Shows / New Books in South Asian Studies
New Books in South Asian Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Farah Ahamed, "Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia" (Pan Macmillan, 2022)
Period Matters is a groundbreaking anthology edited by Farah Ahamed that explores the cultural, social, and political dimensions of menstruation in South Asia…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Madhavi Devasher, "Crossing Lines: Cross-Ethnic Coalitions in India and Prospects for Minority Representation" (Routledge, 2024)
Crossing Lines: Cross-Ethnic Coalitions in India and Prospects for Minority Representation (Routledge, 2024) explains why, how, and where ethnic political…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
India in the Global Attention Economy
What is the global attention economy, and how does this perspective help us make sense of the relationship between India and the Global North? In this episode…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Ashis Ray, "The Trial That Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence" (Routledge India, 2024)
In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Jon Chapple, "Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer" (Blazing Sapphire Press, 2024)
Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer is an in-depth, spiritual biography of a British fighter pilot (WW I), Ronald Nixon (1898-1965). Raised in an…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Radha Kapuria and Vebhuti Duggal, "Punjab Sounds: In and Beyond the Region" (Routledge, 2024)
Punjab Sounds (Routledge, 2024) nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Brian Collins, "The Other Rama: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Parasurama" (SUNY Press, 2020)
The Other Rāma (SUNY Press, 2020) presents a systematic analysis of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma ("Rāma with the Axe"), an avatára of Viṣṇu best known for…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Mick Brown, "The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Patrick Beldio, "The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga" (Lexington Books, 2024)
The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Daemons, Tantra, and Cultural Exchange with David Gordon White
In this episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with David Gordon White, a distinguished indologist and scholar of Tantra. Our conversation focuses on David’s…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Nadira Khatun, "Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford UP, 2024), Nadira Khatun explores the contentious Muslim…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Anna Lise Seastrand, "Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India" (Princeton UP, 2024)
An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Janam Mukherjee, "Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2015)
The years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a major front…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Manu Pillai, "Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity" (Allen Lane, 2025)
What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)
John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Paul G. Keil, "The Presence of Elephants: Shared Lives and Landscapes in Assam" (Routledge, 2024)
How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Esha Niyogi De, "Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Material Religion, Assemblage, and the Agency of Things in South Asia
This special issue of Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies is the product of a collective experiment with materials that are assembled, imagined…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Raheel Dhattiwala, "Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
In times of extreme violence, what explains peace in some places? This book investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, an…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Preetha Mani, "The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Tahir Kamran, "Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
Pakistan’s history since independence is…complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, "Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment" (HarperCollins India, 2020)
From being a fringe political party in 2013 to sweeping nearly half of the state s forty-two Lok Sabha seats in 2019, the BJP has gained ground in West Bengal…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Alpa Shah, "The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India" (OR Books, 2024)
The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (OR Books, 2024) pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India" (Columbia UP, 2025)
In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Divya Kannan, "Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and Christian missions in…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Lavanya Vemsani, "Handbook of Indian History" (Springer, 2024)
Handbook of Indian History (Springer, 2024) comprehensively examines the extensive history of India by focusing on the unifying themes of history. The profound…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Ayesha Jalal, "Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia" (Routledge, 2025)
In Ayesha Jalal’s latest work Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) readers are introduced to the “roshan khayali” (enlightened thought)…
New Books in South Asian StudiesChandigarh
Chandigarh is the shared capital city of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, built under the leadership of modernist and brutalist architect Le Corbusier…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)
From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world. By the…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Dan Archer, "Voices from Nepal: Uncovering Human Trafficking through Comics Journalism" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
How can we better protect survivors? How can we learn from their stories without causing further harm? With a pen in one hand and watercolours in the other…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap?…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
India’s Land Mafia: A Discussion with Chiara Arnavas
Who and what are India’s land mafia? How do they operate, and why have they become so crucial to India’s land market? In this episode, we are joined by Chiara…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Gidi Ifergan, "The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga" (Equinox, 2024)
Gidi Ifergan's The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga (Equinox, 2024) explores the road map of yoga as reflected in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali (third century CE)…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Ashish Avikunthak, "Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeological…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Amrita Narayanan, "Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Javaria Farooqui, "Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness" (Shambhala, 2024)
The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Richard H. Davis, "Religions of Early India: A Cultural History" (Princeton UP, 2024)
From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)
Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, "Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Arvind Sharma, "From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti" (Harper Collins, 2024)
Why yet another book on the Manusmriti? In From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti (Harper Collins, 2024), acclaimed academic Arvind Sharma argues that…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Jessica Namakkal, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India" (Columbia UP, 2021)
After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Oishik Sircar, "Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Mukulika Banerjee, "Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Radha Kumar, "Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975" (Cornell UP, 2021)
Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications
Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Pakistan, Populism and the Left
This podcast features Ammar Rashid, a leading figure in left-wing politics in Pakistan, and currently Director of the action-research organization Alliance for…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Antoinette Denapoli and June McDaniel, "Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture" (MDPI, 2024)
Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, "Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Daniel Joseph Majchrowicz, "The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
This episode features Daniel Majchrowicz, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature & Culture at Northwestern University, discussing his new book, The…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Sandhya Fuchs, "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Azad Essa, "Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel" (Pluto Press, 2023)
Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu…
- New Books in South Asian Studies
Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded…