New Books in the Indian Ocean World

By New Books NetworkEducation Arts Books History

New Books in the Indian Ocean World episodes

October 06 Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire with Gunja SenGupta (U California Press, 2023)
In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (U California Press, 2023) mines multinational archives; profiles transnational human rights campaigns; shows how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world; and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a "cotton queen" and courtesans, and fugitive "slaves" and concubines populate the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of "slavery in the East," and in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of U.S. slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.
Gunja SenGupta: Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and currently visiting at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her work places nineteenth-century United States history in global contexts of slavery, abolition, empire, race, gender, and poverty. She is also the author of From Slavery to Poverty and For God and Mammon
Awam Amkpa: Vice Provost for the Arts and Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi, and a professor of drama and social and cultural analysis at New York University. A theater scholar, filmmaker, and curator, he is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires.
Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi: Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). A historian, academic, and translator, he focuses on the history of science, empire, law, and everyday life in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.

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46 min
August 28 Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an
independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than
seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of
actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years,
the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory
elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist
language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has
been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian
regime of Narendra Modi.
Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to
democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came
to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy,
tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what
Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent
political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms
and ideas, The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024) argues
that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics,
when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency
and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that
connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to
the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present
times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.
Dhiren Swain is a MIPA PhD Candidate, affiliated to The University of
Melbourne and IIT Madras. His current research focuses on the Urban
Policies and Community Politics in India and South Asia.
He can be reached at [email protected]
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53 min
August 05 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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1 hr 6 min
July 17 Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)
In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru
left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered
by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the
ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months
later were deported to Calcutta.
In Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018) Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru.
Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that
repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual
stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime
worlds.
Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the
anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's
landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions
between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal
status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and
bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power
through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method
of writing colonial legal history.
The conversation also covers how the book, published in 2018, has
shaped the author’s more recent work as well as how historical methods
and approaches have evolved in the years since publication.
Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French
colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a
professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) and
the author of Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
Helen’s institutional website
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51 min
July 01 Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines
how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth
to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were
assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism,
leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early
postcolonial eras (1828-1963). It examines the resistance that
challenges this ordering, rendering monuments unruly and unassimilable
despite state efforts to control their narrative. This exposes the
nation's contradictory claims of inclusivity while marginalizing
subaltern groups. It guides readers through picturesque landscapes,
museums, imperial displays, postcards, travel experiences, Partition
refugee camps, and cinema. Analyzing these forms reveals how the archive
of Indo-Islamic monuments was shaped through presences and absences.
Each chapter examines everyday life, untangles knowable public
transcripts, illuminates strategic excisions and hidden transcripts,
juxtaposes evidence that has not yet been analyzed in conjunction, reads
archival material against the grain, and finds archival layers in
unfamiliar places.
NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar
Sohini teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University.
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59 min
June 20 Alex Boodrookas, "Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf" (Stanford UP, 2026)
In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful
citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian
Gulf. Their efforts built on decades of wide-ranging struggle over the
meanings and outlines of citizenship. During the twentieth century,
anticolonial nationalists, pro-democracy reformers, feminists, and labor
organizers joined forces to fight for a more equitable citizenship
regime. In so doing, they won a remarkable series of victories:
political independence, constitutional rights, and oil nationalization,
reshaping not just Kuwait, but the global petroleum order. This book reframes the history of labor activism, citizenship, and
decolonization in Persian Gulf by centering the history of social
movements—especially organized labor. In ⁠Comrades Estranged: ⁠⁠Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf⁠ (Stanford University Press, 2026), Alex
Boodrookas traces how workers and their allies shaped the
world-historic transformations witnessed across the region: the
consolidation of British sovereignty, formation of autocratic states,
inrush of hydrocarbon wealth, onset of decolonization, and rise of both
mass migration and mass politics. But unions failed to incorporate
noncitizens into their movement, and as Boodrookas argues, this fatally
undermined the movements' strength. The contradictions of nationalist
and internationalist visions proved insurmountable. Comrades Estranged thus sheds light on both the power, and the limits, of citizenship and the nation-state as the framework for political action.
Dr. ⁠Alex Boodrookas⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Dr. ⁠Ahmed AlMaazmi⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University.
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49 min
May 21 Shyam Ranganathan, "Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
Why have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), Shyam Ranganathan tells the story of moral philosophy and colonialism and reveals the benefits of drawing from a colonized tradition to a create a rigorous logic-based ethics. This is a timely exploration of the the ways in which Western colonialism has structured moral theorizing to insulate itself from criticism. In his account of the domination of the European tradition and the suppression of questions of its colonialism, Ranganathan covers the evolution of metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics in ancient European, Chinese, and Indian traditions of philosophy. We see the presence of white supremacy in the writings of J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, and the importance placed on autonomy and sovereignty in Hobbes and Kant. The European influence of interpretation on our peer review of historical philosophy is evident throughout. Using South Asia as an example Ranganathan examines how colonizers are able to erase moral philosophical history and redefine cultures as religions, judged in terms of their conformity to, or deviation from, the Western tradition, which is treated as secular. His acknowledgment of Yoga as a basic ethical theory introduces us to thinking that recognizes persons as a diverse group, traversing sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, and species. Through this analysis of colonized traditions and ethics, Ranganathan is able to de-colonize moral philosophy by looking outside the colonizing tradition. If we want sophisticated and inclusive ways of thinking about how to live we must turn towards indigenous thought.
Shyam Ranganathan is a member of the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research at York University, Toronto, Canada, and founder of the Yoga Philosophy Institute.
Dr. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Indian mythology and seasoned online educator. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom where he delivers original courses applying Indian wisdom teachings to modern life.
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49 min
May 18 Robert Rouphail, "Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius" (Ohio UP, 2026)
In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Rouphail offers a historical analysis of how these catastrophes shape people’s understanding of themselves, their collective history, and their relationship to the institutions that govern them. An examination of cyclonic disasters in the multiethnic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius throws into stark relief how deep histories of diasporic identity formation, of imperial governance, and of the informal practices of racial difference making graft onto how everyday people interpret these moments of loss and the futures that emerge in their wake.
Cyclonic Lives shows that disasters are not only events; they are also processes through which people evaluate and rethink the most elemental social and cultural categories that give meaning to their lives. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the early postcolonial era, this book tracks, for example, how Mauritians of African descent integrated these disasters into broader collective histories and memories of the Indian Ocean slave trade, how Hindu Indo-Mauritians understood cyclones’ ecological effects as material elements to be accounted for in a broader Hindu diasporic space, and how the late colonial and early postcolonial state built infrastructures—material, conceptual, and financial—to mitigate the threats posed by these storms and ensure their own long-term durability.
The increasing political, social, and economic instability that climate change has already triggered demands that humanists develop analytical geographies and methodologies that shed light on how power can modulate in asymmetrical ways at moments of crisis. If there is one central takeaway from this historical study of this small island in a big ocean, it is that catastrophic events are not things that merely happen to people; they are processes that remake them.
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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55 min
May 14 T. V. Paul, "The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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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1 hr 2 min
May 07 Julia Stephens, "Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton UP, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the stories of Indian migrants that traveled the empire throughout their lives–and, in some cases, after their lives were over.
Julia joins us today to talk about her book and her attempt to find a different approach to studying these histories: Figures like Kuala Lumpur magnate Thamboosamy Pillai, Zanzibar–Bombay matriarch Jambai, and the elusive sailor John Muhammad.
Julia Stephens is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge University Press: 2018)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. You can read its review of Worldly Afterlives here. 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.
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43 min

About New Books in the Indian Ocean World

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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 published research with another expert in their field.

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New Books in the Indian Ocean World episodes

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