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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

66:55

About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/30

Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific

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38:12

Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/30

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that

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56:04

Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/29

Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent.How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2024) explains how the Portuguese tried to learn more about their more powerful

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24:23

India’s Land Mafia: A Discussion with Chiara Arnavas

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/24

Who and what are India’s land mafia? How do they operate, and why have they become so crucial to India’s land market? In this episode, we are joined by Chiara Arnavas for a discussion on the emergence over the past decades of a dynamic Indian land mafia that is centrally involved in moving land around, freeing it up for new uses, and passing it onto other actors for mega-profits. We analyze how the land mafia works, and what the implications are for social inequalities along the lines of class,

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49:06

Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History"...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/23

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated environment in what Avinash Paliwal calls “India’s Near East”: India, Bangladesh (or East Pakistan before the 1970s), and

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40:48

Gidi Ifergan, "The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga"...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/23

Gidi Ifergan's The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga (Equinox, 2024) explores the road map of yoga as reflected in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali (third century CE) and the Sāṁkhyakārikā of Iśvarakṛṣṇa (350–450 CE) which leads to the rise of this discerning insight, evading interpretations motivated by naivety on the one hand, and excessive suspicion on the other. Inspired by the psychology of yoga, the author offers a meditation focused on the sense of self and the cultivation of a discerning clear

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70:36

Ashish Avikunthak, "Bureaucratic Archaeology: State,...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/21

Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeological practice within postcolonial India, focusing on the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as a site where scientific knowledge production intersects with state bureaucracy. Through granular analysis of ASI's quotidian operations, this monograph demonstrates how archaeological micro-practices materially influence the construction of political and

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55:46

Amrita Narayanan, "Women's Sexuality and Modern...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/18

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) a collection of poems, short prose and fiction in translation from Indian languages, linked by an introductory essay on the central themes in Indian

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44:29

Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/16

The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings

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53:59

Javaria Farooqui, "Romance Fandom in 21st-Century...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/16

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual

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41:09

Richard H. Davis, "Religions of Early India: A...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/09

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique,

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56:07

Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/06

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often

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75:24

Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion,...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/05

Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a

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30:57

Arvind Sharma, "From Fire To Light: Rereading the...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/01/02

Why yet another book on the Manusmriti? In From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti (Harper Collins, 2024), acclaimed academic Arvind Sharma argues that the present understanding of the Manusmriti - regarded as a text designed by the higher castes, especially brahmanas, to oppress the lower castes and women - only tells one side of the story. As he demonstrates, this perception, when examined against textual, commentarial and historical evidence, is limited to the point of being misleading (and

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96:01

Oishik Sircar, "Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/29

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the

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67:40

Mukulika Banerjee, "Cultivating Democracy: Politics...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/28

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how agrarian communities cultivate democratic values—solidarity, reciprocity, and ethical citizenship—through practices embedded in their daily lives. Dr

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68:38

Pakistan, Populism and the Left

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/27

This podcast features Ammar Rashid, a leading figure in left-wing politics in Pakistan, and currently Director of the action-research organization Alliance for Urban Rights, and Research Lead at the public health think tank, Heartfile. This episode of Radio ReOrient is hosted by Sher Ali Tareen with Shehla Khan and Salman Sayyid. The conversation explores the lengthening political crisis in Pakistan by foregrounding the potential for resistance. In this vein, it ranges across several salient themes,

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31:34

China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/27

Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment? In this episode, Professor Marina Svensson talks to Professor Anne-Marie Brady about her research on China’s strategic

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56:35

Antoinette Denapoli and June McDaniel, "Gurus,...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/26

Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI, 2024) explores the varieties of strategies that holy women use for gaining and expressing power in diverse roles. It examines different concepts of holiness and leadership for men and women, the role of charisma, and the arenas of activity and accomplishment for holy women in India and abroad. By relating a new idea-that of the 'influencer'-to

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66:02

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, "Required Reading: The Life of...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2024/12/23

In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their

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294 results

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