Two Permanently Blackened Cornell Wallahs in New Paperback Editions

KAUSHIK BASU is a professor of Economics at Cornell who has taken leave to be chief economic advisor to the government of India.

According to Professor Martha Nussbaum, “In the US, you rarely see real empowerment of good intellectuals. Someone like Kaushik Basu, for instance, would never be made part of the government in America because he’s just too heterodox — a real intellectual interested in thinking through the theoretical plane.”

paperback / 290pp / Rs 325 / Spring 2011

SUVIR KAUL's PhD is from Cornell. He is now a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He usually works on some Gray areas of the literature of the eighteenth century (such as Thomas Gray) and took leave from his interest in arcana to edit this scintillating collection.

Of this collection the historian Indivar Kamtekar says: “The articles in this book, taken together, succeed remarkably well in broadening the treatment of the Partition of India. Scholars will, as usual, flesh out some of the ideas and flush away others. But the originality of these articles will ensure that the book becomes essential reading for specialists, as well as providing entertainment to the general reader who enjoys listening to echoes of the past.”

paperback / 320pp / Rs 350 / Spring 2011

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THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

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"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

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