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Being an early modernist who works on non-Mughal South Asia is infuriating, because most of the books I need, never got reprints or paperback versions. One of the core texts for my research is Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam's Symbols of Substance, a book that came out in '92.
1992 was a full year before I was born, and SoS is a foundational text for studying Telugu and Tamil literary and political culture in the precolonial period. All copies for sale online, are priced at $95+ for used books, and OUP doesn't even list the book for sale on its site.
If people want to know why there are so many historians of the Mughal around, I would conjecture that part of it is because of how much easier it is to find material to work with, because publishers will print them. There are political considerations everywhere.
North India and Sanskrit will ALWAYS find more publishers than books about Tamil and other "regional" cultures. Most people don't even know that the Mughals didn't rule over all of South Asia, or that EMod South India produced exquisite multilingual literature and performances.
Publishers have to step up and remove paywalls and barriers to access. Pricing books out of people's financial reach, and not reprinting germinal texts in a field, forecloses the possibility of new ground being broken in research. I am one of few who work on 17th century Nāyakās.
Don't make me one of the last.
