Permanent Black

Winner of the 2021 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award LISTEN TO A DISCUSSION WITH THE AUTHOR HERE   " I am the People is an innovative, theoretically rich engagement with populism"  Zaad Mahmood in Telegraph "lucid, provocative and insightful. Balmurli Natrajan, Wire “In these masterful lectures, Chatterjee provides a truly global account of the logics of populist and popular sovereignty in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on the example of modern Indian capitalism and governmental techniques, Chatterjee shows that the career of the ‘people’ and populism in India enables a richer, deeper, and more complex account of populist politics than is the norm in current debates in Euro-America. ” Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University “Partha Chatterjee’s scintillating intervention is essential reading for a global constituency that is being encouraged, by journalists and polemicists alike, to understand populism, ...

Given that he is a scholar, we are surprised Dr Chandak Sengoopta did not do some basic research before shooting off his mouth. In a Facebook post today he accuses Permanent Black thus: "I am all for focusing on quality rather than quantity, but this ain't it. How many young scholars have had their first, influential book published by Permanent Black? I can think of one or two, but no more than that... Overall, however, Advani has devoted himself to publishing the work of his cronies and mentors, ignoring new, adventurous scholarship".  He also claims that Ramachandra Guha, in his article on scholarly publishing in India " overpraises Permanent Black, a publisher obsessed almost exclusively with academic stars..."  We are pleased to provide below a (not exhaustive) list of forty-one authors and their first books published by Permanent Black. All of them are stars in our eyes; many went on to publish successful books with other presses or wi...

Against all rational projections and logical expectations, this little press in the mountains turns twenty today.  So far we have published 330 hardbacks and 170 paperbacks. We have in our catalogue hugely respected, established authors as well as new, brilliant writers.  Will we survive present conditions? Who knows? But with you -- our readers -- around, we think we will. Thank you for reading our books, sharing our books, citing our books.

Many congratulations to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who has been awarded the Kanhaiya Lal Sethia Poetry Prize. According to a report , tthe renowned Rajasthani scholar and poet in whose honour the prize is named would have been a hundred years old this year. This is the fourth edition of the prize, won earlier by Jayanta Mahapatra (2017) and Rituraj (2016). Arvind, true to form, turned up in faded jeans and jacket, but accounts suggest it was a grand occasion, with a battery of luminaries present -- both literary and political. Sachin Pilot, among those pictured here, is Deputy Chief Minister of Rajasthan.   The prize was given at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this month.  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra being awarded the prize. Photo from Jan Prahari Express

"Digging into a vast historical archive of the subcontinent and carefully moving from the past to the present, Mahesh Rangarajan’s Nature and Nation complicates long held assumptions that have informed popular understandings of South Asia’s environment. This marks a historiographical shift from the dominant trend till the early 1990s where there is often a convergence between the concerns of the environmental movements and the framing of history. What emerges in turn is a nuanced picture of a rather dialogical relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘nation’. Bringing together a selection of essays written between 1996 and 2012, Rangarajan, the longtime environmental historian, demonstrates – what he has been arguing for quite a while now – the need to examine a longer-range history with all its attendant regional variations" Tanmoy Sharma, South Asian History and Culture Writing India’s environmental history is not easy. The country’s territorial vastness, geographical ...

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM   NEWS JUST IN (January 2020) . . . Admirers of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's many magnificent "connected histories" will be happy to learn that they -- having long lost count of the number of European languages he reads and lectures in, and having lost count also of the number of monographs he has written on Portuguese and Mughal history, maritime history, economic history, cultural history, and travellers' accounts, and God knows what else -- can now also start losing count of the number of international history prizes he has won. As we already know, Subrahmanyam is the only Asian to be made Professor, International Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France. This happened in 2013. We also recall that he won the Infosys Prize the year before that. We have now received news that this former enfant terrible of Indian and European history (we can certify that he is, for many years now, entirely sober, mature, and dignified, in l...

  Somewhere in these mountains is the only independent press situated on the roof of the world.  It will turn twenty next year.  To mark the end of our teens, we've instituted a prize. The Kosambi Memorial Book Prize will be given annually to the best student in ancient Indian history at Ashoka University, Haryana.  The first prize was awarded on 13th November 2019 to Revanth Ukkalam and Haritha Govind of Ashoka University's Class of 2020.  Haritha Govind with Mahesh Rangarajan Revanth Ukkalam with Mahesh Rangarajan, Nayanjot Lahiri, and Pratyay Nath The prize also marks our extensive co-publication programme with Ashoka University in the series Hedgehog and Fox, edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Over 75 titles have been published in this series in the five years since it came into existence. As every year here at Permanent Black we proved that you don't have to add to the world's carbon footprint to publish internationally. We...

"Being the only boy in the house, I ran errands, went to the shops to buy our necessities, and delivered small quantities of milk and buttermilk which we sold to some neighbours, and then had my morning meal. Breakfast consisted of a small quantity of rice kept overnight in rice water which by the morning had slightly fermented, and a little lime pickle or chutney made dal, tamarind, and chillies. Sometimes a single hot chilli was all that was available to eat with the rice." The memoirs and lectures of A.N. Sattanathan, presented here in a fully annotated edition, with a critical introduction, constitute a key literary-historical document of the caste struggle. Sattanathan’s autobiographical fragment is a unique record of non-brahmin low-caste life in rural South India, where the presence of poverty and caste prejudice is the more powerful for being understated. As the experience—sparsely and beautifully rendered—of the low-caste but not stereotypically ‘untouch...

M.S.S. Pandian (1958–2014) was an eminent historian of South Indian politics, caste, culture, and cinema. His writings offer distinctively Tamil insights on these areas. In this book his chief focus is Tamil political culture for roughly thirty years since 1985. His success lies in bringing a historical understanding to bear on what he called “the strangeness of Tamil Nadu”. A key figure in Pandian’s thinking was E.V. Ramasamy “Periyar”. Pandian argues that Periyar’s ideals and strategies long remained popular among Tamil progressives, but that their survival became difficult because of radical changes in pan-Indian political culture. To show these changes, this book is organised chronologically as well as along thematic sections that reflect the themes of Periyar’s Dravidian ideology: linguistic identity, state politics, religion, and caste.  Periyar’s ideas, Pandian argues, can still provide productive standards for critical analysis of politics in India. But becaus...

An excellent review of this book THE TRIBUNE by the renowned Tamil scholar A.R. Venkatachalapathy ( click here or paste the link into your browser: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/sunday-special/book-reviews/a-subtle-feast-of-words-to-be-valued/829591.html) is good reason to remind readers of how wonderful, as a work of Indian literary and cultural history, this book really is.     "Critic, poet, anthologist, scholar and translator. Mehrotra’s literary career is as multifaceted as it is difficult to write about. To do justice to it, we would need a higher vantage point than what’s afforded by the book review format. For those who haven’t read Mehrotra before, Translating the Indian Past serves as a decent introduction to the author’s longstanding literary preoccupations; the book can also be seen as a belatedly written preamble to the poems" Vineet Gill, Scroll Through his poems, criticism, translations, and edited books, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has played a...