New Books in South Asian Studies

The Cidvilāsastava is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the esoteric contemplation of ritual found within the Śrīvidyā tradition and Śaiva tantra in general. This short forty-verse hymn offers esoteric knowledge and creative contemplations (bhāvanā) for critical steps in the ritual worship of Tripurasundarī. Although belonging to the Śrīvidyā tradition, the Cidvilāsastava will likely be of great interest to all who perform pūjā as many of the verses deal with topics and procedures that are common to all traditional forms of ritual worship. The full tex is available here. 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

Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea—“dharma”—which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. In this deeply researched book, Patrick Olivelle draws on Ashoka’s inscriptions and on the art and architecture he pioneered to craft a detailed picture of Ashoka as a ruler, a Buddhist, a moral philosopher, and an ecumenist who governed a vast multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multireligious empire. 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

Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible and relevant. The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana Buddhism now flourishes in China, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. While the other major Mahayana tradition, the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), focuses on the concept of emptiness—that all phenomena lack an intrinsic essence—the Yogacara school focuses on the cognitive processes whereby we impute such essences. Through everyday examples and analogues in cognitive science, author William Waldron makes Yogacara’s core teachings—on the three turnings of the Dharma wheel, the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception—accessible to a broad audience. In contrast to the common characterization of Yogacara as philosophical idealism, Waldron presents Yogacara Buddhism on its own terms, as a coherent system of ideas and practices, with dependent arising its guiding principle. The first half of Making Sense of Mind Only explores the historical context for Yogacara’s development. Waldron examines early Buddhist texts that show how our affective and cognitive processes shape the way objects and worlds appear to us, and how we erroneously grasp onto them as essentially real—perpetuating the habits that bind us to samsara. He then analyzes the early Madhyamaka critique of essences. This context sets the stage for the book’s second half, an examination of how Yogacara texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Asanga’s Stages of Yogic Practice (Yogacarabhumi) build upon these earlier ideas by arguing that our constructive processes also occur unconsciously. Not only do we collectively, yet mostly unknowingly, construct shared realities or cultures, our shared worlds are also mediated through the storehouse consciousness (alayavijñana) functioning as a cultural unconscious. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argues that we can learn to recognize such objects and worlds as “mere perceptions” (vijñaptimatra) and thereby abandon our enchantment with the products of our own cognitive processes. Finally, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Ultimate Nature (Dharmadharmatavibhaga) elegantly lays out the Mahayana path to this transformation. In Waldron’s hands, Yogacara is no mere view but a practical system of transformation. His presentation of its key texts and ideas illuminates how religion can remain urgent and vital in our scientific and pluralistic age. 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 has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist political parties in modern Indian history: the All-India Hindu Mahasabha (HMS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She compares three critical periods to show the increasing involvement of women in Hindu nationalist politics over time. In its formative years in the early 1900s, the HMS marginalized women; in the 1980s, the BJP began to mobilize them; and in the contemporary period, as the BJP returned to power in 2014, it has incorporated women into its structures and activities. Williams contends that the incorporation of women into Hindu nationalist politics has significantly advanced the BJP's electoral success compared to prior periods when women were either marginalized or mobilized in more limited ways. Given that the BJP is one of the most dynamic religious/ethno-nationalist parties in the world at present, Williams' account of how it incorporated masses of women into its coalition is essential reading for scholars and students interested not just in India, but in the relationship between gender and right-wing populist politics globally. Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: [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 is India tackling its persistent wage management problems? And, are new infrastructural solutions the way forward? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pamela Das about the new infrastructures that are increasingly being put in place to help Indian cities confront the problem of waste and how to handle it. Estimate suggests that by 2025, India will generate 1.3 billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste every year. With a recycling rate at below 20 percent, the negative consequences for the environment and for public health are clear and visible in both urban and rural contexts. In policy discussions, the solution is often deemed to be infrastructural – that if only India could get the infrastructure right, the problem of waste would disappear. But infrastructures sometimes produce new and unanticipated social consequences that compound rather than solve existing problems. Pamela Das is an interdisciplinary researcher trained in anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. 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

Pravina Rodrigues' book A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out (Lexington, 2023) discusses the issue of the missing Hindu interlocutors in the disciplines of theology of religions, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology. It fills the gap left by the missing Hindu interlocutors by offering a first-ever Śākta thealogy of religions and a Śākta method for comparative theology. For Śāktas, the thread of religious diversity is part of the rich tapestry of cosmological, topographical, environmental, and bio-diversity, which is the Goddess’ collective (samaṣṭi) and individuated (vyaṣṭi) forms. Śākta religious diversity is "complex, layered, and paradoxical, allowing ontological similarities, ontological differences, and irreducibility." A Śākta thealogy of religious diversity transcends humans and the borders of religion, politics, society, and speciesism. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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 is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an “inside-out” methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms. Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an “outside-in” approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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

Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala. Dr. Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Dr. Subrahmanyam himself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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, Pat speaks with Dr Supriya Subramani. Dr Subramani's interest in morality and ethics has led her to explore morality, behaviour, and ethics in healthcare contexts. She has worked on the concepts of belonging, micro-inequities, moral habitus, the idea of the passive patient, the social construction of incompetency, and reflexivity. They discuss caste and contemporary music, resistance and poetry, and autonomy and participatory theatre. Background notes and a transcript of this episode are also available on the Concept : Art website (http://www.conceptartpodcast.com). Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. 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

Music in Colonial Punjab (Oxford UP, 2023) offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from 'mirasis' (bards) and 'kalawants' (elite musicians), to 'kanjris' (subaltern female performers) and 'tawaifs' (courtesans). A central theme is the rise of new musical publics shaped by the anglicized Punjabi middle classes, and British colonialists' response to Punjab's performing communities. The book reveals a diverse connoisseurship for music with insights from history, ethnomusicology, and geography on an activity that still unites a region now divided between India and Pakistan. Dr Radha Kapuria is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Durham University, United Kingdom. She is a historian of gender and culture in South Asia. Her current research is on the impact of the 1947 Partition on musicians’ lives in India and Pakistan. This ongoing research will feed into her second monograph on musical memories of the Partition, focused on the history of musical exchange across the Indo-Pak border in both South Asia and the British diaspora since 1947. 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

Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. Book gives an exhaustive introduction dealing with Purāṇas, the growth of Vaiṣṇnavism and Narratology with special reference to Bhāgavata Purāṇa which sets precursor to the further analysis. It undertakes hermeneutic interpretation of episodes – Lord Kṛṣṇa’s birth story, Lifting of Govardhana Mountain, Syamantaka jewel, exploits of Pūtanā and other demons, uprooting of Arjuna trees, the expulsion of Kāliya, Gopīcīraharaṇam, Rāsapaῆcādhyāyī, story of Kubjā, story of Śrīdāman and Rukmiṇī Svayaṁvara. All these narratives are categorised into three themes – 1) Assimilation and acculturation 2) Exploits of demons and 3) Bhakti Narratives. The Narrative structure of each episode is analysed to derive the meaning from it. Theoretical frameworks developed by K. Ayyappa Paniker, Genette and Roland Barthes are applied to the selected narratives of the tenth skandha of Bhāg. P. to understand the deeper meaning of the narratives. The toolbox approach is taken into consideration while doing textual exegesis and hermeneutic interpretation. It explores socio-historical, psychological and philosophical aspects of the above narratives through textual analysis of the tenth skandha of Bhāgavata Purāṇa using the tools like intertextuality and intratextuality. 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 The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara’s analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara’s commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara’s theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. 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

Manu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a pioneering public servant, diplomat, and women's rights advocate, in her own right. They talk about the Nehru’s privileged upbringing and elite education, their conversion to a Gandhi inspired ascetism, the hardships of repeated jail sentences during the struggle against British colonialism, as well as the many influences on Pandit’s feminist consciousness, including early western role models like Annie Besant and Margaret Sanger. Their conversation highlights the critical role of the All-India Women's Conference chaired by Pandit in advancing popular critiques of colonialism and inspiring confidence that the country could transition peacefully and move forward successfully on its own. They also discuss Pandit’s impressive diplomatic career after World War II, when she served in many foreign posts, became the first woman president of the UN General Assembly, and was celebrated globally. 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

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he came to define what it means to be human. How and why did Ambedkar, who revered and cited the Gita till the 1930s, turn against Hinduism? What were his quarrels with Gandhi and Savarkar? Why did he come to see himself as Moses? How did the lessons learnt at Columbia University impact the struggle for water in Mahad in 1927 and the drafting of the Constitution of India in 1950? Having declared in 1935 that he will not die as a Hindu, why did Ambedkar toil on the Hindu Code Bill? What made him a votary of Western individualism and yet put faith in the collective ethical way of life suggested by Buddhism? Why is it wrong to see Ambedkar as an apologist for colonialism? From which streams of thought did Ambedkar brew his philosophies? Who were the thinkers he turned to in his library of fifty thousand books? What did this life of the mind cost him and his intimates? What of his first wife, Ramabai, while he was busy with the chalval? A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar (Navayana Press, 2023) is a rigorous effort at both asking questions and answering as many as one can about B.R. Ambedkar. Ashok Gopal undertakes a mission without parallel: reading the bulk of Ambedkar’s writings, speeches and letters in Marathi and English, and what Ambedkar himself would have read. This is the story of the unrelenting toil and struggle that went into the making of Ambedkar legend. A graduate in history, Ashok Gopal has worked as a journalist, consultant for NGOs, curriculum designer and educational content developer. He has been studying the life and thought of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar since 2004. He lives in Pune. The book features 70 photographs, most of them from the archivist Vijay Surwade’s collection. For a more dedicated analysis about Ambedkar’s take on as well as departure from John Dewey’s American Pragmatism, please check out Scott R. Stroud’s monograph, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction. 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 the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists fought to keep the defeated Ottoman Empire intact and the sultan in Constantinople, and Zionists sought to build on the wartime promise by the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in face of opposition by Palestinians and pan-Islamists. The task of tackling these issues was made all the more difficult by accusations that Jews were not loyal to the British Empire and its goals, a view promoted by the appearance of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in English translation. British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India (Bloomsbuy, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Chasin follows this web of divisive imperial politics, and nationalist and pan-Islamist aspirations in India and Palestine, through the lives and work of these three men whose efforts were coloured by the post-war fear of a declining empire that was being corroded from within. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama's exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship. The second volume recounts Rama's exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities--rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana's marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama's honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita's disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana. Eva De Clercq's The Life of Padma (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani's critical edition. 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

Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority? In Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023), SherAli Tareen, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions over the meaning of Islam in the modern world. Tareen’s framework also provides a timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. In our conversation we discussed Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits. 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

Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. In Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is a flow with nothing permanent, both the observer and the observed undergoing constant transformation. Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long's book Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) is based on such innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies. 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

Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in The Inhumans and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024) you'll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy's satirical novella about a lost race of Bengali supermen in Uganda. Also included are Jagadananda Ray's “Voyage to Venus” (1895), Nanigopal Majumdar's “The Mystery of the Giant” (1931), and Manoranjan Bhattacharya's “The Martian Purana” (1931). The stories were selected and translated by Dr. Bohdisattva Chattopadhyay. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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

There are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of the Indian subcontinent than anyone else before British colonial rule. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea--"dharma"--which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. He aspired to forge a new moral philosophy that would be internalized not only by the people of his empire but also by rulers and subjects of other countries, and would form the foundation for his theory of international relations, in which practicing dharma would bring international conflicts to an end. His fame spread far and wide both in India and in other parts of Asia, and it prompted diverse reimaginations of the king and his significance. In Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024), Patrick Olivelle draws on Ashoka's inscriptions and on the art and architecture he pioneered to craft a detailed picture of Ashoka as a ruler, a Buddhist, a moral philosopher, and an ecumenist who governed a vast multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multireligious empire. 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 Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct from directly ruled British India. Their legal status and the extent of their rights remained the subject of feverish debates through the entirety of British colonial rule. This book traces the ways in which the language of sovereignty shaped the discourse surrounding the legal status of the princely states to illustrate how the doctrine of sovereignty came to structure political imagination in colonial South Asia and the framework of the modern Indian state. In this podcast, Dr Saksena explores how the various players within British India – international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists – used definitions of sovereignty to construct political orders in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of imperial and world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Our discussions chart the debates and disputes over the princely states across two hundred years of Indian history, and how they continually defined and redefined the concept of sovereignty and international legitimacy in South Asia. The podcast explores the importance of the language of international law, how it is used and by whom, and how it is both a counterweight and a shaping force for political power. We discuss how different understandings of sovereignty have been (and still are) influencing the various ways in which people think about organising the world and their relationship to each other. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith 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 culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London, explores the history and practice of the folk performance Kobigaan. The book draws on rich archival and historical analysis, as well as fieldwork in West Bengal and Bangladesh, to tell the story of how Kobigaan has evolved over time, how it has been preserved, how it has changed media and changed practice, and how the struggles over to whom Kobigaan belongs play out today. A fascinating and engaging text, the book will be of interest to scholars across the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in arts and culture! 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

Razak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identities of Muslims in Rampur-the last Muslim-ruled princely state in colonial United Provinces and a city that is pejoratively labelled as the center of "Muslim vote bank" politics in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. The book highlights the importance of locality and emotions in shaping Muslim identities, politics, and belonging in Rampur. The book shows that we need to move beyond such homogeneous categories of nation and region, in order to comprehend local dynamics that allow a better and closer understanding of the historical re-negotiations of politics and identities by Muslims in South Asia. This is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on the local history and politics of Rampur princely state, based on Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, and English archives and oral histories of Rampuris. The book provides insights into the various facets of the political, economic, religious, literary, socio-cultural, and affective history of Rampur and Rampuris in India and Pakistan. Anindita Ghosh is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her dissertation is about the histories of absorption of the eastern native states of South Asia into the nations and their socio- political afterlives in the post- colonial nations. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. 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 a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the concept of ‘literary sovereignty’, the book argues that political sovereignty in colonial India went hand in hand with a massive project of textually understanding local cultures that colonial officials encountered. This in turn gave rise to paradigms such as those of comparison, fields of study such as literary history and most importantly – world literature. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light. The book also offers us tools to decolonise literary studies by highlighting the genealogies of modern ideas of world literature and comparative literature that are rooted in European colonialism. Baidik Bhattacharya works at the crossroads of literary studies, social sciences, and philosophy. His first book, Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (Routledge, 2018), explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields-postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, the book asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and, in our contemporary times, the promise of that ideal has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories. Bhattacharya is the co-editor of two volumes: Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (eds.) Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre (Permanent Black, 2018); Baidik Bhattacharya and Neelam Srivastava (eds.) The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2012). His other works have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies among other places. Bhattacharya has held visiting scholarships at the University of Virginia and the University of Western Cape. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Postcolonial Studies. 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

Why did khadi become so central to India’s freedom struggle? How did it evolve into an international trademark – and what does khadi signify in India today? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Subhadeep Chowdhury about the political, cultural, and economic importance of khadi, the famous handspun and woven natural fiber cloth that we often associate with Mahatma Gandhi, but which is also an international trademark and part of the world of contemporary Indian fashion Subhadeep Chowdhury is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, at the University of Oslo. He is currently finishing his dissertation that is provisionally titled “Made in Imperialism: An International History of Textiles and India’s Quest for Trademark Law 1877–1947.” Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo, and one of the Leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. 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 Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama's book The Play of the Feminine (HASP, 2023) explores Navarātri as it is celebrated in the South Indian temple town of Kanchipuram. It investigates the local mythologies of the goddess, two temple celebrations, and the domestic ritual practice known as kolu (doll displays). The author highlights three intersecting themes: namely the play of the goddess in myth and ritual, the religious agency and images of women and the divine feminine, and notions of playfulness in Navarātri rituals; as articulated in creativity, aesthetics, competition, and dramatic expressions. This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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

In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes in villages revealed an array of practices of governance that negotiated with the problem of their applicability to local conditions. And at the same time in Britain, the dominant Ricardian conception of political economy was being challenged by thinkers like Richard Jones and William Whewell, who sought to make political economy an inductive science, capable of analyzing the real world. Through analyses of these three interrelated moments in British imperial history, Upal Chakrabarti's Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) engages with articulations of the "local" on multiple theoretical and empirical fronts, weaving them into a complex reflection on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. 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 Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes. As legal historian Dr. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony’s economic and political subordination. Britain’s turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire—authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant—over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists’ reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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

Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant presence in many countries throughout the world. The most important cause of this global expansion is migration. This book presents and analyses the most important of the geographies, migration histories, religious traditions and developments, rituals, places, institutions, and representations of Hinduism in the diasporas, capturing some of the great plurality of Hindu religious traditions. The first part of the book concentrates on the major regions in the world in which Hindu diasporas are found. The main focus is the modern period, but the book discusses also the possibility of premodern Hindu diasporas in Southeast Asia. The second part focuses on specific central themes such as Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta traditions in diasporas, temples, and traditions of sacred sites and pilgrimage outside of South Asia, Hindutva organizations and the diaspora, as well as relations between Hindu diasporas and new followers of Hindu traditions. The chapters in this book show some of the global presence of the Hindu diasporas and some of the dynamic developments in multiple geographical spaces. Analysing specific spaces and themes, the chapters of the book offer a foundation for understanding the Hindu traditions in its most important global diasporic contexts and the dynamic developments around the world. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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

Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with acerbic lyrics to poetry recited in kavi sammelans to social media influencers shaping opinions with their brand of 'breaking news' to books rescripting historical events, 'Hindutva Pop' or H-Pop is steadily creating societal acceptability for Hindutva's core beliefs. By cleverly inserting Hindutva into popular culture, H-Pop normalizes Islamophobia, demonizes minorities and vilifies its critics each day, without ever making headlines. What makes H-Pop so popular? Who are its stars and its audience? Who is pouring in the money, the effort and the resources to produce and broadcast it? What is its impact on the BJP and Prime Minister Modi's popularity? And what kind of an India is it trying to create? These are some of the questions that award-winning independent journalist Kunal Purohit explores in this riveting investigative book as he travels through India, profiling some of H-Pop's most prolific and popular creators--its stars and celebrities. He interrogates whether the creators are driven by ideology or commerce, and what motivates the audience to consume their daily dose of bigotry. In H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins, 2023), Purohit uncovers the frightening face of a New India--one that is united by hate, divided by art. Kunal Purohit has been a journalist for nearly two decades, writing on issues of development, politics, inequality, gender and the intersections between them. He is an independent journalist and has, in the recent past, reported closely on hate crimes and the rise of Hindu nationalism across the country. He has worked in the newsrooms of Hindustan Times and The Free Press Journal in Mumbai. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from where, as a Felix Scholar, he earned an MSc in Development Studies with distinction in 2017. Kunal received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism in 2012, the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting in 2014 and the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Reporting in 2014 and 2019. He has also received various fellowships and journalism grants. His work can be found in Al Jazeera, ProPublica, The Times of India, Foreign Policy, Hindustan Times, South China Morning Post, Deutsche Welle and The Wire, among others. 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

1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence. Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here. 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

India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India (Stanford UP, 2023) reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security. Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: [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

Jeffery D. Long's Indian Philosophy: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2023) helps readers discover how the many and varied schools of Indian thought can answer some of the great questions of life: Who are we? How can we live well? How do we tell truth from lies? Accessibly written for readers new to Indian philosophy, the book takes you through the main traditions of thought, including Buddhist, Hindu and Jain perspectives on major philosophical topics from ancient times to the present day. Bringing insights from the latest research to bear on the key primary sources from these traditions and setting them in their full spiritual, historical and philosophical contexts, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction covers such topics as: - Philosophies of action and knowledge - Materialism and scepticism - Consciousness and duality - Religious and cultural expressions The book includes a pronunciation guide to Sanskrit and Indic language terms and a comprehensive guide to further reading for those wishing to take their study further. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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

This episode is dedicated to introducing the South Asian Studies Association (SASA) and their annual academic conference being co-hosted by the Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies Concentration (ACTS) being held at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) on March 1st-3rd, 2024. We are joined by Chris Chapple, the president of SASA, and Debashish Banerji, board member of SASA, as well as the chair of ACTS, who describe this years hybrid, in-person and online, conference, which is called Order and Disorder in South Asia. We also discuss Chris’s new book, Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas, as well as scholar-practitioner approaches to South Asian Studies. Conference Information Join us for the Order and Disorder in South Asia conference, where leading experts and scholars will explore the delicate balance between stability and chaos in one of the world’s most diverse and dynamic regions. Delve into the historical, political, and socio-cultural complexities that have shaped South Asia, examining the forces that foster order and those that disrupt it. Gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing this vibrant part of the world. This conference promises to be a thought-provoking journey through the fascinating tapestry called South Asia. You can register here. Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and founding Director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A specialist in the religions of India, he has published more than twenty books, including the recent Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY Press). He serves as advisor to multiple organizations including the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley), the Jain Studies Centre (SOAS, London), the South Asian Studies Association, and the International School for Jain Studies (New Delhi). Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Program Chair for the East-West Psychology department. Previously, he was the Professor of Indian Studies and Dean of Academics at the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles. He holds the Aurobindo Puraskar Award for international excellence in Sri Aurobindo studies from the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata (2017) and the Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM) Book Award for Constructive Philosophy. Recent books include Meditations on the Isha Upanishad: Tracing the Philosophical Vision of Sri Aurobindo (Pink Integer Books, 2020) and Philo-Sophia: Wisdom Goddess Traditions (Lotus Press, 2021), co-edited with CIIS emeritus President, Robert McDermott. More updated information on his talks, publications and other academic activities may be found at his website www.debashishbanerji.com. EWP Podcast Credits East-West Psychology Podcast Website Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP Core Faculty) and Jonathan Kay (EWP PhD candidate) Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay Introduction music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala Music at the end of the episode: Migration, by Justin Gray’s Synthesis on Monsoon-Music Online Record Label Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra 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

Until Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament of the marginalization this gender non-confirming community was subjected to under British colonial rule. This book is, therefore, important not only because of its efforts to humanize and situate this community amid the anxieties and hubristic ambitions of colonial rule, but also because it documents the ability many Hijras have to preserve in spite of systematic policing and criminalization. More importantly, perhaps, Jessica Hinchy reveals that the Hijras’ were not just surveilled or marginalized; British colonial authorities ultimately aimed to eradicate and eliminate the community entirely. Jessica Hinchy is Assistant Professor in History at the Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. Her research examines gender, sexuality and colonialism in India. In addition to studying the history of the transgender Hijra community under British colonial rule, Dr. Hinchy has also explored problems related to slavery, masculinity, and indirect colonial rule in India through several publications on Khwajasarai eunuch-slaves. She has also investigated the history of childhood, in particular in relation to sexuality and slavery. 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 East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea. As Joshua Ehrlich notes in his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press: 2023), the Company hit upon a novel justification for its work: It was committed to the pursuit of knowledge, and that was why it needed to merge commercial and political power. In this interview, Josh and I talk about the East India Company, how it tried to make “knowledge” part of its responsibility, and how the “politics of knowledge” are still relevant today. Joshua Ehrlich is an award-winning historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago. Ehrlich’s many articles have appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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

East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genres-courtly, devotional, and popular-composed in the main languages of the region: Hindavi, Persian, Brajbhasha, and Urdu. Individual chapters focus on narratives, devotional song-poems and didactic works, local courtly literary practices, and multilingual education as recorded in biographical dictionaries-anthologies. This book suggests that the multilingual and multi-genre approach is better suited to capturing the texture, complexity, and dynamics of literature in the world, and of literary history, than approaches that focus only on global circulation or models that draw centers and peripheries on a single global map. Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London. After earning an undergraduate degree in Hindi at Venice University and living in Delhi, she completed her PhD at SOAS. She taught at the University of Cambridge and SOAS and held visiting positions at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, a regional editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, and an editor of the Cambridge Studies in World Literature series. Her previous monographs include the 2009 book Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India and the 2002 book The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940, Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. She has recently also been writing on decolonisation, the role of magazines in cold-war internationalisms and rethinking the paradigm of world literature by taking a more multilingual and located approach. 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

Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially the development of new technologies and state and colonial projects. Indian Muslim artisans, such as those who worked in electroplating, or as stonemasons, tailors, carpenters, or woodworkers, used their craft, labour, class, and religion to establish prophetic lineages to their crafts and imbue it with Islamic piety in response to struggles of class and caste hierarchies and broader disenfranchisement. Amanda Lanzillo masterfully draws out these stories from Urdu technical manuals and oral histories of artisans themselves and in the process challenges us to think more capaciously about Islamic piety through the economy of labour, class, and technology, and our approaches to the histories of Islam in South Asia and beyond. This book is available open access here. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. 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

Santideva's 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist classic, "The Guide to the Practices of Awakening" (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years. In Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury, 2023), Stephen Harris guides us through a philosophical exploration of Santideva's masterpiece, introducing us to his understanding of the compassionate bodhisattva, who vows to liberate the entire universe from suffering. Individual chapters provide studies of the bodhisattva virtues of generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom, illustrating the role each plays in Santideva's account of well-being and moral development. Harris also provides an in-depth analysis of many of Santideva's most influential arguments, demonstrating how he employs reasoning as a method to cultivate moral character. As the first book-length English language philosophical study of Santideva's most influential text, this will be essential reading for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics, as well as for anyone interested in intercultural ethics and the philosophy of well-being. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. 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

During British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? In Widows Under Hindu Law (Oxford UP, 2023), David Brick offers an exhaustive history of the treatment and status of widows under classical Hindu law, or Dharmasastra as it is called in Sanskrit, which spanned approximately the third century BCE to the eighteenth-century CE. Under Dharmasastra, Hindu jurists treated at length and at times hotly debated four widow-related issues: widow remarriage and levirate, a widow's right to inherit her husband's estate, widow-asceticism, and sati. Each of the book's chapters examine these issues in depth, concluding with an appendix that addresses a widow's right to adopt a son-a fifth widow-related issue that became the topic of discussion in late Dharmasastra works and was a significant point of legal contentions during the colonial period. When read critically and historically, works of Dharmasastra provide a long and detailed record of the prevailing legal and social norms of high-caste Hindu society. Widows Under Hindu Law uses lengthy English translations of important passages from Hindu legal texts to present a largescale narrative of the treatment of widows under the Hindu legal tradition. This book is available open access here. During British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? 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

Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. Amar Sohal's book The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition (Oxford UP, 2023) complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah, and the nonviolent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, this book argues that these three men collectively produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism; an intellectual tradition that has retained religion within the public space while nevertheless preventing it from defining either national membership or the state. At a time when many across the decolonising world believed that identity-based majorities and minorities were incompatible and had to be separated out into sovereign equals, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan thought differently about the problem of religious pluralism in a postcolonial democracy. The minority, they contended, could conceive of the majority not just as an antagonistic entity that is set against it, but to which it can belong and uniquely complete. Premising its claim to a single, united India upon the universalism of Islam, champions of the Muslim secular mobilised notions of federation and popular sovereignty to replace older monarchical and communitarian forms of power. But to finally jettison the demographic inequality between Hindus and Muslims, these thinkers redefined equality itself. Rejecting its liberal definition for being too abstract and thus prone to majoritarian assimilation, they replaced it with their own rendition of Indian parity to simultaneously evoke commonality and distinction between Hindu and Muslim peers. Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan achieved this by deploying a range of concepts from profane inheritance and theological autonomy to linguistic diversity and ethical pledges. Retaining their Muslimness and Indian nationality in full, this crowning notion of equality-as-parity challenged both Gandhi and Nehru's abstractions and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's supposedly dangerous demand for Pakistan. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. 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 uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland's edited volume Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats (Penn State University Press, 2023) critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. Featuring contributions from international scholars with deep knowledge of the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange. Using examples such as trade along the Silk Road; the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia; the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that shaped the history of the continent; and other “sensory highways” of contact, the contributors break down essentializing olfactory tropes and reveal how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies. Smell shapes individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson. Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. 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 proponent of the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Candrakīrti wrote several works, one of which, the Madhamakāvatāra, strongly influenced later Tibetan understandings of Madhyamaka. This work is the subject of Jan Westerhoff’s Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2024), part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. His book situates Candarkīrti and his text within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and helps philosophical readers appreciate the text’s main arguments and ideas. Chief among these is a commitment to the emptiness of all phenomena, especially but not only selves, which is the subject of the lengthy sixth chapter—analyzing what it means for things to lack any substantial existence and criticizing opposing positions. Candrakīrti also takes up topics in metaphilosophy (do critical arguments commit us to positive claims?), philosophy of mind (do enlightened beings have experience at all?), and semantics and logic (what is the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, and can we express the latter in language?). Westerhoff’s guide aims to help readers unfamiliar with Sanskrit or Tibetan navigate these ideas, pointing them to further scholarly and philosophical resources along the way. 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

While there has been sustained interest in Gandhi's methods and continued academic inquiry, Gandhi's Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges (Lexington Books, 2022) is unique in bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who analyze Gandhi's tactics, moral methods, and philosophical principles, not just in the fields of social and political activism, but in the areas of philosophy, religion, literature, economics, health, international relations, and interpersonal communication. Bringing this wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors provide fresh perspectives on Gandhi's thought and practice as well as critical analyses of his work and its contemporary relevance. Edited by Veena R. Howard, this book reveals the need for reconstructing Gandhi's ideas and moral methods in today's context through a broad spectrum of crucial issues, including pacifism, health, communal living, gender dynamics, the role of anger, and peacebuilding. Gandhi's methods have been refined and reimagined to fit different situations, but there remains a need to consider his concept of Sarvodaya (uplift of all), the importance of economic, gender, and racial equity, as well as the value of dialogue and dissenting voices in building a just society. The book points to new directions for the study of Gandhi in the globalized world. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well. The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging. The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts. Discussed in this episode: Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test John Carson, The Measure of Merit Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State Donna Tartt, The Secret History Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India Listen and Read Here 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 Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources – from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj – Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they did so by channeling inter-imperial crosscurrents to successive surges of imperial revolution and regional regime change. Rishad Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on X @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

Tulasi Srinivas' edited volume Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023) brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning of wonder in such varied joyful, tense, and creative sites and moments as Sufi music performances in Gujarat, Tamil graveyard processions, trans women's charitable practices, Kipling's Orientalist tales, village Kuchipudi dance performances, and Rajasthani healing shrines. Offering a synthetic and scholarly reading of wonder that speaks to the political, aesthetic, and ethical worlds of South Asia, these essays redefine the nature and meaning of wonder and its worlds. Taken together, they provide an invaluable research tool for those in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions in particular. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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 the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad's Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment (Routledge, 2022) directs attention to frictions around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. While documenting a range of containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and scrutinising their functioning and outcomes, the book is a first attempt to bridge research on religious offence with critical understandings of peace and scholarship on the micro-mechanisms of coexistence. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. 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

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he’s also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022) offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy. Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India's tea belt. Garima Jaju is a Smuts fellow at the University of Cambridge. 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