About the Book: The Cooking of Books
It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship that
survives forty 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It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD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 of cricket, while also