A.R. Venkatachalapathy took his Ph.D. in history from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for his dissertation on the print culture in colonial Tamil Nadu. Presently he is Associate Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He has earlier taught at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, the University of Madras and the University of Chicago. An accomplished Tamil writer, he has written/edited over fifteen books in Tamil combining rigorous scholarly discipline with literary flair. He is also the translator of Sundara Ramaswamy’s J.J.: Some Jottings (Katha, 2004).