New Books in South Asian Studies Podcast

On "The Mahābhārata" from 2022-11-23T09:10

When it comes to epic poetry, there’s a strong case to be made that the Ancient Indian story the Mahābhārata is the most epic. Clocking in at around 100,000 verses, the Mahābhārata is roughly seven...

Listen

Apabhraṃśa from 2022-07-08T08:00

Abhishek Avtans talks about the apabhraṃśa, a word that refers to the middle stage of the Indo-Aryan languages, crucial links between ancient languages like Sanskrit, and modern South Asian languag...

Listen

Ghazal from 2022-06-14T08:00

Manan Kapoor talks about the Ghazal, the medieval Arabic poetic form which travelled to the Indian subcontinent in the 12th century and flourished there ever since. He focuses on the work of Agha S...

Listen

Diaspora with Diasporastan from 2022-06-01T08:00

In our second crossover episode, Saronik talks to Maryyum Mehmood and Aditya Desai, the hosts of Diasporastan, a podcast for discussions on the South Asian diaspora, both as topic and lens through ...

Listen

Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, “Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Himalayas have long been at the crossroads of the exchange between cultures, yet the social lives of those who inhabit the region are often framed as marginal to historical narratives. And whil...

Listen

Sareeta Amrute, “Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington Sareeta Amrute has written Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016), a study of c...

Listen

Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives this concept has produced and continues to produce,...

Listen

Sujatha Gidla, “Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in ...

Listen

Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement” (U. Cal Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfacti...

Listen

Jane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the Universit...

Listen

Michael J. Altman, “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of syn...

Listen

Mengia Hong Tschalaer, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her inspiring new book, Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mengia Hong Tschalaer charts the strivings and creative struggles ...

Listen

Rahuldeep Singh Gill, “Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, A...

Listen

Manan Ahmed Asif, “A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In contemporary South Asia, the question of Muslim origins emerges in school textbooks, political dialogues, or at tourist or pilgrimage cites. The repeated narrative revolves around the foreign Mu...

Listen

Kief Hillsbery, “Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of...

Listen

Michael Youngblood, “Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization” (South Asian Studies Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by...

Listen

William Elison, et.al. “Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ways. But what can we learn from a dee...

Listen

Rajan Gurukkal, “Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usuall...

Listen

Audrey Truschke, “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal C...

Listen

Ronojoy Sen, “Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Covering sporting activities from ancient times right up to the modern day, Ronojoy Sen’s Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2016) is at once broad in its scope...

Listen

Benjamin Schonthal, “Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of the Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship betwee...

Listen

Anastasia Piliavsky, ed., “Patronage as Politics in South Asia” (?Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambri...

Listen

Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practi...

Listen

“Best New Books in Political Science 2016: International Politics Edition” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Sin...

Listen

Carol Upadhya, “Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and as...

Listen

Rupa Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation...

Listen

Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a ...

Listen

Arie L. Molendijk, “Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, the Netherlands. He has written Friedri...

Listen

Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not on...

Listen

Liam Brockey, “The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck...

Listen

Prerna Singh, “How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Poli...

Listen

Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoli...

Listen

D. Asher Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is des...

Listen

Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: E...

Listen

James Staples, "Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to co...

Listen

Anand Pandian, “Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do we live in a real world or a ‘reel world,’ in which life begins to feel like a film? In this wonderful ethnography of the Tamil film industry, Anand Pandian explores topics as grand, rich and ti...

Listen

Pedro Machado, "Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (Ohio UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020), co-edited by Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, Steve Mullins) is the first book to examine the trade, dis...

Listen

Srimati Basu, “The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are solutions to marital problems always best solved through legal means? Should alternative dispute resolutions be celebrated? In her latest book The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law ...

Listen

Uma Majmudar, “Gandhi and Rajchandra: The Making of the Mahatma” (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This book traces the little-known yet unparalleled influence of Shrimad Rajchandra, Jain zaveri (jeweller)-cum-spiritual seeker, on Mahatma Gandhi. In examining original Gujarati writings of both G...

Listen

Sahana Udupa, “Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Po...

Listen

Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the che...

Listen

Sangay Mishra, “Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans” (U of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mishra is an assistant professor of political science at Drew Unive...

Listen

Annapurna Garimella, “The Contemporary Hindu Temple: Fragments for a History” (Marg Foundation, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary Hindu temples raise aesthetic, economic, political and philosophical questions about the role of architecture in making a place for the sacred in society. This book presents the Hindu ...

Listen

Nayanika Mathur, “Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India” (U of Cambridge Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nay...

Listen

Coulter George, "How Dead Languages Work" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After reading How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press 2020), Coulter George hopes you might decide to learn a bit of ancient Greek or Sanskrit, or maybe dabble in a bit of Old Germanic. Bu...

Listen

Jeff Koehler, “Darjeeling” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Darjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and...

Listen

Hayden J. Bellenoit, "The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760-1860" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When he appeared before the British House of Commons in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, Benjamin Franklin reminded his audience that the American colonies were governed ‘at the expense only of a ...

Listen

Mitra Sharafi, “Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parsis, also known as Zoroastrians, were deeply entwined with the colonial legal system of British India and Burma, far beyond what one might expect from their relativity small numbers. Mitra Shara...

Listen

Anway Mukhopadhyay, “The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions” (Palgrave, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary debates on “mansplaining” foreground the authority enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privile...

Listen

Tasneem Khalil, “Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia” (Pluto Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

State executioners in their various guises are explored in all their horrific detail by Tasneem Khalil, in his new book Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia (Pluto, 2016). From the R...

Listen

Kristin Plys, "Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1947, decolonization promised a better life for India's peasants, workers, students, Dalits, and religious minorities. By the 1970s, however, this promise had not yet been realized. Various grou...

Listen

Sara Shneiderman, “Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Sara Shneiderman is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a Himalayan comm...

Listen

Margrit Pernau, "Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied a...

Listen

Anita Weiss, “Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pakistan is often caricatured and stereotyped as a volatile nuclear country on the precipice of disaster. Such depictions are often especially acerbic when comes to the issue of Women’s rights in t...

Listen

Tahseen Shams, "Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toront...

Listen

Arthur Dudney, “Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History” (Hay House India, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History (Hay House India, 2015) by Arthur Dudney tells the story of India’s capital and beyond through the lens of Persian literary culture. A lively read written for ...

Listen

Bihani Sarkar, "Heroic Sh?ktism: The Cult of Durg? in Ancient Indian Kingship" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heroic Saktism is the belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durga, the form and substance of kingship. This belief formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cu...

Listen

Peter van der Veer, “The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India” Princeton University Press, 2013 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the m...

Listen

Sree Padma, "Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions" (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions (Oxford UP, 2013), Padma (Bowdoin College) focuses on two types of Gramadevatas or goddesses: deif...

Listen

Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we no...

Listen

Wilson Chacko Jacob, "For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire: Sayyid F...

Listen

Sanjay Srivastava, “Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthr...

Listen

Ahalya Satkunaratnam, "Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharatanatyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka" (Wesleyan UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“How can dance be sustained by its practitioners in the unstable political and geographical landscape of war?” Satkunaratnam asks this through her text, Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practici...

Listen

Amanda Lucia, “Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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: Devotees in a Global Embrace (Univers...

Listen

Michael Slouber, "A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Slouber's new book A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press, 2020) surveys the diversity of India's feminine divi...

Listen

Neha Vora, “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neha Vora‘s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, ...

Listen

Tim Bruce, "Devi Mahatmyam: The Glory of the Goddess" (Raconteurs Audio LLP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Tim Bruce, narrator of Devi Mahatmyam: The Glory of the Goddess (Raconteurs Audio LLP, 2020). For millions worldwide, the Devi Mahatmyam is of central spiritual importance and of ...

Listen

Bhavani Raman, “Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India” (U of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bhavani Raman‘s new book Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) explores the world of colonial clerks in the Madras Presidency. Arguing ...

Listen

Adam Auerbach, "Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Good Provision in India’s Urban Slums" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to basic public goods and services—paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communit...

Listen

Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, “New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India” (Oxford UPs 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theore...

Listen

Rita D. Sherma, "Contemplative Studies in Hinduism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What counts as contemplative practices in Hinduism? What can Hindu Studies offer Contemplative Studies as a discipline? Contemplative Studies in Hinduism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship ...

Listen

Gyanendra Pandey, “A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democra...

Listen

Ravinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested Third World count...

Listen

Mrinalini Chakravorty, “In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. M...

Listen

E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Trade and Traders" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Blessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also people ...

Listen

Venkat Dhulipala, “Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the historiography on South Asian Islam, the creation of Pakistan is often approached as the manifestation of a vague loosely formulated idea that accidentally emerged as a nation-state in 1947....

Listen

Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism? We speak with Robert M. Geraci about his research into religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering...

Listen

Jeffery Witsoe, “Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffery Witsoe‘s book Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India (University of Chicago Press, 2013) takes the reader to urban and rural Bihar...

Listen

Ronit Ricci, "Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have ...

Listen

Joyce B. Flueckiger, “When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess” (Indiana UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 of the goddess Gangamma’s festival and...

Listen

Nicholas H. A. Evans, "Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A sustained and compelling critique of the doubt/belief binary in the anthropology of religion and Islam, Nicholas H. A. Evans’ Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Q...

Listen

Steven E. Kemper, “Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864...

Listen

Chhaya Goswami, "Globalization Before Its Time: The Gujarati Merchants from Kachchh" (PRH India, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chhaya Goswami’s Globalization Before Its Time: The Gujarati Merchants from Kachchh (Penguin Random House India) asks: How did the Kachchhi traders build on the Gujarat Advantage? In the eighteenth...

Listen

Julie Billaud, “Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ project...

Listen

Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deplo...

Listen

Tenzin Chogyel (trans. Kurtis R. Schaeffer), “The Life of the Buddha” (Penguin Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eig...

Listen

Debjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terr...

Listen

Nicholas B. Dirks, “Autobiography of an Archive : A Scholar’s Passage to India” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas B. Dirks‘ Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (Columbia University Press, 2015) is a wonderful collection of essays, loosely arranged along the line’s of the author’s...

Listen

Omar H. Ali, "Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. It offers a rare look at an indivi...

Listen

Pedro Machado, “Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and...

Listen

Sai Balakrishnan, "Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Profe...

Listen

Ananya Vajpeyi, “Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard University Press, 2012) by Ananya Vajpeyi is a rethinking of the self in self-rule, as understood in the ideas generated and r...

Listen

Malcolm Keating, "Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we know what we know? The most prominent means of knowledge for Indian philosophers are direct perception (pratyak?a), inference (anum?na) and authority (?abda). Then there is the much deba...

Listen

Jamal Elias, “Aisha’s Cushion” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his remarkable new book Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Practice, and Perception in Islam (Harvard University Press, 2012), Jamal Elias, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Penns...

Listen

Jonathan Lee, "Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present" (Reaktion Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Lee’s comprehensive study of Afghanistan’s political history in Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present (Reaktion Books) tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising l...

Listen

Ritu G. Khanduri, “Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a wonderful piece of visual anthropology by Ritu Gairola Khanduri, which uses the histo...

Listen

Matty Weingast, "The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns" (Shambhala, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A radical and vivid rendering of poetry from the first Buddhist nuns that brings a new immediacy to their voices. The Therigatha ("Verses of the Elder Nuns") is the oldest collection of known writi...

Listen

Peter Gottschalk, “Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 religious. In Religion, Science, and Empire:...

Listen

Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920" (University of California Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas R. Metcalf’s Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (University of California Press) is an innovative remapping of empire. Imperial Connections offers a broad-rangi...

Listen

Dhara Anjaria, “Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899-1905” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I won’t speak for you, but I find it utterly remarkable that the British were able to “rule” India. Britain, of course, is a small island off a small continent some significant distance from most o...

Listen

Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora" (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sana Aiyer investigates how Indian diasporic actors influenced the course of Kenya’s political history, from partneri...

Listen

Mukulika Banerjee, “Why India Votes?” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why India Votes? (Routledge, 2014) is the latest book by Mukulika Banerjee and is a deep, engaging and continually surprising account of elections in India. Weaving together ethnographic research i...

Listen

Audrey Truschke, “Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many, the history of the Mughal empire looms heavy over contemporary South Asian social imaginaries. The lightning rod figure within modern day myths about the past is the Mughal emperor Aurang...

Listen

Cabeiri Robinson, “Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of jihad is among the most keenly discussed yet one of the least understood concepts in Islam. In her brilliant new book Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of...

Listen

Alessandro Graheli, "The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

he Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) spans over two thousand years of inquiry into language in the Indian subcontinent. Edited by Alessandro ...

Listen

Neilesh Bose, “Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2014),Neilesh Bose analyses the trajectories of Muslim Bengali politics in the first ...

Listen

Shankar Nair, "Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shankar Nair’s new book Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2020) is an intellectually daring and dazzlingly imagi...

Listen

Meir Shahar and John Kieschnick, “India in the Chinese Imagination” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese re...

Listen

Martin Gansten, "The Jewel of Annual Astrology: A Translation of Balabhadra's H?yanaratna" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We speak with Martin Gansten on his groundbreaking edition and translation of Balabhadra's H?yanaratna (1649), the first-ever scholarly volume on Sanskritized Perso-Arabic (T?jika) astrology. The J...

Listen

Pamela Price, “The Writings of Pamela Price” (Orient BlackSwan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Writings of Pamela Price: State, Politics, and Cultures in Modern South India: Honour, Authority, and Morality (Orient BlackSwan, 2013) is a wonderful collection of ten essays by historian Pame...

Listen

Jeffery D. Long, "Hinduism in America" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Hinduism in America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) Jeffrey D. Long traces two worlds that converge – that of Hindu immigrants to America who strive to preserve their traditions in a foreign land, a...

Listen

Sarah Besky, “The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India” (U of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic...

Listen

Arti Dhand, "Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahabharata" (SUNY Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s s...

Listen

Kavita Datla, “The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her brilliant new book, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (University of Hawaii Press, 2013),Kavita Datla, Associate Professor of History at Mount Holyoke Colleg...

Listen

Kareem Khubchandani, "Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife" (Michigan UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020) follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore an...

Listen

Jamie Cross, “Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India” (Pluto Books, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India (Pluto Press, 2014), the excellent new book by Jamie Cross, explores the ways in which dreams of the future shape the present. Centring...

Listen

Ravi Palat, "The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650" (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon ...

Listen

Loraine Kennedy, “The Politics of Economic Restructuring in India” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Loraine Kennedy‘s The Politics of Economic Restructuring in India: Economic Governance and State Spatial Rescaling (Routledge, 2014) is a timely and important intervention into the debate on how ec...

Listen

Ananya Chakravarti, "The Empire of Apostles" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ananya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press), recovers the religious roots of Europe's firs...

Listen

Harleen Singh, “The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh e...

Listen

Gaurav Desai, "Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination" (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Rea...

Listen

Ayona Datta, “The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement” (Ashgate, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement (Ashgate, 2012) by Ayona Datta is a detailed account of how the law interweaves in everyday life in a squatter settlement in D...

Listen

Gabriel Dattatreyan, "The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), Gabriel Dattatreyan departs from the existing literature on masculinity in I...

Listen

Amrita Pande, “Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amrita Pande‘s Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy...

Listen

Khurram Hussain, "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Delighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). B...

Listen

Barbara Harriss-White, “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy” (Three Essays Collective, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 small team of collaborators – Elisabet...

Listen

Vanita Reddy, "Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture (Duke University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies thr...

Listen

Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool ...

Listen

Pritipuspa Mishra, "Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha,...

Listen

Stephen Legg, “Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by ...

Listen

Lakshmi Subramanian, "The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lakshmi Subramanian’s The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an amphibious history written around the juncture o...

Listen

Iqbal Sevea, “The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The towering Indian Muslim poet and intellectual Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is among the most contested figures in the intellectual and political history of modern Islam. Heralded by some as the fath...

Listen

A Conversation with Chris Chapple, Part II: Living Landscapes from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Join us as we continue discussion with Dr. Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Layola Marymount University as we dive into his new book Living Landscapes: Medi...

Listen

Karen Pechilis, “South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 course readers, full of excerpts taken from...

Listen

Edward Alpers, "The Indian Ocean in World History" (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied o...

Listen

Aswin Punthamabekar, “From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aswin Punthamabekar‘s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York University Press, 2013) offers a deeply researched and richly theorized look at the evolution of the...

Listen

Johannes Bronkhorst, "A ?abda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A ?abda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2019), Johannes Bronkhorst, emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne, makes the case through an extensive...

Listen

Afsar Mohammad, “The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India” (Oxford University Press, 2013 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Several studies about Islam in Asian contexts highlight the pluralistic environment that Muslims inhabit and interplay of various religious traditions that color local practice and thought. In The ...

Listen

Sara Smith, "Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What’s love got to do with it? Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by feminist political geographer Sara Smith tell u...

Listen

Carla Bellamy, “The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011), Carla Bellamy explores the role of saint shrines in India, while focusing on a pa...

Listen

David L. Haberman, “Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan” (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (Oxford University Press) explores the worship world of Mount Govardhan: located in the Braj region of India, the mou...

Listen

Sunil S. Amrith, “Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time...

Listen

Robert Yelle, “The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the nature of secularization? How distant are we from the magical world of the past? Perhaps, we are not as far as many people think. In the fascinating new book, The Language of Disenchant...

Listen

Jonathan Parry, "Classes of Labor: Work and Life in an Indian Steel Town" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town (Routledge, 2020) is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis...

Listen

Teena Purohit, “The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does colonial power, both discursive and institutional, transform the normative boundaries and horizons of religious identities? Teena Purohit, Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston Univers...

Listen

Drew Thomases, "Guest is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Guest is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India (Oxford University Press, 2019) Drew Thomases investigates the Indian pilgrimage town of Pushkar. While the town consists of 20,00...

Listen

Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman, “Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Genocide studies has been a growth field for a couple of decades. Books and articles have appeared steadily, universities have created programs and centers and the broader public has become increas...

Listen

Adheesh Sathaye, “Crossing the Lines of Caste" (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one? The ancient Indian mythological figure Vi?v?mitra accomplishes just this, transforming himself from a king into a Brahmin by...

Listen

James A. Milward, “The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxf...

Listen

Ayesha Siddiqi, "In the Wake of Disaster: Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the last couple of decades, a number of books written both by the academics and journalists have appeared on many dysfunctions of the Pakistani state, a few of them even predicting why and ho...

Listen

Matthew W. Mosca, “From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China” (Stanford, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to ...

Listen

Raj Balkaran, "The Goddess and the Sun in Indian Myth" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why are the myths of the Indian Great Goddess, Durg?, found in the M?rka??eya Pur??a framed by myths glorifying the Sun, S?rya? And why do these glorifications mirror each other in both content and...

Listen

Samir Chopra, “Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket” (HarperCollins, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were ...

Listen

Ehud Halperin, “The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whos...

Listen

Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t g...

Listen

Anya P. Foxen, "Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2020), Anya Foxen traces several disparate yet entangled roots of modern y...

Listen

Justin Jones, “Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin Jones‘ book, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is all about Lucknow, and colonial India, and Shia Islam – and the links a...

Listen

Ionut Moise, "Salvation in Indian Philosophy: Perfection and Simplicity for Vai?e?ika" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Salvation in Indian Philosophy: Perfection and Simplicity for Vai?e?ika (Routledge, 2019), Ionut Moise offers a comprehensive description of the ‘doctrine of salvation’ (ni??reyasa/ mok?a) and V...

Listen

Amanda Weidman, “Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India” (Duke UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colo...

Listen

Nandini Patwardhan, "Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions" (Story Artisan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1883, a young woman named Anandi Joshi set out from her native India to the United States to study medicine. To do so, as Nandini Patwardhan describes in her book Radical Spirits: India’s First ...

Listen

Matt Rahaim, “Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music” (Wesleyan UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Have you seen North Indian vocalists improvise? Their hands and voices move together to trace intricate melodic patterns. If we think that music is just made of sequences of notes, then this motion...

Listen

Hamsa Stainton, "Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019), Hamsa Stainton explores the relationship between 'poetry’ and ‘prayer’ in South Asia through close examination ...

Listen

Markus Vink, “Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court in the Seventeenth Century” (Manohar, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Presenting- and being granted an audience- at the court of a foreign potentate was the way to gain legitimacy, acceptance, and often, protection to be able to trade in the territory. Of course arri...

Listen

Deepra Dandekar, “The Subhedar's Son” (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This book is a translation and study of The Subhedar's Son (Oxford University Press, 2019), an award-winning Marathi biographical novel written in 1895 by Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, who writes a...

Listen

Andrew Muldoon, “Empire, Politics and the Creation of the 1935 India Act: Last Act of the Raj” (Ashgate, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It was the last in a long line of ‘Acts’ designed to ensure better colonial governance for the Indian sub-continent. It was an Act which was vociferously opposed by, amongst others, Winston Churchi...

Listen

John Stratton Hawley, “Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century” (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Stratton Hawley's new book Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2020) is about a deeply beloved place-many call it the spiritual capital of India. Loca...

Listen

Karen Ruffle, “Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism” (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender...

Listen

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

Listen

Guy Fraser-Sampson, “Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977” (Elliott & Thompson, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition ...

Listen

Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of...

Listen

Carolien Stolte, “Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600-1672 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was intended to get into Hartsinck’s good books; Angel h...

Listen

A. M. Ruppel, "Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this podcast, we interview Dr. Antonia Ruppel about Sanskrit Studies. Dr. Ruppel is the author the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and also teaches online S...

Listen

Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka,” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri...

Listen

Govind Gopakumar, "Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedest...

Listen

Donna Landry, “Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture” (John Hopkins UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a book about horses. Donna Landry‘s Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009) is all about how horses were a means of cultural e...

Listen

Jacqueline H. Fewkes, "Locating Maldivian Women's Mosques in Global Discourses" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is a mosque? What are women's mosques specifically? What historical values do women's mosques offer, and what is the relationship between mosque spaces and women's religious work? How do women...

Listen

Susan Harris, “God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Susan K. Harris‘ lates...

Listen

Caleb Simmons, "Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2020), Caleb Simmons examines the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1...

Listen

Peter Robb, “Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it i...

Listen

Nusrat S. Chowdhury, "Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bank...

Listen

Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean, “Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain a...

Listen

Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette, "Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosophy" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This ground-breaking work on Indian philosophical doxography examines the function of dialectical texts within their intellectual and religious milieu. In Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosop...

Listen

Jeff Sahadeo, “Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1903” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office; so that, he said, ‘all may know that here is ...

Listen

Kevin McGrath, "Vy?sa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mah?bh?rata" (Anthem Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Vy?sa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mah?bh?rata (Anthem Press, 2019), Kevin McGrath examines the complex and enigmatic Vy?sa, both the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mah?bh?rata and a key...

Listen

Marcus Franke, “War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India ...

Listen

Sheetal Chhabria, "Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay o...

Listen

Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne, “Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire” (Manchester UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

English common law is prevalent across large parts of the world; and all thanks to the British Empire. It was not just culture and commerce that came along to the colonies; English law, as Diane Ki...

Listen

Lisa Balabanlilar, "The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kingship in Mughal India" (I. B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite a reign that lasted for over two decades, the Mughal emperor Jahangir has often been regarded as a weak ruler who was hobbled by his addictions and dominated in his later years by his wife ...

Listen

Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexam...

Listen

Maria Rashid, "Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her spellbindingly brilliant new book, Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army (Stanford University Press, 2020), Maria Rashid conducts an intimate...

Listen

Eugenia Herbert, “Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Horticulture is not an activity normally associated with Empire building. But Eugenia Herbert‘s book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)....

Listen

A Conversation with Nicholas Sutton of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Dr. Nicholas Sutton speaks about his work at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. We discuss his teaching philosophy, his mandate of making the study of Hinduism accessible to pub...

Listen

Steve Inskeep, “Instant City: LIfe and Death in Karachi” (Penguin, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (Penguin Press, 2011), Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, chronicles the story of Karachi’s seemingly instantaneous population e...

Listen

Mallika Kaur, "Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in ...

Listen

Philip Stern, “The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal ru...

Listen

Mythri Jegathesan, "Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, commodity chain analysis – the scholarly effort to piece together the production and consumption ends of various commodities – has really taken off. For goods ranging from cotton t...

Listen

Alexander Morrison, “Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying commonalities; these were, after all, colonial Em...

Listen

Brian Collins, "The Other R?ma: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Para?ur?ma" (SUNY Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Collins' book The Other R?ma Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Para?ur?ma (SUNY Press, 2020) examines a fascinating, understudied figure appearing in Sanskrit narrative texts: Para?u...

Listen

Chris Poullaos and Suki Sian, “Accountancy and Empire: The British Legacy of Professional Organization” (Routledge, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For an empire supposedly founded on the back of trade, not much attention has been paid to how the finances of the British Empire were organized- or to the people who organized them. Chris Poullaos...

Listen

Jyoti Puri, "Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke UP, 2016), Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of s...

Listen

Yasmin Saikia, “Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971” (Duke UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s almost a cliche to say that war dehumanizes those who participate in it – the organizers of violence, those who commit violent acts, and the victims of violence. In her new book, Women, War, a...

Listen

Julia Stephens, “Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the ...

Listen

Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow a...

Listen

Peter Adamson, "Classical Indian Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri survey both the breadth and depth of Indian philosophical traditions. Their odyssey touches on the ...

Listen

Cecilia Leong-Salobir, “Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the th...

Listen

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

Listen

Mark Bradley, “Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, ...

Listen

Archana Venkatesan, "Endless Song: Tiruvaymoli" (Penguin, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the...

Listen

Vinayak Chaturvedi, “Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India” (University of California Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The odds are that if you don’t figure in an administration’s records, you won’t figure in the historical record. But what do you do to get into those records? Raising a ruckus is one way. But that ...

Listen

Elizabeth A. Cecil, "Mapping the P??upata Landscape" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth A. Cecil's Mapping the P??upata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the ?aiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (Brill, 2020) weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapur?...

Listen

Howard Spodek, “Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India” (Indiana University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek’s lovely book, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century Indi...

Listen

Susan Newcombe, "Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis" (Equinox, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paying special attention to sociocultural threads form the period 1945-1980, Susan Newcombe's new book Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (Equinox, 2019) charts the trajec...

Listen

Nile Green, “Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 about Bombay’s divers religions and peopl...

Listen

Pawan Dhingra, "Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pawan Dhingra's new book Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (NYU Press, 2020) is an up-close evaluation of the competitive nature of the United States ...

Listen

Robert Parthesius, “Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660” (Amsterdam UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph when they took over the port of Melaka in 1641,...

Listen

Pankaj Jain, "Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pankaj Jain, Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora (Routledge, 2019) provides a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, highlighting con...

Listen

Katharine E. McGregor, “History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past” (NUS Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nugroho Notosusanto (1930-1985) never pursued a military career; but all the same he did his bit for the Indonesian armed forces. He was co-opted into the Armed Forces History Centre as a young aca...

Listen

Maura Finkelstein, "The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2019), Maur...

Listen

Tilman Nachtman, “Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, ...

Listen

Knut A. Jacobsen, "Yoga in Modern Hinduism: Harihar?nanda ?ra?ya and S??khyayoga" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Yoga in Modern Hinduism: Harihar?nanda ?ra?ya and S??khyayoga (Routledge, 2017), Knut A. Jacobsen examines the K?pil Ma?h, a S??khyayoga institution emerging in the late nineteenth cent...

Listen

Noboru Ishikawa, “Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a South East Asian Borderland” (NUS Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Borneo is an island where three very different nation-states meet: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The Indonesian province of Kalimantan occupies most of the island; of the rest, all except one pe...

Listen

Christine Fair, "In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The attacks on the luxurious Taj Hotel in Mumbai in 2008 put Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a jihadist terrorist group, in the international / Western spotlight for the first time, though they had been deadly ...

Listen

Bhanu Athaiya, “The Art of Costume Design” (HarperCollins, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bollywood, the Hindustani film genre based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), has long been known for its lavish costumes and sets. Now comes a sumptuous book from a master costume designer, and the firs...

Listen

Kate Imy, "Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her fascinating and remarkable new book Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford University Press, 2019), Kate Imy explores the negotiation of religious identit...

Listen

Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t eve...

Listen

Sanjib Baruah, "In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sanjib Baruah’s latest book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020) completes a trilogy on India’s northeastern borderland region of which the first two...

Listen

Brian A. Hatcher, "Hinduism Before Reform" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did modern Hinduism truly emerge due to the “reforms” instigated by “progressive” colonial figures such as Rammohun Roy? Brian A. Hatcher's new book Hinduism Before Reform (Harvard University Press...

Listen

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

Listen

Ahmet T. Kuru, "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ahmet T. Kuru’s new book Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment, A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a ground-breaking history and analysis of the evoluti...

Listen

Andrew Ollett, "Language of the Snakes" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Ollett, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, argues in his book, Language of the Snakes: (University of California Pre...

Listen

SherAli Tareen, "Defending Muhammad in Modernity" (U Notre Dame Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), SherAli Tareen, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, takes us into t...

Listen

Patrick Inglis, "Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps espe...

Listen

Jennifer B. Saunders, "Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and their Narrative Performances" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and their Narrative Performances (Oxford University Press, 2019) tells the story of the Gupta family through the personal and religious narrati...

Listen

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

Listen

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

Listen

Kenneth R. Valpey, "Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join us as we speak to Kenneth R. Valpey about his ...

Listen

Dr. Alice Collett, "Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Alice Collett’s monograph Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford University Press, 2016) delves into the lives of six of the best-known nuns from the period of early Buddh...

Listen

Kim A. Wagner, "Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You've probably seen the film Gandhi and you likely think that you know all about the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. After all, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 academy award winning film did an incredible ...

Listen

Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question ...

Listen

Simon Brodbeck, "Krishna's Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyasa's Mahabharata" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While typically circulating as a separate text, The Harivamsha forms the final part of the Mahabharata storyline. Beyond this, it is rich storehouse of cosmological, genealogical, theological mater...

Listen

James M. Vaughn, "The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his notes for a speech to be delivered in the House of Commons in the wake of American Independence, the MP and imperial reformer Edmund Burke observed that ‘Some people are great Lovers of unif...

Listen

Sidharthan Maunaguru, "Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War" (U Washington Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sidharthan Maunaguru’s Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press 2019) is an unusual ethnography of the ‘in-betweenness’ a...

Listen

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

Listen

Sebastian Prange, "Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Sebastian Prange provides a fascinating window into the Muslim world of the medieval (12-16th cent...

Listen

Nosheen Ali, "Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her pioneering and politically urgent new book Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier (Cambridge UP, 2019), Nosheen Ali presents a lyrical and at many ti...

Listen

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, "In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholarly and public discourse on Islamic intellectual thought in the modern period tend to frame it narrowly through the concept of “influence” as it emanates from the Middle Eastern “center” to t...

Listen

Angela Rudert, "Shakti's New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Women-Led Spiritual Movement" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 contemporary North Indian female guru A...

Listen

Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, a...

Listen

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 in that most of them are what you might...

Listen

Jessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Until Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the histo...

Listen

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

Listen

Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, "Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mah?bh?rata Textual Criticism" (Anthem Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Hindu great epic, Mah?bh?rata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India. These manuscripts were painstakingly examined, sorted and reconstituted into the official Critical E...

Listen

Farhat Haq, "Shari?a and the State in Pakistan: Blasphemy Politics" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few doctrinal and political issues are more controversial in Pakistan today than that of blasphemy. In her excellent and engaging new book Shari?a and the State in Pakistan: Blasphemy Politics (Rou...

Listen

Mark McClish, "The History of the Artha??stra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was ancient India ruled by politics or religion? In The History of the Artha??stra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Mark McClish explores the Artha??...

Listen

Ather Zia, "Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ather Zia’s Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism (University of Washington Press, 2019) is a brilliant, bold, and urgent ethnography centered on Kashmiri women of the A...

Listen

Kim A. Wagner, "The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857(Oxford Un...

Listen

Geoffrey Barstow, "Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a...

Listen

Dolly Kikon, "Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India(University of Washington Press, 2019), anthropologist Dolly Kikon offers a rich account of life in the midst of ...

Listen

Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages ...

Listen

Mubbashir A. Rizvi, "The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its ...

Listen

Arik Moran, "Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role did women play in securing power in colonial Himalayan kingdoms? Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam UP, 2019) specifically documents the key roles played by women ...

Listen

William M. Gorvine, "Envisioning A Tibetan Luminary: The Life of a Modern Bonpo Saint" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Envisioning A Tibetan Luminary: The Life of a Modern Bonpo Saint (Oxford University Press, 2018), William M. Gorvine provides a multifaceted analysis of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (185...

Listen

Berthe Jansen, "The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet (University of California Press, 2018) discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies and ...

Listen

William Elison, "The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, tribal people, and members of other ma...

Listen

Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha, "Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book today is Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management (Routledge, 2017) edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha. It's the Winner of the Environmen...

Listen

Julia Cassaniti, "Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you understand mindfulness? Is your understanding limited by your own culture’s definition of what mindfulness is? These are some of the questions you will ask yourself while reading Remembe...

Listen

Ithamar Theodor, "Exploring the Bhagavad G?t?: Philosophy, Structure and Meaning" (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Bhagavad G?t? remains to this day a mainstay of Hinduism and Hindu Studies alike, despite the profusion of books written on it over the centuries. While the G?t?’s profundity is evident, its me...

Listen

Robert Haug, "The Eastern Frontier: Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia" (I. B. Tauris, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Haug’s new book, The Eastern Frontier: Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia (I. B. Tauris, 2019) is an in-depth look at the frontier zone of the Sassanian, Umayya...

Listen

Harshita M. Kamath, "The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 donning a women’s guises to impersona...

Listen

Alpa Shah, et al., "Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st-Century India" (Pluto Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A recent UNDP report makes the astonishing claim that India has halved its poverty between 2006 and 2016. Moving us past the rosy picture, Alpa Shah and her co-author's multi-authored, masterful G...

Listen

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, "Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz's Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (Oxford University, 2018) represents the very first study of a fascinating Hindu phenomen...

Listen

John Stratton Hawley, "Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between religion and power? With this important overarching theme in mind, Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart(University of Washington Press, 2019), e...

Listen

Marko Geslani, "Rites of the God-King: ??nti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (?anti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces (primarily the Atharva Veda and in th...

Listen

Hannah Weiss Muller, "Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. Th...

Listen

Kate Harris, "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" (Dey Street Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Har...

Listen

Pankaj Sekhsaria, "Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story" (HarperCollins India, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most consistent chronicler of contemporary issues in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Pankaj Sekhsaria's writings on the environment, wildlife conservation, development and indigenous co...

Listen

A. Nilsen, K. Nielsen, A. Vaidya, "Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations" (Pluto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

More than 70 years after its founding, with Narendra Modi's authoritarian Hindu nationalists in government, is the dream of Indian democracy still alive and well? Indian Democracy: Origins, Traject...

Listen

Patton E. Burchett, "A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How distinct is Indian devotionalism from other strands of Indian religiosity? Is devotionalism necessarily at odds with asceticism in the Hindu world? What about the common contrasting of Hindu de...

Listen

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killi...

Listen

Jane Hooper, "Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800" (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Madagascar lies so close to the African coast--and so near the predictable wind system of the Indian Ocean--that it’s easy to overlook the island, the fourth largest in the world, when talking abou...

Listen

Jeevan Sharma, "Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal" (Temple UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

People’s decisions to migrate in search of work are often discussed in terms of economic necessity, but these decisions are also shaped by a host of historical and cultural factors. In his new book...

Listen

Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr, "The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements" (U Georgia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political geographers in particular, have in recent years...

Listen

Dia Da Costa, "Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater" (U Illinois Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a world where heritage, culture, creativity, and the capacity to imagine are themselves commodified and sold under the banner of neoliberal freedom, (how) can art be harnessed for anti-capitalis...

Listen

Nico Slate, "Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Nico Slate, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, about the intersections between diet, spirituality, health, and politics for one of ...

Listen

Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the la...

Listen

Deonnie Moodie, "The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: K?l?gh?? and Kolkata" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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: K?l?gh?? and Kolkata (Oxford University P...

Listen

Anway Mukhopadhyay, "The Goddess in Hindu-Tantric Traditions: Dev? as Corpse" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Shiva is figured as a corpse? Centered o...

Listen

A. M. Ruppell, "The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ancient India which remained in vogue...

Listen

Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British em...

Listen

Raj Balkaran, "The Goddess and The King in Indian Myth" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 myths as a literary whole, frame and all? ...

Listen

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, "Islam in Pakistan: A History" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s Islam in Pakistan: A History(Princeton University Press, 2018) is a landmark publication in the fields of Religious Studies, modern Islam, South Asian Islam, and by far the m...

Listen

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Academy, and distinguished professo...

Listen

David V. Mason, "The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 the other? Join us as we dive into The ...

Listen

Shonaleeka Kaul, "The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru Univer...

Listen

Borayin Larios, "Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra" (De Gruyter, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra(De Gruyter, 2017; open access) probes the backbone of what makes Hinduism the world’s oldest living tradition: the unbroke...

Listen

Paul J. Kosmin, "Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose uni...

Listen

Richa Kaul Padte, "Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography" (Penguin Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parents, teachers, feminists, conservatives, lawyers, the concerned citizen – pornography raises everyone's hackles. Author Richa Kaul Padte approaches pornography with a combination of light-heart...

Listen

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

Listen

Claire Pamment, "Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bh?nd" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claire Pamment’s book Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bh?nd (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is a fantastic new book centered on the Punjabi folk art of the Bh?nd, or comic performance. Pamment explor...

Listen

Prakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Shah (Reader in Culture and Law at the Qu...

Listen

Nico Slate, "Lord Cornwallis is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced ...

Listen

Richard Salomon, "The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandh?ra: An Introduction with Selected Translation" (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode of New Books in Buddhist Studies, Dr. Richard Salomon speaks about his book The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandh?ra: An Introduction with Selected Translation (Wisdom Publicatio...

Listen

Ethan Mills, "Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa" (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Skepticism has a long history in the Western tradition, from Pyrrhonian Skepticism in the Hellenistic period to more contemporary forms of skepticism most often used as foils to theories of knowled...

Listen

Gil Ben-Herut, "?iva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Raga?ega?u (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 complicated world of texts and traditions...

Listen

Caleb Simmons, "Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 diverse collection of cutting-edge inter...

Listen

Richard Gombrich, "Buddhism and Pali" (Mud Pie Slices, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Gombrich's new book, Buddhism and Pali (Mud Pie Slices, 2018), puts the richness of the Pali language on display. He introduces the reader to the origins of Pali, its linguistic character, ...

Listen

B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition" (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambeda...

Listen

Mani Rao, "Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. The practitioners she engages at these s...

Listen

Brannon D. Ingram, "Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its tr...

Listen

Chinmay Tumbe, "Moving India: A History of Migration" (Penguin/Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chinmay Tumbe's book Moving India: A History of Migration (Penguin/Viking, 2018) is a brilliant and path-breaking history of Migration in India. Tumbe analyses the interlinked histories of migratio...

Listen

Alf Gunvald Nilsen, "Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Almost a decade in the making, Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland(Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws on collaboratively collected oral histories of ...

Listen

Patrick Eisenlohr, "Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World(University of California Press, 2018) by Patrick Eisenlohr is an exciting ethnographic study of Mauritian Muslims’ sound...

Listen

Radhika Govindrajan, "Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In what is sure to become a classic, Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018) mobilizes the thematic of “in...

Listen

Snigdha Poonam, "Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

49.91% of India’s population was below the age of 24 in the 2011 Census. By 2020 India will become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group of 15-64 years. T...

Listen

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

Listen

Llerena Searle, "Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India" (U Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities. Gated residential complexe...

Listen

Jessica Marie Falcone, "Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn from the anthropological study of projects that are never realized, or of dreams that are never fulfilled? In her new book Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the...

Listen

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, "The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan(Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an incisive study of continuity as well as change in Pakistan that ha...

Listen

Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parti...

Listen

Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 presence that at one time rivaled that ...

Listen

Sohini Kar, "Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is microfinance the magic bullet that will end global poverty or is it yet another a form of predatory lending to the poor? In her new book Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfin...

Listen

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “Forging an Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging an Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018) is a pathbreaking and incredibly timely mono...

Listen

Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard University Press, 2016-) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 of the Hindi devotional text, the R?mc...

Listen

Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practi...

Listen

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, “What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize what They Do” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to the Walk Free Foundation, there are currently 46 million slaves in the world. Despite being against international law, slavery is not yet culturally condemned everywhere. Despite being...

Listen

Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Ass...

Listen

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itsel...

Listen

Michael Levien, “Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries...

Listen

Merin Shobhana Xavier, “Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1971, a Sri Lankan Sufi arrived in Philadelphia to address a group of spiritual seekers. This trip initiated the career of one of the most influential teachers in the history of North American S...

Listen

Jeremy Martens, “Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907” (UWA Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018), Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in...

Listen

Madiha Afzal, “Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State” (Brookings, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings, 2018) provides a unique insight into Pakistan’s complex and multi-layered relationship with militancy and the role of the state i...

Listen

Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such...

Listen

Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 text – is it right to kill members of...

Listen

Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “...

Listen

Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideo...

Listen

Lavanya Vemsani, “Modern Hinduism in Text and Context” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academi...

Listen

Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and G...

Listen

Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the v...

Listen

Daisy Deomampo, “Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), Daisy Deomampo explores relationships between Indian surrogates, their families, aspiring parents ...

Listen

Tarak Barkawi, “Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships bet...

Listen

Elaine Fisher, “Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in p...

Listen

Milan Vaishnav, “When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do Indian voters knowingly vote for politicians with pending criminal proceedings against them? Why do political parties recruit criminal politicians among their rank and file? If money and mus...

Listen

Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 intricately tied to the hardening of ...

Listen

Mark Liechty, “Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal” (U of Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Nepal become synonymous, in the minds of many Westerners, with the idea of a mystical paradise and a place to find enlightenment? How did Kathmandu become the subject of songs by countercul...

Listen

Bhoomi Thakore, “South Asians on the U.S. Screen: Just Like Everyone Else?” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the portrayal of a character like Apu matter? What does the representation of South Asian TV characters tell us about society at large? In her new book, South Asians on the U.S. Screen: J...

Listen

Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global ...

Listen

David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing A...

Listen

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, “Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad” (I. B. Tauris, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her fascinating and path paving new book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad (I. B. Tauris, 2017), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Relig...

Listen

Debarati Sen, “Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling” (SUNY Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production i...

Listen

Fahad Bishara, “A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Fahad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Bishara is Assistant Professor of ...

Listen

Fareen Parvez, “Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India ...

Listen

Reiko Ohnuma, “Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reiko Ohnuma‘s Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful treatment of animals in Indian Buddhist literature. Although they are l...

Listen

Amy Langenberg, “Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Birth and suffering are deeply linked concepts in Buddhism, and their connection has shaped how the bodies and status of women were understood. Join us for a conversation with Amy Paris Langenberg ...

Listen

Ammara Maqsood, “The New Pakistani Middle Class” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between class and religious piety represents a theme less explored in the study of modern Islam in general, and in the study of South Asian Islam in particular. In her incredibly n...

Listen

Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, political freedoms and national advancement, sugges...

Listen

Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2011-03-18T17:04:31

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t eve...

Listen

Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2011-03-18T17:04:31

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t eve...

Listen

Podcasts by New Books in South Asian Studies

All episodes

On "The Mahābhārata" from 2022-11-23T09:10

Apabhraṃśa from 2022-07-08T08:00

Ghazal from 2022-06-14T08:00

Diaspora with Diasporastan from 2022-06-01T08:00

Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, “Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sareeta Amrute, “Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sujatha Gidla, “Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement” (U. Cal Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael J. Altman, “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mengia Hong Tschalaer, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rahuldeep Singh Gill, “Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Manan Ahmed Asif, “A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kief Hillsbery, “Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Youngblood, “Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization” (South Asian Studies Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William Elison, et.al. “Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rajan Gurukkal, “Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audrey Truschke, “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ronojoy Sen, “Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Schonthal, “Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of the Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anastasia Piliavsky, ed., “Patronage as Politics in South Asia” (?Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Best New Books in Political Science 2016: International Politics Edition” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carol Upadhya, “Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rupa Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arie L. Molendijk, “Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Liam Brockey, “The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prerna Singh, “How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

D. Asher Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Staples, "Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anand Pandian, “Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Machado, "Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (Ohio UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Srimati Basu, “The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Uma Majmudar, “Gandhi and Rajchandra: The Making of the Mahatma” (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sahana Udupa, “Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sangay Mishra, “Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans” (U of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Annapurna Garimella, “The Contemporary Hindu Temple: Fragments for a History” (Marg Foundation, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nayanika Mathur, “Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India” (U of Cambridge Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Coulter George, "How Dead Languages Work" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeff Koehler, “Darjeeling” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hayden J. Bellenoit, "The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760-1860" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mitra Sharafi, “Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anway Mukhopadhyay, “The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions” (Palgrave, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tasneem Khalil, “Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia” (Pluto Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristin Plys, "Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sara Shneiderman, “Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Margrit Pernau, "Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Weiss, “Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tahseen Shams, "Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arthur Dudney, “Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History” (Hay House India, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bihani Sarkar, "Heroic Sh?ktism: The Cult of Durg? in Ancient Indian Kingship" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter van der Veer, “The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India” Princeton University Press, 2013 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sree Padma, "Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions" (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wilson Chacko Jacob, "For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sanjay Srivastava, “Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ahalya Satkunaratnam, "Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharatanatyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka" (Wesleyan UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda Lucia, “Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Slouber, "A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neha Vora, “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Bruce, "Devi Mahatmyam: The Glory of the Goddess" (Raconteurs Audio LLP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bhavani Raman, “Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India” (U of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Auerbach, "Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Good Provision in India’s Urban Slums" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, “New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India” (Oxford UPs 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rita D. Sherma, "Contemplative Studies in Hinduism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gyanendra Pandey, “A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ravinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mrinalini Chakravorty, “In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Trade and Traders" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Venkat Dhulipala, “Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffery Witsoe, “Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393