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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

43:05

David McNally, "Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/09/03

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people as profound labour struggles.He posits a "social conception of freedom", contrasting it with the liberal individualist view, asserting that for

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55:54

Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/09/02

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and

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44:03

Laura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/30

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it?Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) by Dr. Laura Murphy is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion

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58:49

Maan Barua, "Plantation Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024)

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/29

In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture

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76:49

Faisal Chaudhry, "South Asia, the British Empire, and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/28

South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on 'the laws' factoring into the administration of justice more than 'the law' as an infinitely generative norm

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63:54

A Ukrainian Translation of the Devi Mahatmya

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/28

In this episode, Dr. Raj Balkaran speaks with art historian and curator Alisa Lozhkina about her groundbreaking Ukrainian translation of the Devī Māhātmya—the first ever in the language. They explore the inspiration behind this bold project, the text’s unique reception in the Ukrainian cultural and spiritual landscape, and broader reflections on the relevance of goddess traditions in times of crisis. The conversation also ranges into the challenges and freedoms of independent scholarship and the

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68:04

Robert Cribb et al., "Detention Camps in Asia: The...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/22

Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps?How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History (Brill, 2022) is an ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The

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68:31

Vinay Lal, "Gandhi, Truth, and Nonviolence: The...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/21

The anthology presents a diverse array of essays delving into Gandhi's political activities, ethical beliefs, and philosophical stance. Distinguished Gandhian scholars contribute to this collection, setting it apart from similar compilations by focusing not just on Gandhi's impact or the debate over his relevance, but on maintaining his bold ethical ideals and progressive views in an era of skepticism. The essays delve into Gandhi's comprehensive dissection of political logic, his concept of

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70:04

Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South:...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/20

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land.This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs

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53:14

Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/16

A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the Indian Ocean. Here the reign of Oman’s longest-serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan, offers a keyhole through which we can peer to see the entangled histories of Arabia and the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa in the Omani Empire. In centering this empire, Nicholas P. Roberts shows how Arabs, Africans, and Asians actively shaped the conditions of

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68:47

Vinay Lal, "India and Its Intellectual Traditions: of...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/14

The book, the third volume to emerge from the enterprise known as 'The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics', attempts to further the collective's ambition to put into question the certitudes of conventional social science discourse, decolonize the dominant knowledge frameworks, and understand how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indian civilization may be deployed to think both, about some problems in contemporary politics and culture, and to introduce greater plurality into

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44:10

Audrey Truschke, "India: 5,000 Years of History on...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/14

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.How do you tell the story of India–not just the modern-day country, but the whole region of South Asia, home to over two billion people? Historian Audrey Truschke’s newest book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (Princeton UP, 2025), starts at the very beginning: the rise of the

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77:25

Kirin Narayan, "Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/11

On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperCollins India.As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father’s stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave

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27:58

Navijivan Rastogi, "Kalikrama and Abhinavagupta: The...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/07

The Krama School of the Trika Saivism of Kashmir, more familiar as Kalikrama in the contemporary parlance, has turned out to be the most crucial among the monistic Saiva traditions of medieval Kashmir after the Pratyabhijna school, a scenario people could hardly envisage six decades back when it first came to the notice of modern scholarship. The doctrine of Kalikrama, lit. sequential order of consciousness deities called Kalis, constitutes the most pivotal aspect of this school marked by a

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101:12

“Truth is a Pathless Land”: Krishnamurti and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/05

In this episode, “Truth is a Pathless Land,” we speak with Transformative Inquiry Program faculty member Connie Jones to explore the micropolitical stakes of revolutionary spirituality through Krishnamurti’s challenge to religious prescription, psychological conditioning, and egoic identification. We discuss techniqueless meditation, the primacy of awareness over truth, and the distinction between perception and cognition as a path beyond the representational mind. Our conversation engages the

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70:48

Suruchi Mazumdar, "Divided Media: Politics and...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/01

Suruchi Mazumdar’s book addresses the complex relationship between India’s evolving, emerging media landscape, the political and economic interests of diverse media actors, and movements opposing contentious issues such as market-based economic reforms and religious nationalism. In the mid-2000s, Singur and Nandigram, nondescript semi-urban and rural areas in the east Indian state of West Bengal, suddenly became the center of national and international media attention and debates on state-led

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56:21

Anne M. Blackburn, "Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/08/01

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries new kingdoms emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Sovereignty in these new kingdoms was expressed in terms we understand today as coming from ‘Theravada Buddhism’. Crucial to this tradition was the Pali language. Anne Blackburn’s new book, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena 1200-1550, examines the ‘intensification of connections’ between these polities in the region she calls, the ‘Bay of Bengal-Plus’:

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51:55

Joanna Jurewicz, "Invisible Fire: Memory, Tradition...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/07/31

Invisible Fire by Joanna Jurewicz explores early Hindu philosophy through the Manusmṛti, Bhagavadgītā, and Mokṣadharma, showing that reality is a single cognitive field manifesting through subject-object perception. Drawing from Vedic roots and cognitive linguistics, Jurewicz argues that creation, bondage, and liberation are all epistemic processes. Misrecognition leads to suffering; liberation arises through refined cognition and self-recognition. The “invisible fire” symbolizes transformative

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86:44

Ankur Barua, "The Hindu Self and Its Muslim...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/07/30

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal.The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore

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85:51

Jessica Ratcliff, "Monopolizing Knowledge: The East...

New Books in South Asian Studies ·

2025/07/28

In the book Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2025), author Jessica Ratcliff traces the changing practices of knowledge accumulation and management at the British East India Company, focusing on the Company’s library, museum, and colleges in Britain. Although these institutions were in Britain, they were funded by taxes from British India and they housed, so it was argued, the “national” collections of British India. The book

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285 results

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