New Books in South Asian Studies

By New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently publ... more

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The podcast currently has 1,446 episodes available.

New Books in South Asian Studies episodes:

August 10, 2026 Daniel Majchrowicz, "A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Descended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad in southern India, where she lived a quiet, private, and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, the wealthy couple embarked on a four-month journey through the Middle East and Europe, performing the hajj in Mecca and sitting for tea with the future king and queen of England.
A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides
the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's Urdu travel
diary from this journey, of which only three original copies remain.
Originally intended for circulation among friends and family and later
published, her informal entries not only reveal the everyday practices
of an Indian woman of her time, but also detail her impressions and
reactions as she explored the world alongside her husband. As Begum
Sarbuland encountered other women and Muslims during her travels, those
encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim
woman. Her observations hold continued significance for readers
interested in critical questions about gender, Islam, and identity.
Daniel Majchrowicz has thoroughly annotated his translation and paired
it with rich appendices, including a biographical sketch of Begum
Sarbuland and excerpts from Hamidullah Khan's own accounts of their
journey.
Engagingly written and enriched with years of original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London
restores the nearly forgotten narrative of one of India's first Muslim
women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic
history.

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1h 2min
August 08, 2026 Edward T. G. Anderson, "Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant
ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with
sections of India’s vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively
supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen
as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a
new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown over many decades.
Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
(Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how and why the movement
became popular among India’s diaspora from the second half of the
twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of
organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating
overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular
functions for diaspora communities.
Edward T.G. Anderson argues that
transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this
phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of
diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He
also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on
British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various
minority communities.
Sachin Nikarge has
extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent
foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power
domains.

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1h 6min
August 05, 2026 Muslims and the Minority Question across the Indian Ocean: A Conversation With Roy Bar Sadeh
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected
by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay
and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and
Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a
question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live
together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities?
Bombay
sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major
imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean
merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped
ideas cross borders.
At the same time, British censuses and
representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia
contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were
increasingly classified as a political minority within India.
Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh
is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world,
joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate
Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is
currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.
His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow
the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political
destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl
merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely
Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the
nation-state.
Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi,
a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the
Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the
Australian National University.

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1h 11min
August 02, 2026 Monalisa Adhikari, "A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management" (Cornell UP, 2026)
In A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.
Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Dr. Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo—and often illiberal.
Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.
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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1h 5min
July 31, 2026 Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
In
this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his
book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
Anglo-Afghan
Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the
modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer
Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman
Khan, which today divides Pashtun communities between Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Sahak's central argument is that the historical purpose of the
Durand Line has never been settled: was it a temporary
sphere-of-influence arrangement, a frontier meant to manage dissent, or a
genuine international border? The book contends that answering this
question by using long-neglected Afghan-language sources alongside the
familiar British colonial record. Anchored chronologically in the period
from Abdur Rahman
Khan's rise to Afghan independence in 1919, with earlier and later
chapters extending the frame back to 1761 and forward to 1947, the book
draws on original correspondence between the Afghan Amir and British
viceroys, the writings of Afghan historians such as Ghubar, Kakar, and
Habibi, the accounts of colonial officials like Holdich and Caroe, and a
set of original interviews with contemporary Afghan and Pakistani
scholars and politicians. What distinguishes the book is its explicit
reframing of the dispute as a matter of missing perspective. Sahak
argues that decades of scholarship on the Durand Line have been built
almost entirely
on British and Pakistani positions, leaving the Afghan and Pashtun view
including the lived experience of communities split by the line is
largely absent
from the international debate. Writing partly from personal history as
someone who grew up in Kabul during the Soviet occupation and civil war,
Sahak situates the technical and diplomatic history of the boundary
within its human cost. The author treats
the line not only as a nineteenth-century colonial artefact but as an
unresolved question still shaping Afghanistan-Pakistan relations,
Pashtun identity, and regional security today.
Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.

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31min
July 30, 2026 The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism in Asia and Beyond
How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on fabricated charges by Asian authoritarian regimes seeking to control populations and narratives across borders.
You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism, published by Springer.
Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Oslo.
Mubashar Hasan is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.
Karin Zackari Associate Senior Researcher at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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0min
July 25, 2026 Samantha Iyer, "Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States" (Columbia UP, 2026)
The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.
Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.
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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46min
July 25, 2026 Mitra Sharafi, "Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia
(Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's
critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the
government of British India created a web of institutions for the
scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native
mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked
evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists
known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective,
scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to
counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system
enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of
wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants. Through scrupulously
documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put
special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice.
Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to
(mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over
adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of
the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in
criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust. Thanks
to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the
ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through
the Cornell Open initiative.
Mitra Sharafi
is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She is the
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and
currently serves as the president of the American Society for Legal
History. She has been the host of the South Asian Legal History Resources website since 2010.
Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).

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58min
July 24, 2026 Lily Kelting, "Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods" (UNC Press, 2026)
The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional
foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of
chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the
popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in
response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist
movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology.
Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory,
embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional
food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India.
Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish
to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert,
and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As
Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the
conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people
already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026),
then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks
largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage
revival.

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1h 4min
July 23, 2026 Dominik A. Haas, "South Asia Before Religion: Reflections on an Anachronistic Concept" (Knowledge Commons Works, 2026)
South Asia Before Religion: Reflections on an Anachronistic Concept (Knowledge Commons Works, 2026) critically examines the applicability of the concept of religion to premodern South Asian culture. I argue that premodern South Asia did not possess a concept equivalent to religion as understood today – neither as a distinct system of religious teachings and practices, nor as a fundamental cultural category separate from non-religious domains such as the secular, philosophy, or science. Using Āyurveda and philosophy as examples, I show that imposing anachronistic categories on past cultures risks misrepresenting their inner logics and social realities. I advocate deconstructing modern notions of religion and refraining from reconstructing the past with religion as a template. However, concepts of religion can serve a purpose when used as historicized objects of comparison or reference for premodern concepts and systems, in order to facilitate access to premodern cultures and contribute effectively to contemporary discourses.

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49min

FAQs about New Books in South Asian Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in South Asian Studies have?

The podcast currently has 1,446 episodes available.

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