It consists simply of a slide show of details from the Acknowledgements pages of recent academic books on South Asia. Authors express gratitude to institutions and grant­givers, but also to conference series, to influential fore-runners, to mentors, and to peers. Without making any crude suggestions about conspiracies and nexuses, Index of Debt makes us aware of the conditions and circuits in which academic work is produced. As Hazra says, he attempts “to bypass questions of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ money” to raise questions about “the political implications of knowledge production, agency and representation:’+ 1he surfeit of place and people names in these Acknowledgements tells us much about the globalized networks of institutions and individuals that shape knowledge as it is being produced. If commercial writing follows certain implicit norms, Hazra’s piece suggests the way academic writing
too is powerfully determined and limited by certain, albeit other, norms.