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Sanjay Subrahmanyam Three Ways to be Alien Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World This book looks at individual trajectories in an early modern global context . It draws on the lives and writings of a trio of marginal figures who were cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world. The subjects include v   a “Persian” prince of Bijapur in Central India held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa v   an English traveller and global schemer whose writings reveal a nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century v   an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam injects humanity into global history and shows that biography still...

        Unifying Hinduism has won the 2011 award for Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion   ANDREW J. NICHOLSON Unifying Hinduism Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History South Asia Across the Disciplines Series A Short Interview with Andrew J. Nicholson whose new book Unifying Hinduism is a brilliant exploration of some of the central genealogies of Hinduism: Q1: Would it be true to say that your book provides a prehistory of modern Hindu thinkers we’re familiar with, such as Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan? Can we get a better sense of their intellectual genealogy by reading your book? A1: Yes, one of my goals in writing this book was to do just that. As important as I think Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism is for South Asian Studies, we are in a period when the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Said criticized Orientalists like Bernard Lewis for insist...

Finbarr B. Flood OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter Congratulations to Finbarr B. Flood: his book, published for South Asia by Permanent Black alongside Princeton University Press, has just won the 2011 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, South Asia Council. Objects of Translation has been praised as “[A] brilliant, far-ranging study [...] This book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter.” –John E. Cort, Religious Studies Review The prize is awarded to the best English-language work in South Asian Studies, with a preference for “broad scholarly works with innovative approaches that promise to define or redefine understanding of whole subject areas.” According to the Selection Committee Citation: “Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation is a magisterial study of material culture and community identity in South Asia from the...

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Partial Recall Essays on Literature and Literary History India’s poets have been among the finest writers of English prose—earlier, Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt; more recently, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, and Adil Jussawalla. Writers of this kind, representing the ‘common reader’ tradition of unpretentious and jargon-free writing about literature and life, are something of a rarity in India. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—renowned poet, critic, translator, editor, and anthologist—enriches an uncommon stream with this brilliant collection. The essays gathered here, rich in literary detail and accessible insight, were written over the past thirty years. Among them are Mehrotra’s homage to his friend and fellow poet Arun Kolatkar; a perceptive appreciation of A.K. Ramanujan; a scathing scrutiny of R. Parthasarathy; a radical redefinition of the modern Indian poem; a literary-historical view of Kabir; and a wide-ranging introduction to the...

There aren't many (actually we can't think of any) Sankritists of Sheldon Pollock's subtlety, scholarship, complexity and renown who can write accessibly for non-specialist readers.  Read Professor Pollock's essay here  for a fresh understanding of the classics. And then turn to his book. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men SANSKRIT, CULTURE AND POWER IN PREMODERN INDIA by  SHELDON POLLOCK WINNER OF The Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies The 32nd Lionel Trilling Award, Columbia College and Flora Levy Foundation of Lafayette, LA. The 2006 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Awards for Axcellence in Literature, Language, & Linguistics, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India’s ancient language, as a vehicle for poetry and polity by tracing the two g...

MAHESH RANGARAJAN AND  K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN, EDITORS India’s Environmental History Vol. 1: From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period Vol. 2: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Nation Environmental history in India has generated a rich literature on forests, wildlife, human–animal conflict, tribal rights and commercial degradation, displacement and development, pastoralism and desertification, famine and disease, sedentarism and mobility, wildness and civility, and the ecology versus equity debate. This reader brings together some of the best and most interesting writing on India’s ecological pasts. It looks at a variety of the country’s regions, landscapes, and arenas as settings for strife or harmony, as topography and ecological fabric, in the process covering a vast historical terrain. Vol. 1 provides an antidote to the existing historiography, which barely takes notice of the era before 1800. The essays here range from prehistoric India to the middle of the nineteenth cent...

Stages of Life Indian Theatre Autobiographies     KATHRYN HANSEN “These four autobiographies of artists and writers who shaped early Indian theatre during its most creative period are as riveting as the fare that the theatre itself provided. Kathryn Hansen’s lifelong and perceptive involvement with that rumbustious enterprise infuses every word of her translation of these texts.” —Girish Karnad By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city.  Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions.   From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book.   The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time. The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played women's parts, until gaining great fame for his r...

RONIT RICCI Islam Translated Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia South Asia Across the Disciplines Series The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated , Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions —from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected, mutually dependen...

--> TANIKA SARKAR Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University an swers six questions sent to her by Permanent Black. TANIKA SARKAR Here, first, is Dipesh Chakrabarty on Tanika Sarkar: “Tanika Sarkar is arguably the most prominent feminist historian today writing on Bengal and India. She also belongs to a tiny band of Indian scholars whose interests embrace both history and literature. Her many different books and essays on women's histories—notable as much for their breadth of interests as for their sensitive and imaginative handling of a wide variety of Bengali and English-language sources from the colonial times and before—show her to be an intellectual whose work is both attentive to the messiness of the past and at the same time deliberately resistant to what she sees as unsatisfactory, schematic interpretations of many postcolonial scholars. This gives her writing a polemical edge but it is not consumed by polemics. In the end, muc...