Permanent Black

  Udaya Kumar on his new book, Writing the First Person. With V. Sanil, Mohinder Singh, Prathama Banerjee   Monday 20 March, 5 pm, CSDS seminar room 29 , Rajpur Road, Delhi.    

The Writer of Modern Life Three scholars on the making of Indian literature By VINEET GILL  |  1 February 2017   "M odern writers and artists in India—and in other postcolonial countries—have always had to contend with the politics of cultural exchange between the colonised and the coloniser. When the Bengali critic Dineshchandra Sen, in a letter to the British historian EP Thompson, referred to Rabindranath Tagore as “a European writer of Bengali,” he was articulating a grievance against all cultural renegades. Yet far from being a failing on the part of the postcolonial writer or artist, the urge to cross over is essential to modernity. The scholar Rosinka Chaudhuri, in her 2014 book The Literary Thing —a fascinating study of the beginnings of modern poetry in Bengal—employs an interesting phrase to describe the phenomenon: “creative cross-contamination.” Let there be no doubt: the spirit of modernity is confused, many-hued, contaminated. How t...

In his first speech after taking office, Pakistan's new army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, urged officers to read ARMY AND  NATION by STEVE WILKINSON, reports Salman Masood in The Nation . ISLAMABAD - The gathering of senior army officers of Rawalpindi Garrison sat alert in the General Headquarters auditorium and listened to their chief intently. It was the last week of December and Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, the army chief, had been into the top job just weeks earlier. The general delivered his first speech – an articulation of his vision – as the new army chief in a poised manner and communicated it to his officers in unequivocal terms. The army has no business trying to run the government, the general said. The army must remain within its constitutionally defined role, he stressed. Gen Bajwa also alluded that an impression of a competition between the civilians and the military is counter-productive for the country. And, apart from other professional advice, he urg...

CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE The Quotidian Revolution Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India In thirteenth-century western India, venture spiritualists—entrepreneurial religious figures—challenged the linguistic and cultural hegemony of Sanskrit, a language restricted to high-caste men. They did this by formulating new texts and social orders oriented around the use of the regional languages that reduced the barriers to access that Sanskrit had imposed. In so doing, these venture spiritualists created an early form of the public sphere in which the social ethics of caste and gender inequity were debated. This debate drew from, and reconfigured, the sense and scope of “everyday life” permeated by social distinction. The configuration of a new public sphere in medieval India that engaged with questions of social equality in the context of expanding the scope of everyday life is the process called “vernacularization.” The Quotidian Rev...

IQTIDAR ALAM KHAN The Mughal Nobility : Two Political Biographies Mirza Kamran (blinded and deported to Mecca in 1553) and Mun‘im Khan (d. 1575), whose political biographies this volume carries, are known for their prominent roles in the early Mughal state, over the time it was struggling to consolidate itself over North India. This was the crucial period which saw a process of gradual change in the structure and cultural ethos of the ruling establishment that Babur had brought with him. It came to be popularly known in India as Sultanat-i Mughlia (the Mughal Empire). One of its distinguishing features was the plurality of persuasions from which it drew its military personnel: Turkish-speaking Sunni Turanis, Irani or Khurasani Shias , Indian Muslims (the so-called Shaikhzadas), and Hindu Rajputs. The political lives of Mirza Kamran and Mun‘im Khan provide vital insights into the changing formation and character of early Mughal rule. Most modern ...

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Renunciation and Realization (Volume 4): Correspondence 1926–1932 Subhas Chandra Bose came to regard tyaga and amrita (renunciation and realization) as “two faces of the same medal” during his long stay in Mandalay Jail. “To attain hundred per cent and to sacrifice hundred per cent”, he proclaimed, had become a passion with him. This volume opens with Bose’s prison letters written during the last year he spent in Burmese prisons in 1926–1927 (plus twenty earlier unpublished letters of 1925). Between 1928 and 1931 Subhas was in and out of prison, even as he emerged as the leader of students, youth and labour across India. The volume closes with another set of his prison letters written from many different jails during the second phase of the civil disobedience movement in 1932. Paperback, Rs 495  

NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE  The Call of The Motherland (Volume 5):Writings and Speeches 1923–1929  “We have been born in this world to fulfill a purpose – to preach a message”, reads the opening sentence of Subhas Chandra Bose’s 1923 essay The Dreams of Youth (Taruner Swapna). “One hundred and fifty years ago,” he wrote in The Call of the Motherland (Desher Dak) in December 1925, “it was the Bengalees who showed the foreigners the way to penetrate India. Now it is incumbent on the Bengalees of the twentieth century to expiate that sin.” This volume brings together Subhas Chandra Bose’s prison essays and notes, speeches and articles between 1923 and 1928 as well as his early 1929 monograph Boycott of British Goods. Paperback, Rs 495

In 1921 a travelling sadhu appeared by a river bund in Dacca. He was there every day. Soon, people began to identify him as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal, a young zamindar who had died twelve years earlier. His wife denounced him as an impostor. His sisters welcomed him back. This resulted in one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history: it held the entire country’s attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dacca and Calcutta to London. This is possibly the most riveting work of history ever written in the Indian subcontinent. Ever since it first appeared, Partha Chatterjee’s  A Princely Impostor?  (2002), a telling of the notorious “Bhawal Sannyasi Case”—among India’s best-known legal disputes—has been recognized as world-class narrative history in a league of its own.  Chatterjee has written a book as spell-binding as any great Victorian or Russian novel, a story replete with courtroom drama, sexual de...

UDAYA KUMAR WITH THE FIRST COPY OF HIS BOOK  Why did autobiographical writings emerge in Kerala more than a century ago? What were the social, material and cultural features that motivated individuals to write personal histories and memoirs? This book shows the complex ways in which private recollections and the use of memory for loosely literary ends, also entailed the production of history by another name. Udaya Kumar analyses this period of social transformation to show the emergence of new resources for the self-relective writer, as well as of new idioms of expression. Among the many genres and forms he studies are anti-caste writings, works advocating spiritual and social reorientation, monologic poetry and early novels in Malayalam. Sree Narayana Guru’s thought, the portrayal of women and desire in Kumaran Asan’s poetry and the fictional worlds created by major novelists of this period (such as O. Chandu Menon and C. V. Raman Pillai), says Udaya Kumar, excit...

BOOK LAUNCH DALIT STUDIES, edited by Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana FRIDAY, 22, JULY 2016, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. Gulmohar Hall, 1st Floor, Indian Habitat Centre Lodi Road, New Delhi (Entry Gate #3) Appetizers & Drinks 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Also at English and Foreign Language University (EFLU), Hyderabad, July 26 2016 in the afternoon -- time to be specified.