Read Of The Week (28 Jan to 3 Feb)

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship that survives 40 years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship that developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.

It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with the Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years, Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant and reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known — narrative histories that have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible.

Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness.