Permanent Black

This year's different. We've been told there will be French food and French films (and books) at the bookfair. Plus all the usual suspects -- Permanent Black included. Come and see all we've published since you last visited! It only happens for one week in the year so don't miss it. Who knows what friends, bargains and books you will find. As usual our stand will be a part of the Orient Blackswan stall. Details below. NEW DELHI WORLD BOOK FAIR 2013 Pragati Maidan Hall 4, Stall Nos 164–175 (Entry from Gate No. 2, Bhairon Marg) February 4–10 2013 11:00 a.m. to 8 p.m.

‘Sir William Jones’, a book review dating to 1968 and therefore 45 years old, is in 2013 exactly half the age of its author, Ranajit Guha, the Bengali writer and thinker who is also the most influential living historian of South Asia. Guha and his wife Mechthild live close to the Viennese woods on the outskirts of Vienna. From their house you can see straight to the sanatorium in which Subhas Chandra Bose was briefly housed. The other figure from nationalist times who once lived not so far away was Mirabehn. She spent her last years in the proximity of the regions where her first idol, Beethoven, had composed his music. At one time Mechthild had thought of writing a book about Mirabehn, but many years back, after some meetings with her prospective protagonist, she decided against pursuing the idea. (Unlike Annie Besant, C.F. Andrews, and Verrier Elwin, who have biographers, Madeleine Slade seems to have made a getaway.) Mechthild and Ranajit Guha in 2008 ( photo court...

  Surendra J. Patel Six years back, an economist called Surendra J. Patel passed away. He seems to have been both prolific and respected in his day—the Hindu ’s obituary of him, from which a bit is reproduced below, suggests so. Perhaps his major works are still sometimes read by economists and historians in a library or two. At Permanent Black, however, there would have been no reason for his writing to be remembered had a section in one of his essays not struck an editor here as unusually felicitous—in fact, as prose much more expressive than any that editors in scholarly publishing, weather-beaten and teeth-gritten by academese, expect to see in an essay on the economics of agriculture. To be fair to the late Dr Patel, this compliment cannot be laid as a charge upon his entire essay, the bulk of it being what Dr Patel meant it to be, namely, sound agricultural economics. Orwell and Woolf don’t lurk between its lines. The whole isn’t remotely a stab in the direction o...

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM Portrait of the historian as a young man who not that far back in recent history was feared as the enfant terrible of Indian history, has just won the Infosys Prize for History 2012. Subrahmanyam's achievement is based in part on his utterly unusual genius for mastering virtually every European and South Asian language that the Indian historian needs. This has enabled him to range temporally from medieval to modern South Asian history, spatially from the Mughal to the Ottoman to the empires of Europe, and 'generically' from biography to travel literature to political thought to economic and cultural history to the acerbic critical essay. It may even be accurate to say, in fact, that no single historian of South Asia has ever been able to authoritatively span as large a terrain as Subrahmanyam. And the fellow's only just crossed his forties -- leaving, we hear, a fair number of fellow historians foaming at the mouth, specially as Su...

Blackbeard, Sanjay S. Whitebeard, Simon Digby IS SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM FOR REAL?  He's won the Infosys Prize for History for 2012, so he probably is. Academics write mainly two kinds of books: monographs addressed to their peers, and textbooks for students. The scholar who can entirely switch modes and provide entertaining English for the serious lay reader is a rarity everywhere. In India, Ramachandra Guha, Nayanjot Lahiri, Sunil Khilnani, and Mukul Kesavan are some of the better-known exceptions—teachers and scholars who’re well regarded for their journalism and magazine essays. You would not think of Sanjay Subrahmanyam in connection with this bunch. A formidable economist who grew into a formidable historian and linguist—estimates of the languages in which he’s fluent remain inexact and it would take a supercomputer to tot up his publications—he’s usually associated with social science intellection at rarefied levels, including trade an...