New Books in South Asian Studies

Jon Keune's book Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Queer lives in semi-urban and rural India are typically required to conform to heteronormativity in a way that stands apart from Western and urban Indian experiences. In the first episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. Jayaprakash Mishra, a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India, shares with us why he chose to examine the emotions of guilt in South Asian families through a queer perspective, as explored in his article “Queering Emotion in South Asia: Biographical Narratives of Gay Men in Odisha, India”. Dr. Mishra examines how and why gay men negotiate between heteronormative expectations and homoromantic desire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Kama Maclean's book A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (Oxford University Press, 2015) draws on new evidence to deliver a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association or Army (HSRA), the revolutionary party formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. The book offers an account of the activities of the north Indian revolutionaries who advocated the use of political violence against the British; and considers the impact of their actions on the mainstream nationalism of the Indian National Congress. The book contends that the presence of these revolutionaries on the political landscape during this crucial interwar period pressured Congress politics and tested the policy of non-violence. The book makes methodological contributions, analyzing images, memoirs, oral history accounts and rumours alongside colonial archives and recently declassified government files, to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which are far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined. Dr. Kama Maclean is Professor of South Asian History in the South Asia Institute (SAI) at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What does the Mahābhārata – a gargantuan epic tale from ancient India – have the teach about life wisdom? Learn three core themes of the ancient Sanskrit epic – along with a story of one of its most compelling female characters – from Dr. Arti Dhand, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and host of The Mahābhārata Podcast. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Karen Ruffle's Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) is an introduction to the everyday life and cultural memory of Shi’i women and men, focusing on the religious worlds of both individuals and communities at particular historical moments and places in the Indian subcontinent. Ruffle draws upon an array primary sources, images, and ethnographic data to present topical case studies offering broad snapshots Shi'i life as well as microscopic analyses of ritual practices, material objects, architectural and artistic forms, and more. Focusing exclusively on South Asian Shi'ism, an area mostly ignored by contemporary scholars who focus on the Arab lands of Iran and Iraq, the author shifts readers' analytical focus from the center of Islam to its periphery. Ruffle provides new perspectives on the diverse ways that the Shi'a intersect with not only South Asian religious culture and history, but also the wider Islamic humanistic tradition. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Anastasia Piliavsky's book Nobody's People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves (Stanford UP, 2020) depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world—including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Breaking box office records, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved an unparalleled level of success with fans across the world, raising the films to a higher level of narrative: myth. Michael D. Nichols's Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (McFarland, 2021) is first book to analyze the Marvel output as modern myth, comparing it to epics, symbols, rituals, and stories from world religious traditions. Nichols places the exploits of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and the other stars of the Marvel films alongside the legends of Achilles, Gilgamesh, Arjuna, the Buddha, and many others. It examines their origin stories and rites of passage, the monsters, shadow-selves, and familial conflicts they contend with, and the symbols of death and the battle against it that stalk them at every turn. The films deal with timeless human dilemmas and questions, evoking an enduring sense of adventure and wonder common across world mythic traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Mirza Ghalib is one of the most celebrated poets in the Urdu literary canon. Yet, at the time, Ghalib was prolific in both Urdu and Persian. His output in Persian output dwarfs his Urdu writing (at least in its published form), and he often openly dismissed his Urdu works, once writing: Look into the Persian so that you may see paintings of myriad shades and hues; Pass by the collection in Urdu for it is nothing but drawings and sketches. Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep: A Critical Biography (Allen Lane, 2021) by Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi explores the work of Mirza Ghalib to perhaps explain why the power made the switch from Urdu to Persian and back to Urdu. In this interview, I ask Mehr to introduce us to Ghalib and his work. We explore Ghalib as both a poet and a person, and why he made the switch from writing in Urdu to Persian and back again. Mehr Afshan Farooqi is currently an associate professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. Her research publications address complex issues of Urdu literary culture particularly in the context of modernity. A well-known translator, anthologist, and columnist, she is the editor of the pioneering two-volume work The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature. More recently, she has published the acclaimed monograph The Postcolonial Mind: Urdu Culture, Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari. Farooqi also writes a featured column on Urdu literature of the past and present in the Dawn. Mehr can be followed on Twitter at @FarooqiMehr You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ghalib: A Wilderness At My Doorstep. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), not only brings together his wide-ranging research from the past three decades, but brings together Indian philosophers with analytic philosophers in an extended reflection on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language. He takes up these topics under the three broad categories of objects, subjects, and other subjects, investigating where arguments for the existence of ordinary objects might lead us: towards accepting the reality and perceptibility of universals and the existence of immaterial yet embodied selves. Chakrabarti’s arguments engage with well-known analytic thinkers like Russell, Strawson, and Dummett, along with well-known Indian thinkers like Śaṅkara, Nāgārjuna, and Uddyotakara, though always for the purpose of philosophical progress, not mere comparison or historical exegesis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Jacqueline Fewkes and Megan Adamson Sijapati edited volume Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalayas: Conceptualizing the Global Ummah (Routledge, 2020) explores individual perspectives and specific iterations of Muslim community, Muslim practice and experience of Islam in the Himalayan region as well as the concept of the general Islamic community the Ummah. A multidisciplinary analysis of Muslim communities and historical and contemporary Islamicate traditions, the book shows how Muslims understand and mobilize regional identities and religious expressions. Moreover, it assesses regional interactions, the ways in which institutions shape Muslim practices in specific areas and investigates the notion of the Himalayas as an Islamic space. The book suggests that the regional focus on the Himalayas provides a site of both geographic and cultural crossroads where Muslim community is simultaneously constituted at multiple social levels. As a result, chapters document a wide range of local, national, and global interests while maintaining a focus on individual perspectives, moments in time, and localized experiences. This book draws attention to the cultural, social, artistic, and political diversity of the Himalaya beyond the better-understood and frequently documented religio-cultural expressions of the region. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of anthropology, geography, history, religious studies, Asian Studies, and Islamic Studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Today I talked to Joseph McQuade about his book A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today. Dr. Joseph McQuade is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In today’s episode, we speak with Ayesha Chaudhry about her new book, The Colour of God (Oneworld Publications, 2021). The book describes Chaudhry’s personal, spiritual, and professional journey as she navigates her life as a South Asian immigrant Muslim girl raised in Canada. Rich in its analysis of its major themes – such as patriarchy, religion, colonialism, Islamophobia, the family, grief – it pushes us to think more deeply about the choices we make in response to various traumas, such as death or the violence of racism. Readers will appreciate the unapologetic rawness, its very personal but also academic nature, the ways Chaudhry weaves Islamic and Qur’anic themes and narratives into her own. Written in an accessible and engaging way, the book will interest academics and non-academics; it will make for an excellent read for both undergraduate and graduate courses in Women’s and Gender Studies, English courses, Islamic and Religious Studies courses, any courses on Migration, and Theory and Methods Courses, among many others. Chaudhry’s ownership and embrace of an Islam that values her humanity and her opposition to the oppressive, patriarchal Islam that she grew up with makes it an essential read for those seeking an Islam rooted in compassion and love. In our discussion, Chaudhry shares the origins of the book and its usefulness as a teaching resource. We also talk about puritan Islam and the toll it takes on our humanity and the intersection of patriarchy and Islamophobia, highlighting the complexity of telling a story parts of which may fulfil stereotypes about Muslims and the negotiation that the process of telling such a story entails. Chaudhry also shares her ideas on who the intended audience of the book is and her relationship with that audience, the advice she would give to others interested in writing in this genre, and so much more. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?!, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how survivors navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world's largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules, but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women's groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India (Oxford UP, 2020) shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm, but by forcing them to become "capable": to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury's book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India, but large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent criminal justice systems throughout the world. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In this episode Kennth Bo Nielsen of Asianettverket at the University of Oslo is joined by Niladri Chatterjee (University of Oslo), Zaad Mahmoud (Presidency University) and Arild Engelsen Ruud (University of Oslo) to analyse the results of the recently concluded West Bengal state assembly elections. The elections dealt a major blow to the expansionist ambitions of the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP, while the regional party Trinamool Congress (TMC) scored a landslide victory. How was the TMC able to stop the BJP juggernaut? And what will the results mean for national politics? The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University. About NIAS: https://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (Syracuse UP, 2019) vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli Nu'mani (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu'mani took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu'mani records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and political history of South Asia. This translation by Gregory Maxwell Bruce, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu'mani's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire. Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

For more than three decades now, Carl Ernst, through his scholarship and his public engagement on the study of Islam and Muslim societies, has modeled the finest form of intellectual inquiry and performance. The imprints of his work extend from the study of Sufism, South Asia, the Qur’an, arts and aesthetics, and more recently, Islamophobia in North America. Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox, 2020), edited by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon Wheeler, honors Carl Ernst’s scholarly prowess and promise not through hagiography but by bringing together 13 essays that chart and direct a robust intellectual agenda for the future of Islamic Studies. The wide ranging essays in this volume serve as testament not only to the variety of ways in which Carl Ernst has shaped and informed the field of Islamic Studies, but also to his contribution in placing the study of Islam firmly in the broader field of Religion Studies. In this conversation, we discuss salient aspects of this book, and also explore some critical and previously unexplored contours of Ernst’s scholarly journey traversing multiples themes, cites, and actors. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here today with Pallavi Guha, assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Towson, MD, to talk to her about her new book, Hear #MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, out this year, 2021 with Rutgers University Press. This book examines the role media platforms play in anti-rape and sexual harassment activism in India. Including 75 interviews with feminist activists and journalists working across India, it proposes a framework of agenda-building and establishes a theoretical framework to examine media coverage of issues in the digitally emerging Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Dismissal, in fact, is the default response to khayal (the preeminent genre of North Indian classical music), well before we get to know what khayal is, and vaguely term its strangeness 'classical music'. Those who later become acquainted with its extraordinary melodiousness forget that on the initial encounter it had sounded unmelodious. These words are part of the introduction to Amit Chaudhuri’s newest book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (New York Review Books / Faber and Faber, 2021). The book is part guide to Indian music, part memoir of Chaudhuri’s life, part examination of modern culture. In this interview, I ask Amit to explain what makes Indian music so special, both in general and to his life. We explore how Indian music influenced the writing of this most recent book, and how his musical experiences in India and abroad have affected how he sees the world. Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, several collections of short stories, poetry and essays, one nonfiction work, and a critical study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds the titles of Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in England and Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India. In addition to his writing, he is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the raga, blues, and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Finding the Raga. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

A clear-eyed look at modern India's role in Asia and the broader world. One of India's most distinguished foreign policy thinkers addresses the many questions facing India as it seeks to find its way in the increasingly complex world of Asian geopolitics. A former Indian foreign secretary and national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon traces India's approach to the shifting regional landscape since its independence in 1947. From its leading role in the "nonaligned" movement during the cold war to its current status as a perceived counterweight to China, India often has been an after-thought for global leaders--until they realize how much they needed it. In India and Asian Geopolitics (Brookings, 2021), Menon focuses in particular on India's responses to the rise of China, as well as other regional powers. Menon also looks to the future and analyzes how India's policies are likely to evolve in response to current and new challenges. As India grows economically and gains new stature across the globe, both its domestic preoccupations and international choices become more significant. India itself will become more affected by what happens in the world around it. Menon makes a powerful geopolitical case for an India increasingly and positively engaged in Asia and the broader world in pursuit of a pluralistic, open, and inclusive world order. Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This podcast features Brenda Beck’s lifelong work on the Tamil folk epic Ponnivala. In addition to her forthcoming new English translation of the epic (“Land of the Golden River”), we also discuss her 1982 study of the epic The Three Twins (now open-access), her full color graphic novel of the epic (available in Tamil and English), and her 13-hour animated video of the epic. The interview discusses the significance of folks traditions in understanding Indian religions, along with the power of narrative to encapsulate religious themes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Gil Ben-Herut and Jon Keune's book Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers (Routledge, 2019) explores the key motif of the religious Other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent. The primary aim of this book is to reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta's or devotee's Other and unmask processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book considers the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact--as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic--while critically engaging with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and tracing when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asia's devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti, and it will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religion and Asian Religion. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021), Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women's reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions--about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In this engaging and innovative history of the communist movement in colonial India, Ali Raza reveals the lives, geographies, and anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries and how they sought to remake the world. Driven by the utopian visions of Communist Internationalism, Indian revolutionaries yearned and struggled for a global upheaval that would overthrow European imperialisms and radically transform India and the world. In an age marked by political upheavals, intellectual ferment, collapsing empires, and global conflicts, Indian revolutionaries stood alongside countless others in the colonized world and beyond in their desire to usher in a future liberated from colonialism and capitalism. In Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Raza demonstrates how Communist Internationalism was a crucial project in the struggle for national liberation and inaugurates a new approach to the global history of communism and decolonization. Dr. Ali Raza is Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Prathama Banerjee's book Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Duke UP, 2020) studies the rise of modern politics in India, between the mid-19th and the mid-20thcenturies, at the cusp of colonial modern, classical Indian, Indo-Persian and regional vernacular ideas. It unpacks the political, following modern common sense, into four elementary aspects – Self, Action, Idea and People – and shows how each element is structured around a conceptual instability, rendering its very elementary status questionable. The political subject is split by the tension between renunciation and realpolitik; action driven by the dialectic between labor and karma, each with its distinctive means-end configuration; the idea torn by its troubled relationships with the economic and the spiritual; and the people forever oscillating between being pure structure, as in the political party, and being pure fiction. Through this account, the book argues that the modern political works by virtue not of any irreducible principle or autonomous logic, a priori identifiable as political, but an unceasing process of differentiation of the political from the non-political – variously imagined at various times as science, religion, society, economics and aesthetics – as also through a simultaneous grounding and delimitation of the political by the specter of the extra-political. The book invites us to go beyond postcolonial and decolonial criticism and engage in the positive and creative task of producing new political theory, inspired by histories and practices from the non-European world. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How are immigrants’ lives shaped by cultural and political dynamics in their homeland, hostland, and “elsewhere” countries whose geopolitical dynamics affect their experiences (such as South Asian Muslims who are affected by post-9/11 and more recent backlash against Middle Eastern nations)? In today’s podcast, we talk with Tahseen Shams, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto-St.George and author of Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World. Tahseen talks about how her own background as a Bangladeshi immigrant to Mississippi inspired her to become an ethnographer, and how her positionality affected her research with other South Asian Immigrants. She describes how she used content analysis of Facebook to overcome her own effect on interviewees and some of the difficulties she had in managing relationships with her participants. Also, in a fascinating discussion of how her female research participants navigated contrasting identity categories of “Good Muslim” and “Moderate Muslim”, she reflects on what she learned from the tensions between what they said in interviews and what she observed them doing. Finally, Tahseen talks about finding inspiration in reading novels and her new research project on inter-ethnic relationships. Tahseen Shams is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto - St. George, and the Bissell-Heyd Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the United States of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Birinder Pal Singh's book Sikhs in the Deccan and North-East India (Taylor & Francis, 2018) is a major intervention in the understanding of the dynamics of internal migration in South Asia. It traces the historical roots of certain migrant Sikh communities to the south and north-east India; chronicles their social, religious and economic practices; and examines peculiar identity formations. This first-of-its-kind empirical study examines the socio-economic conditions of Sikhs in the Deccan and the North-East who are believed to be the descendants of the soldiers in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army despatched to the two regions in the early nineteenth century. It draws on extensive ethnographic accounts to present the social realities of the different communities, including language, religion, culture, occupation, caste, marriage and kinship, and agency. It also questions the idea of Sikh homogeneity that many within the community have come to believe in, while revealing both differences and similarities. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, religion, especially Sikh studies, cultural studies, as well as the Sikh diaspora worldwide. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement. The All World Gayatri Pariwar is a modern religious movement that enjoys wide popularity in North India, particularly among the many STEM workers who joined after becoming disillusioned with their lucrative but unfulfilling private-sector careers. Founded in the mid-twentieth century, the Gayatri Pariwar works to popularize practices inspired by ancient religious texts and breaks with convention by framing these practices as the foundation of a universal spirituality. The movement appeals to science in its advocacy of these practices, claiming that they have medical benefits that constitute proof that rational people around the world should find persuasive. Should these practices become sufficiently widespread, the belief is that humanity will enter a new satyug, or “golden age.” In The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar (SUNY Press, 2021), Daniel Heifetz focuses on how religion and science are objects of intense emotion that help to constitute identities. Weaving engaging ethnographic anecdotes together with readings of Gayatri Pariwar literature, Heifetz interprets this material in light of classic and contemporary theory. The result is a significant contribution to current conversations about the globalized middle classes and the entanglement of religion and science that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding these aspects of life in modern India. Daniel Heifetz teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How did Geluk Buddhism become the most widespread school of Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Asia and beyond? In Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Brenton Sullivan reveals the compulsive efforts by Geluk lamas and "Buddhist bureaucrats" (bla dpon) in the early modern period to prescribe and control a proper way of living the life of a Buddhist monk and to define a proper way of administering the monastery. Using monastic constitutions (bca' yig) and rare manuscripts dating primarily to the eighteenth century collected from research trips to Tibet and Mongolia, Sullivan shows that Geluk monasteries regulated scholastic curricula, liturgical sequences, financial protocols, and so on. These documents also appeal to notions of "impartiality" and "the common good," revealing a kind of preoccupation with rationalization and bureaucratic techniques normally associated with state-making. Sullivan points out that unlike with leaders of other schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Geluk lamas devoted an extraordinary amount of time to the institutional framework within which aspects of monastic life would take place. He argues in Building a Religious Empire that "this privileging of the monastic institution fostered a common religious identity that insulated it from nationalism along the lines of any specific religious leader, practice, or doctrine." Sullivan also reminds us that the remarkable success of Geluk Buddhism's spread to various places in Inner Asia can also be attributed to the mobility of monks and lamas, which "both ensured a degree of uniformity among Geluk monasteries and was facilitated by that uniformity." This mobility facilitated the creation of a system of overlapping networks and loyalties that collectively made up the Geluk school across Tibet and Mongolia. Mobility was also an important part of the Geluk lamas' administrative duties. Sullivan identifies that the Geluk school was "polycephalous," or "multi-headed," and "hydra-headed" at the same time, for it did not rely on a single lama or monastic seat for promoting and maintaining its teachings and organization but on a proliferation of such lamas in various monastic centers that are also regenerative. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai's book Many Mahābhāratas (SUNY Press, 2021) is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mahābhārata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mahābhārata has been not to consume it but to create it anew. Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mahābhārata’s long life in South Asia, Many Mahābhāratasconstitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mahābhārata studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press, 2021) reveals the powerful role of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal.Its focus is on examines the magnificent seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa of SaiyadSultān, who lived in Arakanese-controlled Chittagong to affirm the power of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal. Drawing upon the Arabo-Persian Tales of the Prophets genre, the Nabīvaṃśa ("The Lineage of the Prophet") retells the life of the Prophet Muhammad for the first time to Bengalis in their mother-tongue. Saiyad Sultān lived in Arakanese-controlled Chittagong,in a period when Gauṛiya Vaiṣṇava missionary activity was at its zenith. This book delineates the challenges faced by the author in articulating the pre-eminence of Islam and its Arabian prophet in a place land where multiple religious affiliations were common, and when GauṛīyaVaiṣṇava missionary activity was at its zenith. Sultān played a pioneering role in setting into motion various lexical, literary, performative, theological, and, ultimately, ideological processes that led to the establishment of a distinctively Bengali Islam in East Bengal, while yet shaping a distinctively Bengali Islam. At the heart of this transformation of a people and their culture lay the persuasiveness of translation to refresh salvation history for a people on a new Islamic frontier. The Nabīvaṃśa not only kindled a veritable translation movement of Arabo-Persian Islamic literature into Bangla, but established the grammar of creative translation that was to become canonical for this regional tradition. This text-critical study lays bare the sophisticated strategies of translation used by a prominent early modern Muslim Bengali intellectual to invite others to his faith. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Join Raj Balkaran as he discusses yoga philosophy with Ian Whicher. We begin with a discussion on how he began his journey towards yoga philosophy before probing his assertion that the Yoga-Sūtras do not advocate abandonment of the world, but rather support a stance that enables one to live more fully in the world without being enslaved by worldly identification. The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga (SUNY Press, 1998) centers on the thought of Patanjali, the great exponent of the authoritative and Classical Yoga school of Hinduism and the reputed author of the Yoga-Sutras. In this textual, historical, and interpretive study, Whicher offers a plausible and innovative reading of the "intention" of the Yoga-Sutras, namely that Yoga does not advocate the abandonment or condemnation of the world, but rather supports a stance that enables one to live more fully in the world without being enslaved by worldly identification. Challenging and correcting misperceptions about Yoga drawn by traditional and modern interpretations of the Yoga-Sutras, the author argues for a fresh vision of the spiritual potential present in this seminal text, thereby contributing to our understanding of the meaning and practical relevance of Yoga and its reception today. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories (Association for Asian Studies, 2020) is an unconventional little book – experimental in form – about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author’s fieldnotes diaries as they wend their way through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a high-profile mega-infrastructure project that became an internationally celebrated prototype and model. Waiting Town complicates this celebratory narrative by revealing the conflicting temporalities and procedural pretentions of ‘world class’ developmentalism. On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai – about housing schemes and scams, about ‘duplicate’ documents (and ‘duplicate duplicates’), and about the material wreckage wrought by the city’s ‘world-class’ ambitions. And at the same time, it has a larger story to tell about truth and falsehood, time and memory – and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge production, interpretation and representation more generally. Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville and Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global South, that brings together scholars doing fieldwork outside of the US and Europe. Marco and Victoria tell us about how they came to do ethnographic research on the Philippines and describe how the special issue emerged as part of a broader shift towards studying the Global South. We also talk with them about why and how there are pressures against overseas scholarship from within graduate programs and academic journals, how Global South ethnographers must translate their work for US audiences, and how younger scholars can pursue their interests while also positioning themselves for success. Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Reyes studies culture, borders, and empire. Her work is driven by the question of how to understand territoriality in the 21stcentury. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology and she is the author of Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire. Marco Garrido is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Garrido's work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and he is the author of The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2021) (University of California Press, 2021) focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts. Anand A. Yang is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History and Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. His monographs include the books The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India; Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar; and the edited volumes Crime and Criminality in British India and Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What is the history of caste in a city? Indian modernizers assumed that the various processes of modernity, including industrial capitalism, would attenuate caste and create the possibility of new social relationships, including class solidarity. Instead, capitalism relied on caste to recruit and discipline labor, and the colonial and postcolonial governments deployed it for housing, city planning, and provisions for social welfare. On its part, caste adapted to housing, urban planning, and even land tenures. Even the purported antitheses of capitalism — Marxism and Communism — could not annihilate caste. As a result, caste became robust even as it was shrouded beneath the veneer of modern urban life. Outcaste Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2021) examines the interplay of caste and class in twentieth century Bombay. It studies processes that are transnational — capitalism, Marxism, urban planning, literature — and the ways in which they became relevant to life in the city. It focuses on urban outcastes — Dalits primarily, and also the urban poor – to trace their interaction with city-making and urban politics, their sense of self and community, and the cultural life they fashioned in Bombay. This inter-disciplinary book draws on rare English and Marathi language sources — including novels, poems, and manifestoes — and contributes to debates in the fields of South Asian history, global Marxism, social anthropology, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit studies, and literature. Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include Modern South Asia, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit Studies, and global Marxism. His second book project will be on the life and times of Gangadhar Adhikari, a scientist who embraced communism, and became a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India. When he is not working, or spending time with his family, he enjoys cooking, gardening, hiking, and following cricket scores from around the world. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is also coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020), coedited by Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng'weno, and Neelima Jeychandran, breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations. An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations. Smriti Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Bettina Ng’weno is Associate Professor for African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. Neelima Jeychandran is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in African Studies and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Commonwealth, curry and cricket: now that explains India and Australia! Not really, and not according to today's guest. Kama Maclean discusses her book British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901-1947 (NewSouth, 2020). In contemporary bilateral relations, great emphasis has been placed on India and Australia’s historical connection with the Commonwealth. The stress laid on a shared past is deeply misleading, however, for each colony was tied to Britain in the early twentieth century under very different conditions. Both, it is true, strained against the imperial embrace, but the respective forms of colonisation, collaboration with, and resistance against the empire diverge widely. At the beginning of the twentieth century, each colony pulled in a different direction. As a settler society geographically isolated from Britain, newly self-governing and freshly assertive, in 1901 Australia adopted the White Australia policy, effectively preventing the further migration of nonwhite settlers. This, much to Britain’s frustration, included those from British India, undermining an attempt to project a sense of unity within the empire. Prior to 1901, however, a substantial population of Indians had come to Australia and were granted limited rights of residency. British India, White Australia charts the lives of some of these settlers, charting a social history of their struggles against Australian legislation, which prevented them from voting and working in many industries. Kama Maclean - Professor of South Asian History and department head at the University of Heidelberg's South Asia Institutes. Kama is a historian of South Asia, specialising in the experience of colonialism in north India, with an interest in political communication in colonial India. She was trained in the School of Politics at La Trobe University in the 1990s and completed a PhD on the history and politics of the Kumbh Mela in 2003. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now. Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techniques from the US south, how the attempt to create plantation-style agriculture in Queensland, Australia bumped up against the logic of white settler colonialism and attempts to expand plantation agriculture in Belize in the age of so-called “free” labor using indentured labor from Asia. This is a story of racial formation on a global scale, and of the limits of capital’s ability to remake social relations and environments in its own image, despite the capacity for organized brutality that it had at its disposal. This book is particularly important at a time when many American, British and French commentators have tried to downplay the violence of expansion and colonialism and to portray white supremacy as some sort of American peculiarity and relic of the past. Zach is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and was previously Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Hinduism, as is well known, has taken a multitude of shapes and forms. Some Hindu "little traditions" have remained obscure or understudied to this day due to their regional remoteness. One such offshoot is the influential cult of Mahasu, which has existed since medieval times in a part of the western Himalaya. The deity at the core of the cult takes the form of four primary Mahasus with territorial influence, installed in various far-flung temples. Their geographical center is the village of Hanol, and the larger territory is integrated into the Mahasu politico-religious system by a peripatetic deity with loyal followers across a considerable domain. Mahasu remains influential in the region, its ritual practices having remained quite distinct despite social change. An anthropological survey was conducted in its terrain during British times, but Till Kingdom Come: Medieval Hinduism in the Modern Himalaya (SUNY Press, 2021) is the first book to offer a detailed framework, a fine-grained history, and an analytically nuanced understanding of one of the rarest branches of Hindu worship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What were the stories of modern China-India relations in the age of empires? How did India and China engage with each other beyond pan-Asianist and anti-colonialist interactions? In Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (Oxford UP, 2020), fifteen diverse scholars attempt to answer these questions through analyses on literature, religion, diplomacy, intelligence, political activism, nationalism, and more. Together, the chapters of the book argue for a need to understand China-India relations in the period between 1840s to 1960s beyond idealist perceptions of Asian unity. They question the use of fixed periodization and geographically constrained understandings of China-India interactions, at the same time reminding us of the complexities of political transitions and the various roles of mediators. This edited volume also actively engages with existing frameworks for understanding China-India relations, such as ‘Pan-Asianism’ and ‘China/India as method’ in different ways. Some contributors converge with these frameworks to show how thinkers from India and China tried to imagine alternatives to global imperialism and capitalism. Other contributors suggest that state-driven geopolitical designs and desires to overcome the nation-state system cannot be neatly demarcated. Prasenjit Duara, in the epilogue of the volume, points out that “India-China studies of the modern period have been largely confined either to the study of ancient civilizational exchanges or to contemporary realpolitik competitions.” He argues, “…what is not mentioned in these formulations is the extent to which these obscuring strategies are themselves an effect of postcolonial Asian societies participating in and even dominating the capitalist nation-state system for control of global resources.” Utilizing new and diverse archival materials in various languages, Beyond Pan-Asianism attempts to address these issues and highlights that modern China-India ties indeed went beyond, if not challenged, the capitalist nation-state system but also reinforced it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism (Routledge, 2020), Douglas Osto analyses the contemporary global revival of Nondual Śaivism, a thousand-year-old medieval Hindu religious philosophy. Providing a historical overview of the seminal people and groups responsible for the revival, the book compares the tradition's medieval Indian origins to modern forms, which are situated within distinctively contemporary religious, economic, and technological contexts. The author bridges the current gap in the literature between "insider" (emic) and "outsider" (etic) perspectives by examining modern Nondual Śaivism from multiple standpoints as both a critical scholar of religion and an empathetic participant-observer. Osto explores modern Nondual Śaivism in relation to recent scholarly debates concerning the legitimacy of New Age consumptive spirituality, the global spiritual marketplace, and the contemporary culture of narcissism. It also analyses the dark side of the revived tradition, and investigates contemporary teachers accused of sexual abuse and illegal financial activities in relation to unique features of Nondual Śaivism's theosophy and modern scholarship on new religious movements (NRMs) and cults. This book shows that, although Kashmir Śaivism has been adopted by certain teachers and groups to market their own brand of "High Tantra," some contemporary practitioners have remained true to the system's fundamental tenets and teach authentic (albeit modern) forms of Nondual Śaivism. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of religion and Asian philosophies, especially South Asian, tantric, neo-tantric and yoga philosophies, alternative and New Age spiritualities, religion and consumerism, and new religious movements (NRMs) and cults. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a dangerous “fourth wave” of radical right politicians? Dr. Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019) argues that politicians like Le Pen represented a 20th-century marginalized populist radical right party but Trump (and others across the globe) represent a fourth wave in which the 21st-century radical right parties are normalized and mainstreamed all over the world such that three of the world’s largest democracies (India, the United States, and Brazil) have or have had radical right leaders. It is this normalization that Mudde identifies as crucial to our understanding of the radical right around the globe – and any possible responses available from liberal democracies. Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a Professor II in the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. Mudde has written numerous scholarly books published in 23 languages (many of which focus on extremism and populism) and regularly publishes in popular outlets such as The Guardian. He hosts Radikaal, a podcast about the radical aspects politics, music, and sports. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb explores this question through a vigorous and exciting micro-history of a major 20th-century Urdu newspaper Madinah that was at the center of critical political, theological, and sociological currents in Muslim South Asia. The distinguishing feature of this book lies in its focus on the place and space of the qasbah, or small towns, as fascinating and often overlooked theaters of individual and communal identity formation and contestation. What competing notions of Islam, politics, and time emerge in a marketplace of ideas animated and engine by the technology and materiality of print culture, especially, the newspaper? Robb examines this question through a probing analysis that brings together vivid portraits of social and intellectual life in early 20th-century Northern India, with productive theoretical interventions on conceptualizing the interaction of print, religion, and politics in colonial modernity. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2020) offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean. Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015). Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Jaina Studies is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field of inquiry for scholars of Indian religion and philosophy. In Jainism, "yoga" carries many meanings, and this book explores the definitions, nuances, and applications of the term in relation to Jainism from early times to the present. Yoga in Jainism (Routledge, 2015), edited by Christopher Key Chapple, begins by discussing how the use of the term yoga in the earliest Jaina texts described the mechanics of mundane action or karma. From the time of the later Upanisads, the word Yoga became associated in all Indian religions with spiritual practices of ethical restraint, prayer, and meditation. In the medieval period, Jaina authors such as Haribhadra, Subhacandra, and Hemacandra used the term Yoga in reference to Jaina spiritual practice. In the modern period, a Jaina form of Yoga emerged, known as Preksa Dhyana. This practice includes the physical postures and breathing exercises well known through the globalization of Yoga. By exploring how Yoga is understood and practiced within Jainism, this book makes an important contribution to the fields of Yoga Studies, Religious Studies, Philosophy, and South Asian Studies. Raj Balkaran is a Scholar, Educator, Consultant, and Life Coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Modern markets and exchange, compared with other social and political spheres, are seen through technical abstractions. This intellectual compartmentalization has political consequences: if capitalism operates through arcane, objective, and rational mechanics, the very real interests and very real consequences of exchange are disguised and simplified. In their empirically dense and theoretically bold edited volume, Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke gather historians and anthropologists to reflect on the dynamic, adaptive, and ambiguous realities of markets and exchange in India. Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction (Cambridge University Press, 2020) provides a rich array of vivid case studies – from colonial property and advertising milieus to today’s bazaar and criminal economies – to examine the friction and interdependence between commerce, society, and state. Beyond providing a vantage point for rethinking global capitalism from one of the world’s major economies, the volume conceptualizes the moral, spatial, legal, and symbolic dynamics of markets in a way that is broadly relevant through the Global South. Two of the volume’s editors, Ajay Gandhi, assistant professor at Leiden University, and Sebastian Schwecke, head of the Delhi office of the Max Weber Foundation, discuss the book’s theoretical ambitions and empirical range. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is also coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In 1935, the writer Baburao Patel writes the following about Bombay’s film industry: “In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives. . . . He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and recovers his investment by blackmailing the exhibitors into giving heavy and uneconomic minimum guarantees. His only aim in life is to multiply his rupee and in prosecuting this aim he does not worry about the future of the industry or about the existence of the producer or exhibitor.” It’s a hectic time for India’s film industry, as it is for films everywhere, as the silent era becomes the talking era. Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press: 2020) examines this key period of India’s film industry, from finance and casting to screenwriting and production, and brings into view the experiences of the marginalised film workers and forgotten film studios that made up this early period of industry. In this interview, Debashree and I talk about the transition from silent to talking movies in Bombay, along with the historical context and working conditions for those in the city’s historical film industry. Those interested in learning more about the film industry in 1930s Bombay can visit the Wildcat of Bombay Instagram account at @wildcatofbombay (recommended by Debashree!) Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope and has published in journals such as Film History and Feminist Media Histories. In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson. More information can be found on Debashree’s website, and she can be followed on Twitter at @Debashree2017. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bombay Hustle. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins the Pandavas and the Kouravas but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this translation of the complete Mahabharata (Penguin, 2015), Bibek Debroy takes on a great journey with incredible ease. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2021) provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, this study argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. It charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance--through precedent and statute--over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

From 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and set their own policy agendas. But not all resource-exporting countries that benefited from the commodity boom took this path away from neoliberalism. In his new book In China’s Wake: How the Commodity Boom Transformed Development Strategies in the Global South (Columbia University Press 2020), Jepson uses fieldwork, interviews, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify and describe five typologies of resource exporters during the boom and the factors that contributed to differing development strategies and trajectories. China’s rise has had profound consequences on the processes of global capitalism, and this can be observed most clearly in the fortunes of commodity-exporting countries of the Global South. In China’s Wake explores fascinating case studies of countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa to demonstrate the wide-ranging impact of China’s growth. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @LDickmeyer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies