Permanent Black

All are welcome to this lecture by Professor Romila Thapar, chaired by  Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya

When Permanent Black signed on this book, the agreement was that it would include around 40-50 illustrations. In print, the book will have more than 200. How come? The reason is that the author is very persuasive. And he is very persuasive because he is both incredibly knowledgeable about his area of specialization, Telugu cinema, as well as enthusiastic about it to the point of being nuts. Facing a book which came in with four times the number of illustrations agreed to in the contract, it was surprisingly easy all the same for Permanent Black to say 'to hell with the agreement' because there is something quite special about this author's involvement in his subject. He has dug out an incredible array of songbook covers, film posters, and newspaper adverts from the most obscure and unknown private sources, and they are of immense value to his history. The other thing about this book is that you don't need to be a Film Studies wallah to follow it. Srini...

Admirers of Kathryn Hansen's  Kathryn in Austin, Texas many contributions towards understanding North Indian culture, literature, and theatre will want to read this interview . It provides an excellent synoptic view of a scholar who has devoted a large part of her life to a deeply empathetic engagement with things Indian. Not many know that she played the sitar and became, when she first came to India, a friend of Nikhil Banerjee. Permanent Black was privileged to be approached by her to publish STAGES OF LIFE: INDIAN THEATRE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (2011) , one of the most accessible, readable, and enthralling books on our list. In this she both contextualizes four important autobiographies by four theatre personalities from the days of the Parsi theatre, and translates all four from Hindustani/Gujarati into excellent contemporary English. Books by heavyweight scholars can seem intimidating; this isn't one of those. Kathryn Hansen entices you into the Bombay and Calcutta and ...

Coming in September 2013 from Permanent Black It's a great new telling of the birth of nuclear India from the 1930s to the late 1950s. Jahnavi Phalkey is a lecturer in the history of sci-tech at King's College London and, long back, her PhD won the annual Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation submitted at an American university on a South Asian topic. Since then she's been beavering away revising, discovering more material, rethinking and reformulating -- all the usual things that careful scholars spend years agonizing over before a publisher wrenches the script away from them. (JNU has at least two brilliant historians, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Indivar Kamtekar, who are still chewing their fingernails revising their PhDs: Permanent Black has assured them posthumous publication as well as medical expenses for possible onychomycosis. Curiously, these two share a birthday, so there may be something to astrology.) Phalkey demonstrates with hard evidence and irref...

Niraja Gopal Jayal Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Niraja Gopal Jayal whose book CITIZENSHIP AND ITS DISCONTENTS: AN INDIAN HISTORY (Permanent Black and Harvard University Press, 2013) has been published to profuse critical acclaim, is interviewed here by  Madhav Khosla Madhav Khosla (PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University). Q1. It is sometimes felt that a strictly legal conception of citizenship, as it were, can work against more participatory forms of citizenship. Do you feel that some inclusionary forms of citizenship are reflections of deeper failures? A1. That, in a sense, is my point of departure in this book: equality is the premise and the promise of citizenship, but it is also, and precisely because of this aspiration to equality, an embattled and endlessly contested political project. Take legal citizenship: it is certainly true that the denial of leg...

NOW IN PAPERBACK TO UNDERSTAND INDIA AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY, THIS BOOK HAS TO BE READ THE WITTIEST ENTERTAINER ABOUT INDIA AND THE WORLD Romila Thapar and Amba Partha Chatterjee as Bengali sage Sanjay Subrahmanyam before his beard grew white

In addition to retail bookshops, the COMPLETE PERMANENT BLACK list has in India long been available from our associates and primary distributors Orient Blackswan: www.orientblackswan.com And Orient Blackswan has made virtually every Permanent Black book available at www.flipkart.com, www.scholarswithoutborders.com, www.vedambooks.com, www.manoharbooks.com, and many other e-sellers of Indian publications Not all of the above, however, agree to ship books to customers outside India So the arrival in India of www.amazon.in, which replicates the swift downloads and manoeuvring ease of its counterparts in the USA and UK, will we think greatly facilitate the global online buying of books published in India, including of course the entire Permanent Black list ----- which is visible if you visit www.amazon.in and type 'permanent black' in their search box And they're available at Indian prices (not marked up to dollar prices, as in the US version of am azon), often with a ...

90th BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA My First Meeting David Hardiman Professor, History Department, Warwick University I met Ranajit and Mechthild Guha for the first time in October 1971, soon after arriving in India as a young history student about to start my doctoral research on a history of the nationalist movement in Gujarat.    Although Ranajit taught at Sussex University, where I had enrolled as a postgraduate, I had not so far met him as he had been away on research leave.    Already, Sussex had been an eye-opener for me.   I had previously studied as an undergraduate at London University, where I was exposed to what I came to realise was a strongly colonialist interpretation of Indian nationalism.   Anthony Low – who was now my doctoral supervisor – Peter Reeves, and others at Sussex soon changed all that.    My eyes were however to widen yet more on meeting Ranajit in his temporary abode, a flat in Ma...