Permanent Black

THIS IS A BOOK FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS GOOD FOOD: THE COOKING OF IT, THE EATING OF IT, THE SHARING OF IT. Some of these recipes have fed and delighted Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu. All of them have provided nourishment and comfort to generations of Bengali families. Now for the first time, these time-tested recipes are available in English. Renuka Devi Choudhurani (1910–1985) was married off at the age of ten into a zamindari family. That was when her culinary education began, mainly from her father-in-law, but also from itinerant bawarchis and specialist cooks. As her interest in good food developed, she took to collecting and recording recipes. Ultimately, she published a two-volume Bengali work containing about 400 vegetarian and 300 fish- and meat-based recipes. From the simplest dal to the most elaborate biryani, her recipes are easy to follow, and produce delicious results. This book contains a wide-ranging selection from the original Bengali work. It cov...

This book shows how Indian cinema’s many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in the twenty-first. Mahadevan proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, he digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to provide an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant cultural force in India. The result is an innovative account of Indian cinema’s “many origins.” “a rich study of a wide array of primary materials and an important intervention about how we might try to imagine writing the many histories of cinema . . . provides us with new lenses throu...

When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, the apprehension in academic publishers' minds that sales of liberal and Left books might suffer was offset by the assumption that the economy would flourish and keep them happy. Also, since no one in the new regime was likely to be interested in looking at anything written too long after the Vedas and the Golden Age of Sanskrit, there did not seem much cause for worry. In any case, the Congress had never failed to cave in when the crunch came to choosing between freedom of expression and mob violence, so the general situation seemed well described by the French cynicism of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . But what did create chaos for publishers, as much as for everyone else, was demonetization. Once people decide against buying everything seen as inessential, roughly the first thing they stop buying in India is books. With sales plummeting, most publishers and booksellers in the business ...

Honorable Mention in the  Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy  Book Prize 2018 "She achieves an extraordinarily intimate understanding of her subjects' circumstances" Economic and Political Weekly  Many people still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers navigating the currents of capitalism and the inequality they can produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue of class in India, introducing four people who live in the “second-tier” city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker. Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how class is determined...

“… here we see Sarkar grappling with his intellectual heritage, negotiating his own location within the new Marxist nationalist history of the period. Working within its frame, he pushes at the boundaries, disturbing neat classificatory schemes, resisting false historical comparisons, problematizing categories, and questioning linear narratives. The desire to explore contrary experiences and contradictory pictures is part of his process of questioning” NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA For the past forty years or more, the most influential, respected, and popular scholar of modern Indian history has been Sumit Sarkar. When his first monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 , appeared in 1973 it soon became obvious that the book represented a paradigm shift within its genre. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it when the work was republished in 2010: “Very few monographs, if any, have ever rivalled the meticulous research and the thick description that characterised this book, or the luc...

“Jean Drèze is one of the world’s finest development economists. He works in a space that is widely but incorrectly ignored by most. The practical implications of evidence-based economics cannot be worked through without engaging all of society in democratic discussion, including (especially) those who are working for change. Economics itself fails without that engagement. In this collection of beautiful essays, some previously unpublished, Drèze uses economics, philosophy, and his extensive practical experience to illuminate the whole range of social policy in India. Read on!” ANGUS DEATON Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences, 2015 Photograph of Jean Dreze copyright Anuradha Roy   Jean Drèze has a rare and distinctive understanding of the Indian economy and its relationship with the social life of ordinary people. He has travelled widely in rural India and done fieldwork of a kind that few economists have attempted. This has enabled him to make invaluable contributions not ...

If you missed these books when they came out in hardback it's time to get them now. Bodies of Song by Linda Hess Buy at Rs 595 Text and Tradition in South India , by Velcheru Narayana Rao Buy at Rs 695 Beyond Caste , by Sumit Guha Buy at Rs 595 Print and Pleasure , by Francesca Orsini Buy at Rs 595 Dalit Studies, edited by Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana Buy at Rs 595 Unconditional Equality , by Ajay Skaria Buy at Rs 595  Nature and Nation , by Mahesh Rangarajan Buy at Rs 595  Writing the First Person , by Udaya Kumar Buy at Rs 595 The Gender of Caste , by Charu Gupta Buy at Rs 595

Jean Dreze was gifted the first copy of his new book, Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone , at a pine-cone studded book-launch yesterday. The launch took place at the corporate headquarters of Permanent Black in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand.  A huge audience of deodar trees attended, listening to every word in rapt silence. Chief Guest Prakriti Mukerjee has been among Jean's band of road scholars, being one of the many students who camped for days in remote villages working on NREGA and PDS surveys through baking summer weather. She is now Research and Communication Officer at Lok Chetna Manch, Ranikhet, and she took time out of her busy schedule to hand over a be-ribonned copy of the book to Jean, as pictured below. Jean's new book, a superb combination of scholarship, passion, and commitment, is that rarest of things: a work of scholarship that is gripping and accessible. Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate, who calls Dreze "one of the world's f...

Traditional Indian panditya (scholarship) has a long and distinguished history, but is now practically extinct. Its decline is remarkably recent — traditional panditya flourished as recently as 150 years ago. The decline is also paradoxical, having occurred precipitously following a broad and remarkable flowering of the tradition between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The important questions this decline poses are the subject of much ongoing work. The intellectual history of the period is still under construction, and the present book represents a major contribution to the edifice. A notable impediment has been the lack of critical biographies of significant thinkers in this tradition. The importance of personal and social context for reconstructing intellectual histories is widely understood. In the classical Indian intellectual tradition, however, authors systematically exclude such context, making intellectual biography something of a rarity — very rare in English and s...

“A model of how social history stands to gain from a fuller use of legal sources.” C. S. Adcock, American Historical Review “An invaluable contribution…arguably the most important work to date in [Parsi studies].”  Simin Patel, Law and History Review “ … formidably intricate story of legal change … the author has achieved something remarkable. A community and its laws are explained.” Raymond Cocks, Journal of Legal History Winner of the 2015 J. Willard Hurst Award for best book in socio-legal history, Law and Society Association LAW AND IDENTITY IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Parsi Legal Culture • 1772–1947 by MITRA SHARAFI This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From...