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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