Permanent Black

  Permanent Black and Harvard University Press have, over the past few years, published eleven books together (list ed below ). The latest to appear, strongly recommended by Mahesh Rangarajan among others, is This book is about the hunting of tigers and leopards, wild boar and game birds, by Indian princes a hundred years ago. Focusing on Rajput princely states in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it reveals a world of royal huntsmen differing in rank and prestige, ambition and personality, culture and politics. Their hunting practices, involving large and small game—striped, horned, and feathered—in environments ranging from desert to jungle, are described in detail. Weaponry and guns, costumes and trophies, shooting towers and photography, are among the book’s many other fascinating subjects. These Indian princes operated within contexts shaped by local claims and hierarchies, regional rivalries and alliances, and British imperial ...

UNSETTLING THE PAST     Unknown Aspects and Scholarly Assessments of D.D. Kosambi This is a collection of obscure and unknown writings by D.D. Kosambi alongside assessments of his contribution to various areas of scholarship -- ancient history, mathematics, Sanskrit literature, numismatics, and marxism as a method for understanding the past. An array of the great man's unpublished letters, unearthed from the Harvard and TIFR archives by his daughter Meera Kosambi, comprises one section of the book. Kosambi's correspondence includes an exchange with Robert Graves on comparative aspects of Indian and Greek myth. Almost no one has ever seen this cache of incredibly interesting letters which reveal new facets of Kosambi's insights, range of interests, methods, friendships, and affections. Some wonderful photos of Kosambi, mostly unavailable, also feature in the book. They reveal a man resembling a Greek god, 5 ft. 10 in. tall, who was humane, compassi...

“IN INDIA, COPYRIGHT MEANS THE RIGHT TO COPY!” Nasreen Munni Kabir (author of Guru Dutt ) ( Scroll down this post for responses from Nandini Sundar and Partha Chatterjee ) Nandini Sundar, a friend in the Delhi teaching community, voiced a strong feeling in many of her colleagues when she stressed how important it is for teachers to be allowed to use photocopying shops. Her perspective, outlined in the context of a court case against one such shop at the Delhi School of Economics, is roughly this: Nandini Sundar Yesterday (18 October 2012), OUP, CUP, and Routledge, who had filed a case against the Delhi School of Economics photocopying shop for making course packs, won in the high court. So now no more course packs.    This will make it impossible to teach—since a lot of my teaching (as also that of others) depends on new books I buy from abroad, or out of print books, which simply aren't available in India. Most publishers’ perspective on the mat...

Nayanjot Lahiri's new book ... "As a teacher of Indian history I am all too aware of the squabbles that the periodization of Indian history has spawned ... I hope, however, that the elasticity in my use of the label ‘ancient’ is of little consequence since I am not concerned with monuments and artefacts only as a kind of archive of ancient human activity. Instead, I investigate aspects that relate to the modern histories of these architectural and archaeological relics. So these essays all connect with the modern pasts of premodern sites and objects, analysing the many ways in which the conceptions, contradictions, and conflicts of modern India came to mark   their documentation and conservation. " -- from the Introduction ...   Iconic sites and ‘monumental’ subjects in Indian history are the core of this fascinating collection of essays. Nayanjot Lahiri ranges from the Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro to Buddhist Mahabodhi and ...