New Books in South Asian Studies

By New Books Network

Society & Culture History

What's New Books in South Asian Studies about?

Interviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books

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

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in South Asian Studies episodes:

04.24.2024
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu...
04.19.2024
Arsalan Khan, "The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)
The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan...
04.18.2024
Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, "The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation" (Princeton UP, 2022)
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled...
04.12.2024
Sanskrit Study: A Conversation with Antonia Ruppel
A candid conversation with renowned Sanskritist and online teacher Antonia Ruppel on her love of the language, teaching philosophy, views on academia, and online programs, here and here. Antonia Ruppel is a researcher on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax. She did her PhD in Classics at...
04.12.2024
Miss Tibet: Representing Tibet through Beauty Pageants
What does the Miss Tibet beauty pageant tell us about what it means to be Tibetan in a globalized world? And what understandings of Tibetan culture does it convey? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pema Choedon about...
04.11.2024
Peter Scharf, "Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata" (Routledge, 2023)
Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, the story of Rāma was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Rāmopākhyāna, which comprises chapters 258--275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahābhārata. Peter Scharf's Ramopakhyana - the Story...
04.10.2024
Tantra: A New Understanding
Professor Gavin Flood of Oxford University discusses new insights on tantra to be released in an upcoming publication stemming from his Continuing Studies teaching at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Flood's online Tantra course is here. Learn more about your ad choices....
04.09.2024
Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept...
04.05.2024
Translating a Śrī Vidyā Text: The Cidvilāsastava of Amṛtānanda
The Cidvilāsastava is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the esoteric contemplation of ritual found within the Śrīvidyā tradition and Śaiva tantra in general. This short forty-verse hymn offers esoteric knowledge and creative contemplations (bhāvanā) for critical steps in the ritual...
04.04.2024
William S. Waldron, "Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters" (Wisdom Publications, 2023)
Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible...
04.04.2024
Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to...
04.02.2024
Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
How has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP,...
03.29.2024
India’s Waste Problem: A Discussion with Pamela Das
How is India tackling its persistent wage management problems? And, are new infrastructural solutions the way forward? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pamela Das about the new infrastructures that are increasingly being put in place to help...
03.28.2024
Pravina Rodrigues, "A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out" (Lexington, 2023)
Pravina Rodrigues' book A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out (Lexington, 2023) discusses the issue of the missing Hindu interlocutors in the disciplines of theology of religions, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology. It fills the gap left by the missing...
03.27.2024
Michael Ortiz, "Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism" (Bloombury, 2023)
What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon....
03.26.2024
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning...
03.23.2024
Caste, Music, and Microinequities with Supriya Subramani
In this episode, Pat speaks with Dr Supriya Subramani. Dr Subramani's interest in morality and ethics has led her to explore morality, behaviour, and ethics in healthcare contexts. She has worked on the concepts of belonging, micro-inequities, moral habitus, the idea of the passive patient,...
03.21.2024
Radha Kapuria, "Music in Colonial Punjab" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Music in Colonial Punjab (Oxford UP, 2023) offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality...
03.21.2024
Shakuntala Gawde, "Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha" (Dev Publishers, 2023)
Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of...
03.20.2024
Stephen Phillips, "The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Adi-Sakara on the Isa Upanisad" (Bloombury, 2024)
In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on...
03.18.2024
The Pioneering Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Manu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a pioneering public servant, diplomat, and women's rights advocate, in her own right. They talk about the...
03.18.2024
Ashok Gopal, "A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar" (Navayana Press, 2023)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he came to define what it means to be human. How and why did Ambedkar, who revered and...
03.17.2024
Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord...
03.15.2024
SherAli Tareen, "Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and...
03.15.2024
Eva De Clercq, ed. and trans., "The Life of Padma" (Harvard UP, 2023)
The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century....
03.14.2024
Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long, "Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions...
03.13.2024
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)
Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first...
03.08.2024
Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
There are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of the Indian subcontinent than anyone else before British colonial rule. Ashoka sought not only to...
03.07.2024
Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of...
03.06.2024
Priyanka Basu, "The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia" (Routledge, 2023)
How can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London, explores the history and practice of the folk performance Kobigaan....
03.06.2024
Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Razak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identities of Muslims in Rampur-the last Muslim-ruled princely state in colonial United Provinces and a city that is pejoratively labelled as the...
03.05.2024
Baidik Bhattacharya, "Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the...
03.01.2024
Who owns Khadi?
Why did khadi become so central to India’s freedom struggle? How did it evolve into an international trademark – and what does khadi signify in India today? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Subhadeep Chowdhury about the political, cultural, and economic importance...
02.29.2024
Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama, "The Play of the Feminine" (HASP, 2023)
In Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama's book The Play of the Feminine (HASP, 2023) explores Navarātri as it is celebrated in the...
02.29.2024
Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury....
02.29.2024
Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)
In An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on...
02.22.2024
Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant...
02.20.2024
Kunal Purohit, "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" (HarperCollins, 2023)
Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the...
02.14.2024
Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)
1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the...
02.11.2024
Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)
India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries...
02.08.2024
Jeffery D. Long, "Discovering Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Jeffery D. Long's Indian Philosophy: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2023) helps readers discover how the many and varied schools of Indian thought can answer some of the great questions of life: Who are we? How can we live well? How do we tell truth...
02.08.2024
Order and Disorder in South Asia with Christopher Chapple and Debashish Banerji
This episode is dedicated to introducing the South Asian Studies Association (SASA) and their annual academic conference being co-hosted by the Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies Concentration (ACTS) being held at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) on March...
02.05.2024
Jessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
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 history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament...
02.01.2024
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though...
01.29.2024
Francesca Orsini, "East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature" (Oxford UP, 2023)
East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late...
01.27.2024
Amanda Lanzillo, "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India" (U California Press, 2024)
Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially...
01.26.2024
Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Santideva's 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist classic, "The Guide to the Practices of Awakening" (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years. In Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and...
01.25.2024
David J. Brick, "Widows Under Hindu Law" (Oxford UP, 2023)
During British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on...
01.24.2024
Amar Sohal, "The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. Amar Sohal's book The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics...
01.23.2024
Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)
A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland's edited volume Aromas of Asia: Exchanges,...

What's New Books in South Asian Studies about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in South Asian Studies episodes:

Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Arsalan Khan, "The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, "The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Sanskrit Study: A Conversation with Antonia Ruppel

Miss Tibet: Representing Tibet through Beauty Pageants

Peter Scharf, "Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata" (Routledge, 2023)

Tantra: A New Understanding

Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Translating a Śrī Vidyā Text: The Cidvilāsastava of Amṛtānanda

William S. Waldron, "Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters" (Wisdom Publications, 2023)

Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)

Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

India’s Waste Problem: A Discussion with Pamela Das

Pravina Rodrigues, "A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out" (Lexington, 2023)

Michael Ortiz, "Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism" (Bloombury, 2023)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Caste, Music, and Microinequities with Supriya Subramani

Radha Kapuria, "Music in Colonial Punjab" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Shakuntala Gawde, "Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha" (Dev Publishers, 2023)

Stephen Phillips, "The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Adi-Sakara on the Isa Upanisad" (Bloombury, 2024)

The Pioneering Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Ashok Gopal, "A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar" (Navayana Press, 2023)

Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)

SherAli Tareen, "Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Eva De Clercq, ed. and trans., "The Life of Padma" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long, "Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)

Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)

Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Priyanka Basu, "The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia" (Routledge, 2023)

Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Baidik Bhattacharya, "Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Who owns Khadi?

Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama, "The Play of the Feminine" (HASP, 2023)

Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)

Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Kunal Purohit, "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" (HarperCollins, 2023)

Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)

Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Jeffery D. Long, "Discovering Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Order and Disorder in South Asia with Christopher Chapple and Debashish Banerji

Jessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Francesca Orsini, "East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Amanda Lanzillo, "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India" (U California Press, 2024)

Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

David J. Brick, "Widows Under Hindu Law" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Amar Sohal, "The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)