The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 | Historian Ramachandra Guha’s memoir on his relationship with his editor Rukun Advani

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, historian Ramachandra Guha found himself unable make his quarterly trips to the archives that nourished and punctuated his writing. Stranded, he “took recourse” to his personal archive, specifically, his correspondence with Rukun Advani, his editor of long standing at Oxford University Press who went on to found the imprint Permanent Black. The result: a writer’s memoir of his relationship with his editor, The Cooking of Books (Juggernaut, ₹699). In an interview over email, Guha spoke to Mini Kapoor about the book. Edited excerpts: 

You write that as far as you know, this is the first full-length book on the relationship between an author and his/her editor, with the qualification “at least not in English-language publishing”. You did know Rukun Advani in passing at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College, but later in the course of four decades as he played a vital role in your development as “successively, a historian, a biographer, a cricket writer, and an essayist”, you became friends. From this personal history, what can you identify the hallmarks of a great (not just good or competent) editor?