one can begin to build up a picture of what it is to be a ‘bare citizen’ (or something close to that). Citizenship is not an either/or quality but a spectrum of rights and capabilities. Many people find themselves on the wrong end of this spectrum, because of their gender, disability, debility or history of displacement. <br /><br /> <br /></span><a href="https://www.amazon.in/Partitions-Legacies-Joya-Chatterji/dp/8178245396">BUY PARTITION'S LEGACIES</a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2020/11/12/writing-the-legacies-of-partition-a-conversation-with-joya-chatterji" target="_blank">CLICK HERE for another version of the interview in BORDERLINES</a><br /></div>
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{margin-bottom:0in;}</style></p>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3849050944776500703.post-56555348293459020972020-11-10T11:40:00.004+05:302020-11-10T14:32:32.449+05:30PATRIARCHY AND THE PANGOLIN<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;"> When two young women are hired to carry out conservation research, they discover that India is a large jungle – larger than they ever imagined. Their study of trees reveals a complex world in which the greatest threat to pangolins and imperilled species is <br />Indian men and patriarchy. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrPoISqqikD2fayzj172zgQoZq7skpK0a0KDheKGNdSOP2DLMpITCCsJAh7uQgfTgqpDK7wKyGwPTZoVAAiYytPxdmtL5AAv2SLyWlKRMwqeBpO3_vlw03CghXnrQxItQGfDUf3xwcSz3I/s752/pangolin3d.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="752" data-original-width="644" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrPoISqqikD2fayzj172zgQoZq7skpK0a0KDheKGNdSOP2DLMpITCCsJAh7uQgfTgqpDK7wKyGwPTZoVAAiYytPxdmtL5AAv2SLyWlKRMwqeBpO3_vlw03CghXnrQxItQGfDUf3xwcSz3I/w549-h640/pangolin3d.jpg" width="549" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;">Tramping across North India, the women encounter men, man-made obstacles, and bureaucratic corruption, but forge ahead with satire and self-deprecating humour. Their many stories give us the voices of people and species oppressed or marginalised. Several anecdotes show daily battles against research methods and policies that bury lived <br />life in dry data.<br />Environmental research is more about lives and livelihoods than data, says Aditi Patil. She makes us feel the pulse of life hidden by statistics. Women farmers, forest dwellers, rustics, and researchers come exquisitely alive in this entertaining and persuasive book.<br /></div><div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">“a great mix of humour and reflective seriousness.” <br />NAYANJOT LAHIRI</p><p style="text-align: center;">“Under the cover of irresistible humour, <i>Patriarchy and the Pangolin</i> ambushes the reader with unsettling questions about Indian society and the world of research. A bittersweet delight.” <br />JEAN DRÈZE</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizTHcg-7QMrdMC9gSwi_Nk1RbudVSMzSe-OE9I6JNnrLldjeeRSPgVLjmQZchyphenhyphenJWk01cE3guqWd-UnJeyDpg8pXIN9sL41jAOXQBwQyMeFVxhtKs8caPlZt0W9RSvva652lZQzZQuUWoF2/s761/patil+mug.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="761" data-original-width="572" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizTHcg-7QMrdMC9gSwi_Nk1RbudVSMzSe-OE9I6JNnrLldjeeRSPgVLjmQZchyphenhyphenJWk01cE3guqWd-UnJeyDpg8pXIN9sL41jAOXQBwQyMeFVxhtKs8caPlZt0W9RSvva652lZQzZQuUWoF2/s320/patil+mug.png" /></a></div><br />ADITI PATIL was born in Mumbai. She has worked on diverse conservation projects with WWF India, Columbia University, and the Gujarat Forest Department.<p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">The cover was specially hand-painted by the artist Sheela Roy. Based in Calcutta, she was born in 1937 and works with acrylic, watercolours and pastel. The painting for the cover of <i>Patriarchy and the Pangolin </i>is done in ink and acrylic.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><p style="text-align: right;">Published by<b> BLACK KITE</b> </p><p style="text-align: right;">an imprint of Permanent Black<br /></p><p style="text-align: right;">in collaboration with HACHETTE INDIA </p><p style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.amazon.in/Patriarchy-Pangolin-field-Indian-species/dp/9389253888/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=aditi+patil&qid=1604988482&sr=8-1">PAPERBACK/ Rs 399/ BUY</a><br /></p></div>PERMANENT BLACKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13538967965793157926noreply@blogger.com0