Skip to main content

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM WINS ONE MORE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

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 line with his stature) has been awarded the Prix International d'Histoire (International Prize of History) by the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS). 

The committee will give Subrahmanyam the award at a ceremony in Poznań, Poland, in August 2020, at the XXIII Congress of the ICHS, which is held every five years. The citation speaks of his "contributions to the progress of historical research and to the dialogue between cultures, opening many new perspectives and training generations of scholars." The prize, like the Prix Goncourt, is not monetised (what a pity), but we believe Subrahmanyam will get a very fancy medal and a very fancy watch! 

More to the point, this prize is open to a historian of any country, of any time period, and any theme!

Sanjay Subrahmanyam (black beard) with Simon Digby (white beard)
It used to be said of the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the great violinst Jascha Heifetz that their individual achievements were not only head and shoulders above those of every other past and present pianist and violinist, but that they were likely to remain head and shoulders above those of every future pianist and violinist too. Even if we take such grandiose declarations with a pinch of salt and discount the element of wanton exaggeration in them, there is little doubt that Subrahmanyam's accomplishment as a historian is, quite simply, staggering.

 Permanent Black is privileged to have published several of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's books, including most recently IS INDIAN CIVILIZATION A MYTH?, and EMPIRES BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY 1500-1800, and (co-authored with Muzaffar Alam) WRITING THE MUGHAL WORLD.

It may interest readers to know that Sanjay Subrahmanyam's brother S. Jaishankar is India's foreign minister in the BJP government, and that his father K. Subrahmanyam was the foremost advocate of India's atom bomb; and that Subrahmanyam, whose histories have shown the cross-fertilisation of cultures and civilisations and the porousness of political boundaries, has been consistently a staunch defender of secular values . . . So, a variety of opinions and possibly differing positions, all within the same family -- and thus a most potent and heartening example of the coexistence of difference that India is now rapidly in danger of losing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm   and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly.        REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM             Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay”   brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose  did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra   • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...
Post a Comment
Read more