Shows / New Books in Indian Religions
New Books in Indian Religions
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 Indian Religions
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Angela Rudert, "Shakti's New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Women-Led Spiritual Movement" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
Angela Rudert's Shakti's New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Women-Led Spiritual Movement (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is the first academic study of the popular…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books…
- New Books in Indian Religions
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, "Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism" (Anthem Press, 2018)
The Hindu great epic, Mahābhārata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India. These manuscripts were painstakingly examined, sorted and…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Mark McClish, "The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Was ancient India ruled by politics or religion? In The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge University Press…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Alexander Rocklin, "The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad" (UNC Press, 2019)
Beginning in the mid 19th century, thousands of indentured laborers traveled from India to the Caribbean, and many settled in Trinidad. In The Regulation of…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Arik Moran, "Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)
What role did women play in securing power in colonial Himalayan kingdoms? Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam UP, 2019) specifically…
- New Books in Indian Religions
William Elison, "The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
William Elison's The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai(University of Chicago Press, 2018) explores how slum residents…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Ithamar Theodor, "Exploring the Bhagavad Gītā: Philosophy, Structure and Meaning" (Routledge, 2016)
The Bhagavad Gītā remains to this day a mainstay of Hinduism and Hindu Studies alike, despite the profusion of books written on it over the centuries. While…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Harshita M. Kamath, "The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance" (U California Press, 2019)
Harshita M. Kamath's new book The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance (University of California Press, 2019) features an investigation of men…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, "Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz's Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (Oxford University, 2018) represents the very first…
- New Books in Indian Religions
John Stratton Hawley, "Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart" (U Washington Press, 2019)
What is the relationship between religion and power? With this important overarching theme in mind, Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Marko Geslani, "Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (śanti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Patton E. Burchett, "A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India" (Columbia UP, 2019)
How distinct is Indian devotionalism from other strands of Indian religiosity? Is devotionalism necessarily at odds with asceticism in the Hindu world? What…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Deonnie Moodie, "The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Dr. Deonnie Moodie is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of Oklahoma. Her book, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Anway Mukhopadhyay, "The Goddess in Hindu-Tantric Traditions: Devī as Corpse" (Routledge, 2018)
Why is the Indian Goddess sometimes figured as a corpse in Tantric Traditions? What is the significance of this? How is it different from when the Hindu god…
- New Books in Indian Religions
A. M. Ruppell, "The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so? Sanskrit is the highly sophisticated language of…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Raj Balkaran, "The Goddess and The King in Indian Myth" (Routledge, 2018)
Why are myths of the Indian Great Goddess couched in a conversation between a deposed king and forest-dwelling ascetic? What happens when we examine these…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation" (Routledge, 2019)
Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts? What role does it serve? Join me as I speak with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British…
- New Books in Indian Religions
David V. Mason, "The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre" (Routledge, 2018)
To what extent may we say that religion is a theatrical phenomenon, and that theatre is a religious experience? Can making sense of one help us make sense of…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, “Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés” (Bloomsbury, 2017)
You’ve heard them all before. “Religions are Belief Systems.” “Religion is a Private Matter.” “I'm spiritual but not religious.” Our culture is full of popular…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Borayin Larios, "Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra" (De Gruyter, 2017)
Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra(De Gruyter, 2017; open access) probes the backbone of what makes Hinduism the…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Nathan McGovern, "The Snake and The Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion" (Oxford UP, 2018)
The history of Indian religions in the centuries leading up to the common era has been characterized in the scholarship by two distinct overarching traditions…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Prakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it? Join me as I speak with Dr. Prakash…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Gil Ben-Herut, "Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford UP, 2018)
Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Caleb Simmons, "Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia" (SUNY Press, 2018)
Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2018), edited by Caleb Simmons, Moumita Sen, and Hillary Peter Rodrigues, is a…
- New Books in Indian Religions
B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition" (Verso, 2016)
Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Mani Rao, "Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners? Mani Rao takes us on a journey to three sacred sites across India’s Andhra-Telangana region…
- New Books in Indian Religions
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017)
People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard University Press, 2016-)
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi”
Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation” (Routledge, 2018)
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014)
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Lavanya Vemsani, “Modern Hinduism in Text and Context” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Elaine Fisher, “Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia” (U California Press, 2017)
Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia” (Columbia UP, 2016)
For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement” (U. Cal Press, 2016)
Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Michael J. Altman, “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism…
- New Books in Indian Religions
William Elison, et.al. “Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation” (Harvard UP, 2016)
Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Rupa Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India” (Columbia UP, 2014)
The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Roman Sieler’s Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Arie L. Molendijk, “Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Sangay Mishra, “Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans” (U of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mishra is an assistant…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Amanda Lucia, “Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace” (University of California Press, 2014)
Waiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, “New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India” (Oxford UPs 2015)
New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Joyce B. Flueckiger, “When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess” (Indiana UP, 2013)
Joyce B. Flueckiger‘s new bookWhen the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess (Indiana University Press, 2013) is a rich and colorful analysis…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Andrea Jain, “Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture” (Oxford UP, 2014)
Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Peter Gottschalk, “Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India” (Oxford UP, 2012)
When did religion begin in South Asia? Many would argue that it was not until the colonial encounter that South Asians began to understand themselves as…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Barbara Harriss-White, “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy” (Three Essays Collective, 2013)
Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Karen Pechilis, “South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today” (Routledge, 2012)
If you’re going to teach a broadly themed survey course, you’ll probably need to assign some readings. One option is to assemble one of those photocopied…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal” (University of California Press, 2011)
What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University…
- New Books in Indian Religions
Nile Green, “Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written…