Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era. Using company records, Dr. Armstrong-Price shows how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers' writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements.

The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field.

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What do political democracy and social hierarchy do to each other?

For too long Nepal's Dalits have been marginalized, not just socially, economically, and politically, but from academic accounts of Nepalese society as well. This volume forms part of a welcome new trend, the emergence of Dalit Studies in Nepal, led by a new generation of Dalit scholars. 

Nepal's Dalits in Transition (Vajra Books, 2024) covers a wide range of issues concerning Nepal's Dalits and offers a snapshot of the advances that they have made--in education, in politics, in the bureaucracy, economically, and in everyday relations. At the same time the book documents the continuing material disadvantage, inequality, discrimination, both direct and indirect, and consequent mental suffering that Dalits have to face. It also touches on the struggles, hopes, and dilemmas of Dalit activists as they seek to bring about a new social order and a relatively more egalitarian society. 

David Gellner is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How do the inhabitants of the Indian city of Mumbai navigate political signs and representations? What is the significance of crowds and mass mobilization to popular politics, and what lessons does the politics of Mumbai hold for Indian democracy at the current conjuncture? These questions are at the heart of Lisa Björkman’s Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), that analyses questions of representation, populism, and political communication and organizing. In this episode, Björkman joins Kenneth Bo Nielsen for a discussion of the book, and on the intricate ways in which Mumbaikars from all walks of life assess political performances and real-life politicians, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of words and images, cash and crowds, flyers and flowers.

Lisa Björkman is an anthropologist working at the University of Louisville, and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also directs the Centre for South Asian Democracy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Supreme Refuge: Durgā's Transformation Into the Hindu Great Goddess (SUNY Press, 2025) provides the first comprehensive examination of the Hindu Great Goddess Durgā, one of the most significant deities in the Hindu pantheon, who is celebrated annually during the Navarātra festival, a widely observed event across the Hindu world. Drawing on textual, inscriptional, and iconographic evidence, the study traces Durgā's evolution from a minor goddess to her identification as the Mahādevī, or Great Goddess. It presents an alternative chronology for hymnic materials, aligning them more closely with early iconographic depictions and offering new insights into misidentified attributes of the goddess. The work incorporates evidence from beyond South Asia to contextualize external influences on Durgā's persona and her central myths, particularly her defeat of the buffalo demon Mahiṣa. A detailed analysis of the myths in the influential Devī Māhātmya against earlier Purāṇic accounts highlights the text's sophisticated theological approach. Its strategy places Durgā in a transcendent role while asserting her as the supreme deity and ultimate refuge, accessible to both kings and commoners in dire need of her support.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a journalist in India and the U.S. has revealed about the differences in the operations of caste in the two contexts. Finally, we ended with her coverage of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, both its promises and its failure to address the caste question head-on.

Guest:

Yashica Dutt is a journalist and author whose writings can be found on her Substack, Featuring Dalits and in New Lines magazine.

Mentioned in the episode:

Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit

Rohith Vemula: an Indian PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad whose suicide drew attention to widespread institutional casteism.

Kumari Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister in India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities.

Origin: 2023 film written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson.

ST/SC Act: Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is a landmark Indian law designed to protect marginalized communities from atrocities, hate crimes, and discrimination.

Cargenie Institute study: 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

DRUM Beats: organization that mobilizes working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.

Yashica Dutt, “I reported on the Zohran Mamdani Campaign for six months and documented South Asians' rise to power in New York City”

Yashica Dutt, “What Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Says About the Quiet Erasure of Caste in US Politics”

Yashica Dutt, “If South Asians are prominent in the New York Mayoral Election, then where is caste?”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Textiles, embroidered with religious imagery, express lay piety in public and private shrines
This beautifully illustrated volume highlights Jain devotional textiles (choḍs) from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection at UCLA's Fowler Museum. Fashioned in the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, these works of velvet and sateen cloth, lavishly embroidered with gold and silver gilt thread, depict Jain mythology, influential spiritual teachers, sacred sites, and ritual traditions. Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings (U Washington Press, 2025) delves into the innovative material approaches taken by the creators of choḍs, the captivating religious stories they convey, and the social lives of these objects in Jain communities. They offer a mode of devotional patronage to lay people, who frequently commission them as gifts for places of worship in recognition of deceased relatives or upon completion of important rituals, such as monastic initiation or a lengthy fast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (Columbia UP, 2025) presents a set of keywords and concepts embedded in the languages of South Asia and its vast cultural landscape. It reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing, which are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences in the region. The words, concepts, ideas and attitudes in the volume explore the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments. The volume also attempts to work out if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigor to reinvent social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond. Individual essays, which are creative, imaginative, ethnographic and historical, explore the possibility of South Asian intellectual worlds and words to create a broader crossregional and global social science and humanities. The volume argues that it is important to move away from the intellectual shackles inherited from colonial and neo-colonial experiences while also not succumbing to the traps of local reductionist nativisms and cultural nationalisms.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Today, Afghanistan–if it ever reaches global headlines–is portrayed as an unstable land, known more for the wars great powers fight (and often lose) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right.

In his new book, Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest (Reaktion Books, 2025), archaeologist Warwick Ball argues that this land was a center where the worlds of Iran, India, Central Asia, and even the Mediterranean met and mingled. Ball takes readers from the Bronze Age Oxus and Helmand civilizations through Greek Bactria, the Kushan Empire, the spread of Buddhism, and the rise of powerful Islamic dynasties.

Warwick Ball is an archaeologist and author who spent over twenty years carrying out excavations, architectural studies and monumental restoration throughout the Middle East. He is the author of many books on the history and archaeology of the region including The Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

'In the five years that I tacked incessantly between Delhi, Venice and Istanbul, two questions plagued me: How do we lose what we lose? Why do we love whom we love?'

In this collection of essays written over 25 years, Ananya Vajpeyi recounts her experience of 13 cities across India and the world, engaging with them as layered spaces where history, memory and meaning converge.

Through elegantly crafted narratives, interwoven with cultural insight, political reflection and personal meditation, she evokes the emotional and intellectual contours of each place, offering readers her immersive, intimate encounters with cities she love.

Ananya Vajpeyi is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal. In a world of cascading disasters, what are the consequences of transient care? In 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the central region of Nepal. The disaster claimed over 9,000 lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. In The Work of Disaster, based on extensive fieldwork in the region, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman examines what disaster generates, and the fraught relationship between crisis and care. Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes how emergency services transform the places they seek to assist; the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations; and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the contiguous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging with broader debates about worldmaking and the ethics of care.

Aidan Seale-Feldman is a medical and psychological anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

Elena Sobrino is an anthropologist and Lecturer in the program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies