Permanent Black: 50 books

‘Homeless’ in the title of this book means ‘cosmopolitan’. Mukul Kesavan, considered by many to be India’s most articulate and sophisticated scholar-journalist in English, covers a huge range of political and cultural subjects, local and international, in this collection of opinion pieces....

Is natural history a science? Are there scientific ways in which we can give wild animals a better chance of survival? How does conservation actually work? Ullas Karanth has been evolving practical, science-based conservation solutions for over a quarter of a century. He has developed camera-trap sampling...

The historiography on India shows innumerable conflicts which divide the subcontinent—communalism, caste, gender, language—suggesting a region perpetually on the edge of collapse. The disintegration somehow never happens. The present book seeks to locate this paradox of deep divisision and stability...

From the first half of the nineteenth century, the architectural history of medieval India has been the subject of diverse books, essays and miscellaneous writings. The present book pulls together the most significant of these writings, revealing the impressive array of historical ideas about India's...

Translated from the German, this is a major work of classical Indological scholarship. Drawing upon various sources and currents—folk, tribal, and the multilayered Sanskritic tradition—it offers major insights into the complex cultural history of Hindu religious traditions. Starting from the centuries...

Anthropology and sociology have long histories within India. Yet, with the exception of fieldwork experience, there is neither much material on the institutional and material contexts of these disciplines, nor on the practices of pioneering anthropologists and sociologists in shaping the intellectual...

There are many books on the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, pictorial and celebratory. The present one is of a different kind. Professor von Stietencron investigates the temple sculptures of Ganga and Yamuna in order to unveil a whole cosmos of Hindu ritual and conceptual tradition. He shows how an entire worldview...

his anthology comprises a selection of formative literary writings in Hindi and Urdu from the second half of the nineteenth century, leading up to Indian Independence and the creation of Pakistan. The texts here are mostly hitherto unpublished translations into English. The anthology provides a picture...