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New Books in Indian Religions

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. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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62:51

Manu Pillai, "Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/03/06

What is Hinduism?For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to keep the peace, much to the chagrin of officials back in London. And, increasingly, Indians began to define what Hinduism

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46:52

Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/03/06

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John

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44:07

Anna Lise Seastrand, "Body, History, Myth: Early...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/03/06

An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil and Telugu inscriptions that evoke the imagined topographies of devotional poetry unfold before the mobile

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49:33

Material Religion, Assemblage, and the Agency of...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/02/27

This special issue of Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies is the product of a collective experiment with materials that are assembled, imagined, and agentive in the context of South Asian religions. The articles are available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

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56:36

Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/02/20

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK.The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence

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49:24

Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India"...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/02/20

The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in India and throughout the world over the past 50 years. Known officially as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), this once-marginal religious community now wields vast economic assets, political influence, and a posh identity endorsed by Indian business tycoons and Bollywood celebrities. Bringing Krishna Back to

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54:58

Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/02/13

In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the

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38:15

Lavanya Vemsani, "Handbook of Indian History"...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2025/02/06

Handbook of Indian History (Springer, 2024) comprehensively examines the extensive history of India by focusing on the unifying themes of history. The profound analysis of special events and impactful personalities of Indian history form the core of the book. Handbook of Indian History includes articles on cultural, social, and political history of India, topics of religion, philosophy, gender, language and literature, providing a vast array of knowledge on India. The book introduces India from the

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38:12

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

New Books in Indian Religions ·

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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40:48

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

New Books in Indian Religions ·

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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44:29

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

New Books in Indian Religions ·

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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41:09

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

New Books in Indian Religions ·

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 Indian Religions ·

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 Indian Religions ·

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 Indian Religions ·

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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56:35

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

New Books in Indian Religions ·

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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67:20

Nathan McGovern, "Holy Things: The Genealogy of the...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2024/12/19

Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In part, the perception that Thai Buddhism is syncretistic is due to a misunderstanding of traditional

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28:04

Pankaj Jain, "Visual Anthropology of Indian Films:...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2024/12/12

Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films.Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak,

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80:18

Mou Banerjee, "The Disinherited: The Politics of...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2024/12/11

An illuminating history of religious and political controversy in nineteenth-century Bengal, where Protestant missionary activity spurred a Christian conversion “panic” that indelibly shaped the trajectory of Hindu and Muslim politics.In 1813, the British Crown adopted a policy officially permitting Protestant missionaries to evangelize among the empire’s Indian subjects. The ramifications proved enormous and long-lasting. While the number of conversions was small—Christian converts never

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53:02

Nissim Mannathukkaren, "Hindu Nationalism in South...

New Books in Indian Religions ·

2024/12/09

Hindu Nationalism in South India: The Rise of Saffron in Kerala (Routledge, 2024) engages with a range of factors that shapes the trajectory of Hindu nationalism in Kerala, the southern state of India. Until recently, Kerala was considered a socio-political exception which had no room for Hindu nationalism. This book questions such Panglossian prognosis and shows the need to map the ideological and political growth of Hindu nationalism which has been downplayed in the academic discourse as temporary

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