The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore in Contemporary India (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores the landscape of anglophone trade bookselling in India, aiming to identify some key factors that have influenced the changing place of the brick-and-mortar bookstore over the last decade. The discussion focuses on a specific time period identified as a significant turning point, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic led to a series of developments in the field of Indian publishing: a newly emerging body of public discourse within the industry, highlighting the persistent marginalisation faced by brick-and-mortar bookstores; the temporary weakening of Amazon's near-monopoly; and bookstores' growing use of online platforms for sales, publicity, and activism. Drawing upon a range of primary sources and case studies, this Element explores how these developments altered what John B. Thompson calls 'the logic of the field' of contemporary Indian bookselling, transforming the brick-and-mortar bookstore into a newly revitalised space with possibilities for further expansion, growth, and diversity.

Nayantara Srinivasan is a PhD researcher at the University of Münster. Her research examines debut literary fiction in contemporary American publishing. She has previously worked in publishing.

Karishma Koshal is a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter. 

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South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology (Brill, 2025) examines the history and practice of animal omen divination in South Asia, comparing it to similar traditions in Mesopotamia and classical antiquity. It provides critical editions and translations of relevant texts, focusing on the interpretation of bird calls and behaviour. The study incorporates ornithological and natural historical information to enhance the understanding of the omens and their regional origins. Furthermore, it explores the evolution of omen literature and the transmission of knowledge across cultures and time periods, highlighting the enduring significance of sound and direction in divination practices.

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From a Distinguished International Relations Scholar comes The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford UP, 2024), an important book that looks at India's search for major power status. It is an unfinished quest with a long and winding road ahead. This is not to say that India's ambitions in world politics for greater peer recognition and institutional position is unattainable; but its current political class, bureaucratic elites, and intelligentsia must reorient India's statecraft. In this accessible and incisive book Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status, T.V. Paul charts India's cumbersome path toward higher regional and global status, covering both the successes and failures it has experienced since the modern nation's founding in 1947. Paul focuses on the key motivations driving Indian leaders to enhance India's global status and power, but also on the many constraints that have hindered its progress. Paul's analysis of India's quest for status also sheds important light on the current geostrategic situation and serves as a new framework for understanding the China-India rivalry, as well as India's relative position in the broader Indo-Pacific theater.

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Between 1857 and 1947, over 28 million Indians left the subcontinent to live, work and study elsewhere. Today, India has the largest diaspora in the world, with approximately 18 million Indians living overseas. Though often absent from historical narratives, migrant children were instrumental during the time of the British Empire in the development not only of Indian national and diasporic identities, but of British identity too. These children were marginalised by their political status, their race and their age; yet they were fundamental to historical change, from the 1830s through to independence in 1947.

Imperial Footprints: A History of South Asian Child Migrants in Britain (Hurst, 2026) by Dr. Sumita Mukherjee vividly charts this history of emigration from British India to the imperial heartland, through the eyes of its youngest participants. From pupils sent to English boarding schools and runaway servants, to sailor children and refugees of war or Partition, Sumita Mukherjee reveals that these child migrants were crucial players in founding Indian communities abroad. Drawing on archival records and firsthand accounts, she offers a portrait of migration to Britain that pre-dated the larger waves of arrivals post-war.

Imperial Footprints challenges the assumptions of the historical voices we often foreground; reflects on post-colonial legacies; and offers a fascinating new perspective on migration and empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This episode features a conversation with urban geographer, Malini Ranganathan, and historian, Juned Shaikh, on the centrality of caste to urbanization in India. Through a focus on 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai) and 21st century Bangalore (now Bengaluru), we explored the symbiotic relationship between caste and capitalism manifest in the political economy of urbanization from the heyday of industrial capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. We also delved into the continuities between rural and urban caste relations as seen, for instance, in caste networks that remain key to the movement of capital from rural land to real estate. In addition to the centrality of caste in shaping urbanization, we also considered changes to caste wrought by its role within urban processes. The final part of the episode shifted to a discussion of oppositional mobilization among the urban poor, from the upsurge of literary and political activity among Dalits in Bombay and Bangalore in the 1950s-70s to the ongoing pushback against the threat of dispossession and displacement by real estate and finance capital.

Guest bios

Malini Ranganathan, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

Juned Shaikh, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz

References

Khumbarwada: a historic potters’ colony now located within Dharavi, Mumbai (Bombay).

OBC: shorthand for Other Backward Classes, a Government of India classification for socially and educationally disadvantaged castes who are beneficiaries of affirmative action. OBCs are distinct from and considered to be relatively more advantaged than the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes, or Adivasis, who also benefit from affirmative action.

SC/ST: shorthand for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (see above).

Malini Ranganathan, David Pike, and Sapna Doshi, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (2024)

Malini Ranganathan, “Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City” (2022)

Malini Ranganathan, “Caste, racialization and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India” (2022)

Juned Shaikh, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor (2021)

Juned Shaikh, “Imaging Caste: Photography, the Housing Question, and the Making of Sociology in Colonial Bombay, 1900-1939 (2014)

Frank Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935 (1977)

Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964 (2012)

C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste (2014)

Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (2019)

K. Balagopal, Probings in the Political Economy of Agrarian Classes and Conflicts (2020)

Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital, and Politics in Globalizing Delhi, Cambridge University Press (2022).

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (1994)

Priyanka Srivastava, The Well-Being of the Labor Force in Colonial Bombay: Discourses and Practices (2018)

Dana Kornberg, “From Balmikis to Bengalis: The 'Casteification' of Muslims in Delhi's Informal Garbage Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly (2019)

Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology,. Equity, and the Commons in Delhi (2020)

Mukul Sharma, Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice (2024)

Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (2014)

Siddalingaiah, A Word With You, World: The Autobiography of a Poet (2013)

Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums.

Chico Mendes: a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader, and environmentalist who fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and Indigenous people.

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A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya is a groundbreaking ethnography that explores how, in the context of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and its turbulent aftermath, photography has become bound to the Tamil political imagination. From state-commissioned images meant to surveil and rebel documentation of armed resistance, to the fragile memorials created from identity photographs of the disappeared, A Volatile Picture traces the making and moving of images across borders, communities, and generations. Studio portraits, passport pictures, family albums, atrocity photography, social media posts, and more act not only as records of loss and horror but also as vital tools for protest, solidarity, and the realization of alternate political futures. Drawing on transnational archival and ethnographic encounters and long-term fieldwork in northern Sri Lanka, Dr. Buthpitiya situates photography as both a volatile medium and a political practice. Photographs emerge here as incendiary agents—simultaneously evidencing and triggering violence, sustaining memory, and inciting new visions of liberation.
This is the first in-depth study of Tamil photographic practices in Sri Lanka, offering a major contribution to the anthropology of war, visual culture, and South Asian studies. Richly researched and deeply humane, A Volatile Picture demonstrates how, amid devastation and displacement, photographs continue to generate truths, solidarities, and hopes that resist erasure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization based in Silicon Valley. Our conversation began with a discussion of the choice of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as the titular heads of the organization, then moved on to a conversation about its membership-based structure, the anti-caste struggles in which the AKSC has participated, and the significance of California in general, and the Silicon Valley in particular, as an epicenter of caste consolidation and anti-caste mobilization.

Guests:

S. Karthikeyan is an IT professional based in Silicon Valley and regular contributor to public outlets such as The Wire.

S. Subbulakshmi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Centre on Longevity.

Mentioned in the episode:

B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?”

Savera is a multiracial, interfaith, anticaste coalition of organizations and activists.

S. Karthikeyan, “The Hindu Supremacist Disinformation Campaign Against the Caste Discrimination Litigation in US”

S. Karthikeyan, “How Protections Against Caste Discrimination Are Being Opposed in the US”

S. Karthikeyan, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing”

Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit

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Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power.

Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art installations, and digital media, Dr. Black shows how yoga’s imaginative power supports diverse political and cultural ends. Although many cultural practices in today’s India exemplify “culture wars” between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a “culture peace” that conceals, without resolving, such tensions. This flexibility allows states, corporations, and individuals to think of themselves as welcoming and tolerant while still, in many cases, supporting practices that make minority populations increasingly vulnerable. However, as Dr. Black shows, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer new tools for critiquing hierarchical structures of power and race, Hindu nationalism, cultural appropriation, and self-help capitalism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Carola Lorea discusses the MANTRAMS project, a major ERC Synergy Grant initiative jointly hosted by Oxford, Vienna, and Tübingen dedicated to producing a history and anthropology of mantras. The six-year project investigates mantras across millennia and geographies — from their roots in Indian religious traditions through their circulation across South and Southeast Asia to their role in global spiritualities today — building extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives along the way.

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The seekers in these stories travel through worlds both ancient and modern, worlds of symbol and fantastical allegory, on their paths to greater truth.

The state of Maharashtra is famous for its ancient Buddhist cave complexes. It's also known as the birthplace of leaders in the struggle against caste oppression: Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule in the early 1800s, and B. R. Ambedkar in 1891. It is here that Dr. Ambedkar, architect of the Indian constitution and warrior against the practice of untouchability, led marches for the right of Dalit people to draw water from community wells, to enter temples, to live with dignity.

The Seekers (Blaft Publication, 2025) consists of five stories that hold Phule-Ambedkarite thought at their core, weaving together the history of ideological conflict, the pursuit of artistic excellence, and the unquenchable human thirst for freedom. The book tells of ancient revelations, of flood and fire, of vast deadly deserts, of people turned to stone.

It is a unique work of anti-caste Marathi literature that feels both timeless and sparklingly new.

"...Gautamiputra’s stories shun the beaten path, chart their own course, and leave indelible footprints for others to follow" —Raja Dhale (1940-2019), writer and activist, co-founder of the Dalit Panthers

Gautamiputra Kamble is an award-winning Marathi writer. His background in literature and philosophy informs his interests and activism—he is the editor of Secular Vision magazine, coordinator of the Secular Art Movement, and President of the Secular Movement and Secular Education and Research Institute, Sangli, Maharashtra. He has also served as the President of Phule-Ambedkar Shahu Teachers Association, Kolhapur. Parivrajak (The Seekers) was first published in Marathi in 2004; it has featured in curricula for post-graduate courses and civil service examinations in Maharashtra.

Sirus Libeiro is a translator based in Mumbai. The Seekers is his first full length translation in print. He has a background in Economics and Urban Studies. He is currently working on a translation of 'Jayanti' (2022), Gautamiputra Kamble's second fiction novel.

You can order the pdf copy of this book here for $5.32. This collection of short stories is perfect for undergraduate classroom teaching. 

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