History Culture And The Indian City

Raj Chandavarkar was one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century. He died sadly young in 2006, leaving behind a very substantial collection of unpublished lectures, papers and articles. These have now been assembled and edited by Jennifer Davis, Gordon Johnson and David Washbrook, and their appearance will be widely welcomed by large numbers of scholars of Indian history, politics and society. The essays centre around three major themes: the city of Bombay, Indian politics and society, and Indian historiography. Each manifests Dr Chandavarkar's hallmark historical powers of imaginative empirical richness, analytic acuity and expository elegance, and the collection as a whole will make both a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, and a worthy memorial to a major scholar. Review: 'Overall, this is an important, provocative and highly impressive collection. it appears even more impressive when we consider that it consists almost entirely of unpublished, semi-published and unfinished papers left by Chandavarkar at the time of death.' The Journal of Urban History 'All the essays in the volume are alive with Chandavarkar's voice; his gentle intellectual power and soft revolutionary influence. They issue a timely challenge to South-Asianists of all stripes as well as a new generation of scholars to think across ossifying disciplinary boundaries and thought-clogging accepted intellectual discourses to reanimate the study of South Asian society.' The Journal of Asian Studies