New Books In South Asian Studies

What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter (U California Press, 2024) chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefi

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Rizwan Ahmad, Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Qatar University in Doha. We discuss aspects of the Linguistic Landscape, focusing on Rizwan’s research into how Arabic is used on public signs and street names in Qatar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The conversation delves into the use of Arabic in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic-speaking contexts for different purposes. Rizwan explains how variations in grammar, font, and script combined with the distinct social contexts of different countries produces distinctive meanings in relation to culture and identity. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go 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

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated withi

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru. Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-cent

Extensively based on fieldwork material, From Tapas to Modern Yoga: Sādhus' Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox, 2024) primarily analyses embodied practices of ascetics belonging to four religious orders historically associated with the practice of yoga and hatha yoga. This focus on ascetics stems from the fact that yogic techniques probably developed in ascetic contexts, yet scholars have rarely focused their attention on non-international ascetic practitioners of yoga. Creating a confrontation between textual sources and ethnographic data, the book demonstrates how 'embodied practices' (austerities, yoga and hatha yoga) over the centuries accumulated layers of meanings and practices that coexist in the literature as well as in the words of contemporary sadhus. Drawing from conversations with these interlocutors, the book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic fieldwork in shedding light on past historical developments, transmissions, contemporary reinterpretation and innovation. The strength o

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relations with India and China? How does connectivity and infrastructure become a tool for geopolitical competition in the region, from China’s BRI to India’s infrastructural collaboration, and the US’s Millennium Challenges Corporation? On this episode we sit down with Dr. Dinesh Paudel and Aaron Magunna to answer these questions and discuss how it unfolds through cases in the Maldives and Nepal. A wide-ranging conversation, we learn about a rising India, India-China tensions, and how local politics shape the regional SCW. Dr. Dinesh Paudel is a Professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. His current research focuses on exploring the relationships and entanglements between the rising Asian economies, growing environmental degradations and rapidly expanding infrastructure in the Himalaya. He has written extensively on infrastru

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfo

A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskrit poetics and poetic language, thereby yielding an incredibly rich and innovative poetry. Kāḷamēkam sings of courtesans, fellow humans, of gods, of animals, praises them, derides them, and insults them, using sarcasm, dry wit, and criticism, combined with śleṣas and yamakas, samasyās and nindāstutis.  The Monsoon Cloud: Poet Kāḷamēkam and His Irreverent Poetry (Primus, 2024) seeks to introduce this brilliant poet and his timeless and influential poetry, while analysing his humour, worldview, personal values, and devotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingca

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of b

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave (Fourth Estate: 2024), should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff.” Rohit Manchanda is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology. His first novel won a Betty Trask Award, was published with the title In the Light of the Black Sun and was republished in 2024 titled A Speck of Coal Dust. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, coming decades after his first published work. In this episode, Rohit and I talk about his writing career, the themes of The Enclave, and the very real struggle of wanting, but not having the energy, to

For many years, explanations of Pakistan’s politics and its failed democratic transition have focused on the role of the military and politicians. But how have the country’s bureaucrats contributed to the failed democratic transition? And why do their interactions with politicians continue to perpetuate the country’s political instability? Listen as Petra Alderman talks to Sameen Ali about Pakistani bureaucrats, their appointments and interactions with politicians, and the ways in which these interactions have kept Pakistan in the grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism. Sameen A. Mohsin Ali is an Assistant Professor of International Development at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham, where she works on the impact of bureaucratic politics on state capacity and service delivery. Her research on bureaucratic politics in Pakistan has been published in leading politics and development journals, including World Development, European Journal of Development Research, and

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep

Dr. Shweta Kishore and Dr Kunal Ray’s Resistance in Indian Documentary Film: Aesthetics, Culture and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2024) is a unique collection of essays on documentary cinema and practice that brings together multiple modes of scholarly, reflective and autoethnographic writing on documentary by scholars and creative practitioners. It takes a holistic view of documentary culture as a field comprising not only films but practices such as circulation, curation, criticism, and education, that come together to create a particular ecology of resistance. Resistance is conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon comprising both documentary representation as well as practices and tangible actions through which people mobilize and adapt documentary for local, community and individual functions. Dr Kunal Ray is a writer and academic. He teaches literature and film at FLAME University, Pune. His writings on art and culture appear in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times amongst other publications.

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel. A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into

The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger Lawyers Association rocked the nation: protests were launched around India and throughout the diaspora, a record-setting human chain called the ‘Women’s Wall’ was coordinated, and dozens of petitions were filed asking the Supreme Court to review, and potentially reverse, its landmark opinion.  Perhaps most significantly, IYLA led the Court to openly reconsider the Essential Practices Doctrine that has been a mainstay of Indian religious freedom jurisprudence since 1954. In this first monograph-length study of the disput

Speaking with Professor Shalva Weil, one receives a glimpse into the wider world. Through her family ties, her personal journeys, and her research, she has gained, and shares, an understanding of the unique nature and histories of different groups. In this interview she shared the significance of a Jewish community that lasted less than 200 years but made an incredible impact whose reverberations can be felt to this day. Jewish life has existed on the Indian Peninsula for over 2,000 years by most accounts. Prof Weil is a leading scholar in the Bene Israel community of Baghdad, the Jewish communities of Cochin, as well as this more recent community of Baghdadi Jews in India.  The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity (Routledge, 2021) is an anthology of scholars reviewed by Prof Weil to allow us a glimpse into the unique nature and interactions of Baghdadi Jews in India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought as the nascent stage of Savarkarite Hindutva, and highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu Nationalism’. Showing that, by 1915, Lajpat Rai moved towards ‘Indian’ nationalist narratives, it challenges the assumption that all ideas of Hindu nationhood necessarily culminate in Hindutva. An examination of Lajpat Rai’s final nationalist narrative as a Hindu Mahasabha leader in the 1920s confirms the revisionist historiographical rejection of the oppositional binary that was long drawn between Hindu communal politics, on one hand, and secular Indian nationalism and secularism, on the other. Lajpat Rai organized a Hindu politic

Michael C. Baltutis' book What is Hinduism?: A Student's Introduction (Routledge, 2024) is an engaging introduction to the complex religious tradition of Hinduism. Central to its focus is demonstrating the fundamental diversity within Hinduism through the multiplicity of its core beliefs and traditions. Chapters are divided into four historical categories – Vedic, Ascetic, Classical, and Contemporary Hinduism – with each examining one deity alongside one key term, serving as a twin focal point for a more complex discussion of related key texts, ideas, social structures, religious practices, festivals, and concepts such as ritual and sacrifice, music and devotion, and engagement and renunciation. ith study questions, glossaries, and lists of key contemporary figures, this book is an essential and comprehensive resource for students encountering the multiplicity of Hinduism for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://n

In this episode, we are joined by the anthropologist Tone Bleie for a discussion of her book A New Testament: Scandinavian Missionaries and Santal Chiefs from Company and British Crown Rule to Independence (Solum Bokvennen, 2023), a pioneering piece of scholarship that innovatively rethinks the economic, legal, and social history of the power-laden relationship between a Scandinavian Transatlantic mission and the Santals, Boro and Bengalis of Eastern India, Northern Bangladesh, and Eastern Nepal. Based on decades of research, the book offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of historical encounters across the longue durée, transporting readers back to the medieval period and Danish and British Company Rule, through to the British Raj and the early post-Independence period. Tone Bleie is Professor of Public Planning and Cultural Understanding at the University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis

Today I talked to Hari Dutt Sharma about Gulmini: An Anthology of Sanskrit Lyrics and Gazals (Rākā Prakāśana, 2023). The book presents 51 lyrical poems in rythmic and melodious Sanskrit in free metre, The poems examine various sentiments and emotions (rasa and bhāva) on various subjects, from depictions of beautiful seasonal nature to reflections on international travels and the transmission of Sanskrit poetry, and on the experience of poetic creation. 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