Sumit Guha (UT-Austin) has a new book out from University of Washington Press: Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 (July 2023). I'm intrigued by the strength of UW's South Asia catalogue. Their Global South Asia series (edited by Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Anand A. Yang) just grows more impressive, and it's been fun seeing how the various titles intersect. I can't quite keep up with it, but I've leaned a lot on Sugata Ray's Climate Change and the Art of Devotion since it came out.
I always thought my book manuscript was destined to be sent to Duke or UChicago. Then the reality turned out to be that I'd always be one chapter away from finishing it and would send it nowhere. But every time I look at the UW Press website, I wonder if there's a way through that last chapter because that's the cohort I would want to join.
Anyway, back to Sumit Guha: a review of his previous book, History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000, also from UW Press, appeared on H-Net reviews his month, courtesy of Ramya Sreenivasan. My one real thought about this is that my own scholarship sags when it comes to Marathi-language sources, and I feel this most acutely when I'm writing/thinking about Sawai Jai Singh when he is outside the bounds of Amber/Jaipur, let's say the Malwa sojourns. This isn't what's keeping me from finishing my book, obviously, but I do sometimes wonder how different this last chapter would look if I'd spent as much time in Maharashtra as I had Rajasthan back in the day.
