Penguin Books India and Nehru Memorial Museum & Library present release of a path-breaking account of India’s past and present - "THE REDISCOVERY OF INDIA" by Meghnad Desai


with a panel discussion based on the book by Jaswant Singh, Mushirul Hasan, Ashis Nandy, MJ Akbar, Mridula Mukherjee and the author  to be moderated by Rajdeep Sardesai

 

on 17 December 2009 (Thursday), 4.30 p.m.

at the Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library

Teen Murti House, New Delhi.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK:

·         A truly remarkable work of historical analysis from a world-renowned economist and one of the foremost social and political historians of our time, The Rediscovery of India is a comprehensive account of five hundred years of Indian history (from the time that Vasco da Gama landed in India in the late fifteenth century) to make sense of the present. In many respects it is a postmodern, post-Independence response to, and an advancement from, Jawaharlal Nehru’s classic The Discovery of India, which was published six decades ago in 1946.

·         The Rediscovery of India is the fourth book to be published under Penguin India’s prestigious non-fiction imprint Allen Lane, the imprint of ideas, which was launched exactly a year ago, in November 2008, with Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India. The other two books to be published by Allen Lane in India have been NR Narayana Murthy’s A Better India: A Better World and Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good. The Allen Lane comprises some of the finest and most prestigious new non-fiction being written today, and The Rediscovery of India is the latest addition to this exclusive list.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

·         ‘Meghnad Desai’s learned, elegant and provocative book is sure to rekindle the debate about the idea of India, its political and cultural roots and meanings. The reader will enjoy joining the author on his journey of rediscovery, as he deftly situates the unfolding of India’s modern history in its global context.’—Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of History & Director, South Asia Initiative, Harvard University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

·         Meghnad Desai was born in Vadodara, Gujarat, and received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Bombay. He went to the US in 1961 where he completed a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught economics from 1965 to 2003 at the London School of Economics, where he now holds the post of Professor Emeritus. He has authored over twenty books and two hundred articles. His recent books include Marx’s Revenge: Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism; Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India; Development and Nationhood: Essays on the Political Economy of South Asia; Rethinking Islamism: Ideology of the New Terror; and a novel, Dead on Time.

·         Meghnad Desai has been an active member of the British Labour Party since 1971. He was made Lord Desai of St Clement Danes in 1991, and was awarded the Bharatiya Pravasi Puraskar in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2008. He divides his time between London, Delhi and Goa.

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