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To the Miffed Chandak Sengoopta

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 with us after that.

As we said, this is not an exhaustive list. It could have been much longer if we chose to devote the entire day to arguing with Chandak Sengoopta. However, as a two-person press publishing twenty books a year and sifting through and having to evaluate about a dozen book proposals a week, we have work to do.

We are very happy the disgruntled and baseless comments of one academic allowed us to revisit and remember the excellent first books we have published over the years. Most of these are still in print, all these years later.
  1. A.N. Sattanathan, Plain Speaking (PB original)
  2. Bhavani Raman, Document Raj
  3. Chandrima Chakraborty, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism (PB original)
  4. Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community (PB original)
  5. Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds (PB original)
  6. Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging (PB original)
  7. Farina Mir, Social Space of Language
  8. Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists (PB original)
  9. Jahnavi Phalke, Atomic State (PB original)
  10. Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music
  11. Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden
  12. Julie Hughes, Animal Kingdoms
  13. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire
  14. Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics in South India
  15. Lokesh Ohri, Till Kingdom Come (PB original)
  16. Manu Goswami, Producing India
  17. Monica Mehta, Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
  18. Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects (PB original)
  19. Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest (PB original)
  20. Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands (PB original)
  21. Nico Slate, Coloured Cosmopolitanism
  22. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts (PB original)
  23. Pratik Chakraborti, Western Science in Modern India (PB original)
  24. Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire
  25. Rajit Mazumder: The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (PB original)
  26. Ram Narayan Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability
  27. Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics (PB original)
  28. Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen (PB original)
  29. Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland
  30. Ravi Vasudevan, Melodramatic Public (PB original)
  31. S.V. Srinivas, Politics as Performance (PB original)
  32. Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints
  33. Simona Sawhney, The Modernity of Sanskrit
  34. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (PB original)
  35. Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine
  36. Sujoy Das, Sikkim (PB original)
  37. Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate (PB original)
  38. Sunil Sharma, Early Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier (PB original)
  39. Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books (PB original)
  40. Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere (PB original)
  41. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts















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