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PODCAST

New Books in South Asian Studies

New Books Network

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

society & culture

All Episodes

62:46

Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/16

Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh (Rutgers UP, 2021) takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization

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41:40

Sonia Faleiro, "The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/14

When the robe becomes a weapon, who can stop the violence?We think of Buddhism as a faith of peace—rooted in compassion, patience, and nonviolence. But across South and Southeast Asia today, the robe is being turned into a weapon, as radical monks and nationalist movements unleash hatred and war. In The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), acclaimed journalist Sonia Faleiro travels from Sri Lanka’s riot-scarred towns to the homes of

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83:11

Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/13

In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest Rights Act 2006, a law enacted to secure the largest redistribution of property in independent India by recognising the tenure and use rights of millions of landless forest dwellers. Beginning with the devastating destruction of a north Indian village Vaidya calls Ramnagar, inhabited by landless Dalits and Adivasis, the book follows the

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33:33

Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler eds., "Sweetening and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/13

Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (SUNY Press, 2025) explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas. This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions--namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies, the

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101:53

Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals,...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/09

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers foster an ethics of care in the Himalayan communities of Ladakh. She explores the way these relations are changing due to climate change, the growth of the wage economy at the expense of traditional agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and increased military presence resulting from

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36:55

Harini Nagendra, "Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/06

Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home invasion gone wrong: An elderly woman in 1920s India, murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murthy, amateur detective, takes on the case–and soon uncovers a whole array of other mysteries in the coffee plantations of Coorg: a ghost leopard stalking the woods, and a series of murder attempts against a widely-disliked colonial

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109:59

Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/06

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants utilized the technologies of colonial capitalism — banks,

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56:58

William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrarian Life: Urban...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/05

Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and

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93:49

Anand, "The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water,...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/04

Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in. Over the years, as a publisher and editor, Anand immerses himself in the works of Babasaheb Ambedkar and other anticaste thinkers. He gives up his practice of music and poetry, blaming his disenchantment on caste. One day in Delhi, Anand starts looking for Kabir. He finds him here, there, everywhere. He begins to pay attention to the many ways in which Kabir’s words are sung,

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76:19

Kalathmika Natarajan, "Coolie Migrants, Indian...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/02

Over the centuries, millions of migrant labourers sailed from the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, to shape what is now the world’s largest diaspora. Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Hearst, 2025 and Oxford UP, 2026) recovers the histories and legacies of those ‘coolie’ migrants, and presents a new paradigm for the diplomatic history of independent India, going beyond high politics to explore how indenture, emigration and

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49:26

C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India:...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/11/01

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by politics of cinema, in the site of Hyderabad. It traverses through the makings and remakings of

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51:39

Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/30

For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary,

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26:54

Deana Heath, "Colonial Terror: Torture and State...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/26

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by

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72:56

Wendy Doniger, "The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/25

How did Brahma create alluring women, and for what purpose? Why did the righteous King Bhangashvana choose womanhood? How did the sage Markandeya's pupil prevent his guru's wife from committing adultery? What role did Indra play in the births of Vishvamitra and Parashu Rama? How were death, diseases, desire and anger created? Why and how did the institution of kingship come about? What can one learn from the mouse who escaped the cat, the owl, the mongoose and the hunter; or the wise jackal

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31:45

Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/13

How did India’s landmark Forest Rights Act come into being? And what difference has it made to the lives of historically marginalized forest-dwelling communities? These questions are at the heart of Anand Vaidya’s new monograph Future of the forest: Struggles over land and law in India that we discuss in this episode. Future of the forest offers a compelling account of the making, implementation, and partial unravelling of the Forest Rights Act, and traces the complex ways in which collective action

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43:01

Mukul Sharma, "Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/12

Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a special correspondent with a leading news outlet in India and received 12 national and international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. additionally he has also been the Director Amnesty International and South Asia of Climate Parliament. His scholarly has focused on environmental politics and discourses in India and explored

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61:57

Ashis Roy, "Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/12

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes?Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned,

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59:55

Karen Pechilis ed., "A Cultural History of Hinduism:...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/09

In this episode, Raj Balkaran speaks with Karen Pechilis, Jarrod Whitaker, and Valerie Stoker about A Cultural History of Hinduism (Bloomsbury, 2024), a landmark six-volume series that traces Hindu traditions from the ancient world to the present. Each volume is organized around eight core themes—Sources of Authority; Body and Mind; Social Organization; Identity and Difference; Politics and Power; Arts and Visual Culture; Lineages and Exemplars; and Global Contexts—allowing readers to compare

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25:30

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/06

Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces.In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Avishek Ray about his co-authored book Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. This book explores how the digital selfie, unlike traditional photography, turns the lens inward while reconfiguring social identities, gender

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54:27

John Mathias, "Uncommon Cause: Living for...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/10/05

How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John Mathias joins host Elena Sobrino to talk about Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala (2024, University of California Press). Uncommon Cause follows environmental justice activists in Kerala, India, as they seek out, avoid, or strive to overcome conflicts between their causes and their community ties. John Mathias finds two

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294 results

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