Permanent Black

Srinath Raghavan 1971 A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh Like all writers, academics watch the progress of their peers, tracking who’s publishing what, noting who’s flying high or plunging low, registering reputations, spreading the gossip that predisposes hiring committees this way or that. The consensus among such scholarly peer-watchers is likely to be that an uncommonly impressive young achiever in their community is Srinath Raghavan, whose debut work, War and Peace in Modern India (Permanent Black and Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), drew on a huge pile of untapped documentation to illuminate Nehru’s approach to war and desire for peace—within India, in relation to Hyderabad, Goa, Bengal, etc., as well as externally, with China and Pakistan. The book ran to nearly 400 pages, elicited a load of acclamatory reviews, and brilliantly bridged the gap that often separates the disciplines of international relations, history, and war studies. Earlier this year, 2013, ...

Mechthild Guha Danube, Ganges,  and Other Life Streams Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, was born in 1943 in Germany and grew up in Austria. After a PhD in anthropology at Vienna she journeyed to Sussex for postdoctoral research. England was meant to be a staging point for her return to West Africa, where she had spent several months, and about which she published a book—on the history of Benin. Meeting Ranajit Guha at the University of Sussex changed all her plans. They married, lived for a time in England, then moved to Delhi, and then went to Canberra. Now retired, they live close to the Vienna woods. Of this short but deeply thoughtful memoir Mechthild Guha says: “It had never occurred to me that it would be possible to pack the memory of seventy years into a few pages. Nevertheless, out of an eventful and varied life, I have tried to select those aspects which not only speak of me but also the many people and places that make up my memories.” A lover of natur...

If there were textbooks teaching academics how to write their PhDs and subsequent books, this spoof would constitute excellent advice: http://thepaperthinhymn.com/2010/01/26/how-to-speak-post-modernism/   At the non-spoofy end you'd have Sunil Khilnani, who, even when he's just writing a book review, seems as a writer in nearly a class by himself ('nearly' only because he'd have one companion in that class: Mukul Kesavan): http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115435/gary-basss-blood-telegram-reviewed-sunil-khilnani Neither entirely spoofy nor entirely serious is the style long adopted by TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/sanjay-subrahmanyam-myth-buster-113111301202_1.html

THE PRETTINESS OF RHINO MAIDENS AND OTHER UN-WAGNERIAN JUNGLEENESSES Mukul Kesavan by the inimitable        Mukul  Kesavan One day, in about 1981, looking in his pigeonhole at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was an M.Phil. student,  Mukul Kesavan found a card from his supervisor Chris Bayly which included the line: ‘Cambridge isn ’ t yet a holiday resort!’ The implication was that Kesavan better move it a bit on things academic. Later, Bayly presciently wondered if a career in journalism might not suit Kesavan well.   A year or so later, while granting him his M.Phil., Kesavan’s external examiner Francis Robinson felt that with a little more effort the M.Phil. could be worked up into a Ph.D. Kesavan, thanking his stars for not having the money to work further at the wretched thesis, fled that corner of his foreign field happily clutching the M.Phil. Over the subsequent years he went back to Cambridge  often,  but most...

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 ...