Permanent Black – förlag

What was an Indian prince doing in the retinue of a French envoy at Constantinople in 1796? When Sultan Selim III, struck by the sight of a fellow Muslim in a French cortège, asked how he got there, he was told the traveller’s extraordinary story. It had begun in 1772 with the annexation by the East India Company of Broach, a coastal town in Gujarat. Twenty years later, four sons of the town’s deposed nawab headed towards London to seek redress. One of them, Ahmad Khan, reached Paris during the Reign of Terror and told his story to the new Revolutionary regime. Yet, although his tale was true, he was not the man he claimed to be. Uncovering the elusive paper trail of a group of travellers across early colonial India, the Ottoman Empire, and Revolutionary France, Markovits pieces together an astonishing range of fragments from a vast multilingual archive to illuminate in vivid detail how navigating regimes of protection and assistance was key to their securing a passage to Europe.

Symbols of Substance is a groundbreaking analysis of the political culture and political economy of the small Nayaka states that emerged and flourished in the Tamil country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An unusual product of triple authorship, the book examines how such states emerged, what their ideological moorings were, and what they have left us in terms of a cultural heritage. In so doing, it overturns the cliché of a South India in terminal decline after 1565, which had long dominated the narratives of both historians and popular writers.

A century ago, in the autumn of 1924, the scholar-archaeologist John Marshall made an announcement that dramatically altered existing perceptions of South Asia’s antiquity: he proclaimed the discovery of “the civilization of the Indus Valley.” This was seen as monumental - on the same scale as the findings of Heinrich Schliemann who unearthed Troy, and Arthur Evans who dug out Minoan Crete. The Troy and Crete stories have been well told, but a detailed, archivally rich, and completely accessible narrative of the people, processes, places, and puzzles that led up to Marshall’s proclamation has long remained unknown. Now, for the first time here, we have the whole story enchantingly told.

Lucknow was once described as “the last example of the old pomp and refinement of Hindustan”. Both culturally and architecturally it remains one of the most interesting cities of North India. Besides touching on the political aspects of nawabi rule in the province of Awadh, this book discusses the ethos and architecture of Lucknow in its heyday: between the period of the first nawab in the early eighteenth century, and the last nawab who was deposed by the British in 1856.