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PODCAST

New Books in the Indian Ocean World

New Books Network

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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82:23

Lisa Björkman, "Drama of Democracy: Political...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/02/17

In Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Lisa Björkman invites our attention to political form and how they allow us to appreciate the various mediums through which representation is negotiated.Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai closely following the movements of corporation election candidates, protesting crowds, political rally organisers, and social workers, the book maps the linguistic, visual, sonic, and semiotic tools used to

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58:24

Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now:...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/02/13

Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and criticism. It critically examines the history and ongoing influence of colonialism and imperialism in postcolonial cultures and texts. The volume seeks to address the crucial question of how to read postcolonial literatures closely and comparatively, particularly through the lenses of decolonisation and anticolonialism. Through rubrics such as

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50:24

P. C. Saidalavi, "Seeking Allah's Hierarchy: Caste,...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/02/04

Why Muslims in South India observe hierarchical intra-communal relationships despite the egalitarianism of their religionIn Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025), P. C. Saidalavi provides an ethnographic study of a Muslim barber community in South India, unraveling how these barbers negotiated concepts of hierarchy through Islamic values of piety, genealogy, morality, and wealth. Through this close-drawn study, Saidalavi argues that Muslim

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77:31

Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women,...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/02/03

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays

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39:44

Namit Arora and Romila Thapar, "Speaking of History:...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/01/22

What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so politicized?In the new book Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present (India Allen Lane, 2025), Namit Arora and Romila Thapar discuss some of the challenges facing historians in India today, what it means to be an academic historian, and how ideas around gender, caste and religion may be getting distorted in India’s public

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81:14

Ishita Dey, "Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal"...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/01/21

Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (Routledge, 2025) by Ishita Dey is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long fieldwork of a single food substance – sweets – it follows sweet-making in sweetshops, domestic spaces, fairs, festivals and its representation in recipe books to understand how caste, religion, science and law inform the life of a food item with an extremely short shelf life. It shows how food items of conspicuous consumption find a meaning in everyday lives of people

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50:44

Imran Mulla, "The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/01/15

In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic world. Abdülmecid II—who had been elected to the position by the Republic of Turkey just two years before—decamped for Europe.What followed was a bold plan by Indian Muslims and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world’s richest men at the time, to potentially revive the caliphate, as told in Imran Mulla’s book The Indian Caliphate, Exiled

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62:24

Nile Green, "Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2026/01/07

Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. For over a thousand years, Muslim pilgrims, merchants, scholars, and soldiers have passed through “Lanka” or “Sarandib”, leaving traces in Arabic, Tamil, Persian, Malay, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, and Sinhala. Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean (University of Texas Press, 2026) brings together many of

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35:19

Rituparna Patgiri and Gurpinder Singh Lalli eds.,...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/12/13

Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection Food, Culture and Society in India: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives (Berghahn Books, 2025) brings together empirically grounded research across diverse regions and contexts. Organised into four sections – Food, Culture and Identity; Food, Memory and Migration; Food, Livelihood and Nutrition; and Food, Consumption and Media – it highlights the complex role food plays in

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55:21

Isabelle Guérin et. al., "The Indebted Woman:...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/11/29

In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian conceptualise how gender, debt, and capitalism are related. For over ten years, the researchers have been working in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu, observing a credit market that specifically targets Dalit women. The book highlights not only the ways how credit is distributed, but also how it is repaid. Combining in-depth ethnography

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45:10

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

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/11/27

In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still.Fahad Ahmad Bishara talks about this specific 1924 journey in his book Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (U California Press, 2025). As the Crooked travels the waters of the Indian Ocean, Fahad

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83:11

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

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

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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109:59

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

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

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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49:26

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

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

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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19:53

Hindutva and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/24

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy.M. Sudhir Selvaraj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford. Kathinka Frøystad is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member

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45:42

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/23

Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued by the image of Indian royals in cramped conditions. Then, her family was granted use of a rundown 14th-century hunting lodge in Delhi; none were seen in public

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96:33

Ghazala Wahab, "The Hindi Heartland: A Study" (Aleph...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/18

The Hindi heartland, comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, covers nearly 38 per cent of India's total area and is home to over 40 per cent of India's population. It provides the country with over 40 per cent of its parliamentarians and determines the contours of national politics (out of the fifteen prime ministers India has had since 1947, eight have been from the Hindi belt). Yet, despite its political significance, the Hindi belt is

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62:17

Rehan Abeyratne, "Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/16

Democratic backsliding, culture wars and partisan politics in the past two decades has seen the regression of human rights protections in the courts and across societies. However, having made incremental gains in constitutional courts, LGBTQ+ rights operate as somewhat of a paradox. In this pivotal work, Professor Rehan Abeyratne makes an argument that the progress made in LGBTQ+ rights protection obscures an increased shift towards authoritarian legality in the courts and beyond. Case studies of

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71:58

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/08

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories

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86:58

Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity,...

New Books in the Indian Ocean World ·

2025/10/03

About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway, which connects the distant rural shrine with urban Pakistan. Now, an increasingly confident minority Hindu community has claimed Hinglaj as their main

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180 results

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