Permanent Black: 50 books
Nivedan
The Autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
The autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi (18761947), pioneering scholar of Pali and Buddhist Studies, is one of the most moving and spellbinding life stories ever written.Born in rural Goa, Dharmanand came under the spell of the Buddhas teachings during his adolescence. At an early age he set off on an...
by Bill Aitken
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
Away from over-used tourist trails and trekking routes, Bill Aitken wanders through the Himalaya. His inclination is to enter disused colonial dak bungalows and ruined temples, meander in wild glades above the treeline carpeted with wild flowers, filling his water bottle from mountain springs and waterfalls....
by Ramachandra Guha
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2013
I call myself a Nehruvian Indian [and] I like to think that the term "Nehruvian Indian" captures more than my own c.v.', says Ramachandra Guha in his Introduction to this sparkling collection of essays. His book is a meditation on how a large area of contemporary India's cultural and intellectual...
by Christophe Jaffrelot
Language: English
Release Date: August 24, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: August 24, 2018
In India and beyond, Hindu nationalism came into the headlines in the 1990s, when the Ayodhya movement—to build a temple in place of a mosque—gained momentum. This was when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. This stream of Indian politics is, however, considerably...
by Mukul Kesavan
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
‘Every English-speaking Indian man between twenty-five and sixty has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to, and the curse of communalism’, says Mukul Kesavan. Like many of the insightful comments for which his historically...
Indias Literary History
Essays on the Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2013
This book, the first major reassessment of literary history in nineteenth-century India for a generation, opens up this emerging field of literary history to nineteenth-century India. Its essays emphasise the making of literary history, the process of canonisation, the reinvention of literary tradition,...
Brahmin and Non-Brahmin
Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2016
In South India, the categories ‘Brahmin’ and ‘non-Brahmin’ are frequently treated as self-evident, both within contemporary Tamil politics and in mainstream academic discourses. Departing from this political and academic ‘common sense’, the present book historicizes the complex processes...
The World's First Anti-Dam Movement
The Mulshi Satyagraha 1920-1924
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2014
During the time of contemporary India’s most famous anti-dam movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a professor of politics in Pune, Rajendra Vora, wrote a study in Marathi of that movement’s forgotten predecessor. Back in the 1920s, the peasants of Mulshi Peta, near Pune, had protested against the...
Dharmanand Kosambi
The Essential Writings
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
The life and writings of Dharmanand Kosambi (18761947), pioneering scholar of Pali and Buddhist Studies, comprise the substance of this book.Born in rural Goa, Dharmanand came under the spell of the Buddhas teachings during his adolescence. As described in his long autobiographical memoir (included here),...
Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion
With a new essay on Satyajit Ray by Amitav Ghosh
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2013
Looking back now, I am more than ever aware of the part that [Satyajit] Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical…When I saw Agantuk [The Stranger], in...
by Sumit Sarkar
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
This classic work of scholarship, first published in 1973, has long been out of print. It is reprinted now with a new preface by the author and critical essays by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Print and Pleasure
Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Print and Pleasure tells the story behind the boom in commercial publishing in nineteenth-century North India.How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What...
Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects
Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
This is a remarkable work of scholarship which shows how Kashmirs modern Muslim identity came into existence. In doing this, it demonstrates the complex manner in which politics can enforce the creation of religious identity. Kashmir is a hotbed of religious politics. Disputed between India and Pakistan,...
The Small Voice of History
Collected Essays
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2012
Ranajit Guha is arguably the Indian historian whose writings have had a massive and formative impact on contemporary scholarship in several disciplines throughout the world: on postcolonial studies in literature, in anthropology, in history, in cultural studies, in art history.Guha first became known...