New Books In South Asian Studies

If you’re going to teach a broadly themed survey course, you’ll probably need to assign some readings. One option is to assemble one of those photocopied course readers, full of excerpts taken from different sources. However, what you gain in flexibility may be sacrificed in coherence of presentation. A textbook produced by a single author might be more nicely packaged for student consumption, but then, how many different things can one author be an expert in? The best of both approaches would be found in a single-volume collection of essays, written by experts in their respective fields, newly commissioned for the volume in question, and all presented according to a shared format. Karen Pechilis and Selva J. Raj‘s South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today (Routledge, 2012) provides just such a collection, designed with both faculty and students in mind. Contributors to the book include Vasudha Narayanan, M. Whitney Kelting, Sunil Goonasekera, Nathan Katz, M. Thomas Thangaraj, Karen G. Ruff

Aswin Punthamabekar‘s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York University Press, 2013) offers a deeply researched and richly theorized look at the evolution of the world’s largest film industry over the past few decades. Combining ethnographic research with close textual analyses of Bollywood films, Punthamabekar shows how the media industry’s growth has been complexly intertwined with India’s emerging place in the global economy. The book offers a nuanced look at globalization, bringing to light the tensions and productivities that emerge when a highly powerful, historically localized industry enters the world of multinational capitalism.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Several studies about Islam in Asian contexts highlight the pluralistic environment that Muslims inhabit and interplay of various religious traditions that color local practice and thought. In The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013) we are given a first hand account of the devotional life and dynamic setting that produces one such example. Afsar Mohammad, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, documents public rituals and devotional stories revolving around a Sufi master, Kullayappa, and the 300,000 pilgrims from throughout South Asia who travel to the small village of Gugudu. In The Festival of Pirs we are shown how the events occurring during the month of Muharram and the narrative of the Battle of Karbala are transformed into a meaningful local frame. Here, the importance of the ‘local’ becomes clear while both Muslims and Hindus participate in these events. In fact, participants identify their practices as Kullayappa devot

In The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011), Carla Bellamy explores the role of saint shrines in India, while focusing on a particular venue known as Husain Tekri, or “Husain Hill.” Through her in-depth ethnographic research, Bellamy’s monograph provides vivid description and analysis of the site as well as first-person narratives of pilgrims in order to offer a dynamic portrayal of the shrine complex. Bellamy shows how lines between religious communities are often fluid rather than fixed. She also problematizes notions of so-called spirit possession, interrogates the metaphysical power of frankincense, and articulates myriad perspectives of what healing might mean for those who visit Husain Tekri and participate in its rituals. Bellamy’s rich ethnography should appeal to numerous audiences, including those interested in South Asia, shrine culture, Islam, Indian religion, and Sufism.Learn more about your ad choices.

When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time, space, and the ways that their interactions shape human and terrestrial history. In Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), Sunil S. Amrith has produced an elegant, sensitively-wrought account of hundreds of years in the life of the Bay of Bengal. This history of the Bay is also history of the movements and circulations it has engendered, from ocean currents to Tamil migrants, from steamships to Indian laborers, from paper passports to trickles of dammed water, from pails of liquid rubber to wheels on US automobiles. Crossing the Bay of Bengal is simultaneously a political, social, cultural and environmental history: at the same time that it carefully contextualizes the emergence of boundaries (be they the disciplines of area studies or the fo

What is the nature of secularization? How distant are we from the magical world of the past? Perhaps, we are not as far as many people think. In the fascinating new book, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012), we witness some of the discursive practices formulating the Christian myth of disenchantment. Robert Yelle, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis, aims to pull up some of the religious roots of secularism by highlighting the Christian dimensions of colonialism. He achieves this through an examination of colonial British attitudes toward Hinduism and delineates several Protestant projects that assert an ideal monotheism. British colonial discourse in India was integrally tied to religious reform and located false belief in linguistic diversity. Verbal idolatry was specifically addressed through efforts of codification and transliteration. Overall, Yelle’s work on British critiques of South

How does colonial power, both discursive and institutional, transform the normative boundaries and horizons of religious identities? Teena Purohit, Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University, examines this question in The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 2012). This book is clearly written and carefully researched straddling multiples fields and disciplinary approaches. The crux of the study is the transformation of Khoja Isma’ili identity in colonial India. The title refers to a case in 1866 lodged by the Khojas of Bombay against the then Aga Khan over the ownership and control of their property. However, this ostensible property dispute spiraled into a much larger debate over religion and religious identity. Through a dazzling analysis of novel historical and textual archives, Professor Purohit demonstrates that the Aga Khan case of 1866 indelibly transformed the nature and boundaries of Isma’ili religious identity in South Asia, often i

Genocide studies has been a growth field for a couple of decades. Books and articles have appeared steadily, universities have created programs and centers and the broader public has become increasingly interested in the subject. Nevertheless, there remain some aspects of the field and some geographic regions that remain dramatically understudied. Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman’s new edited collection Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (Routledge, 2013) is an excellent step toward filling one of these gaps. The book adds greatly to our understanding of mass violence in East and Southeast Asia. As the title suggests, Mayersen and Pohlman focus not the violence itself, but on its long-term impact on Indonesia, East Timor and other regions in Asia. Deborah and Annie are, besides being solid scholars, delightful conversationalists. The result, I hope, is an interview well worth listening to.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxford “A Very Short Introduction” series. The book is organized into six chapters that each take a different thematic approach to narrating aspects of silk road history from 3000 BCE to the twenty-first century, collectively offering a kind of snapshot introduction to major conceptual approaches to world history writing. In the course of learning about the Xiongnu and the history of dumplings, then, the reader simultaneously gets a crash course in environmental, political, bio-cultural, technological, and artisanal historiographies. Millward has filled the pages of this concise and very readable text with evocative (and sometimes very funny) stories, vignettes, and objects from the historical routes of Central Eurasia, weaving together the histories of lutes, horses, and silkworms with a sensitive an

Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) traces a shift in the Qing state’s external relations from a “frontier policy” at the height of the Qianlong Emperor’s power in the middle of the eighteenth century, to a “foreign policy” by the time Qing scholars, officials, and rulers of the mid-nineteenth century perceived the weakness of their empire when faced with European rivals. At the crux of this change, Mosca demonstrates, was a major shift in the way the empire collected and interpreted information about the world both within and beyond Qing borders. With Qianlong’s death, private Qing scholars who began to take an interest in the empire’s administration transformed the geographi

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various points in the tournament for service in international matches. Political and ethnic tensions in the state of Tamil Nadu required a change in host cities, from Chennai to Delhi, for playoff matches. After a dispute over franchise fees and three unsuccessful campaigns on the field, the franchise in Pune folded at the season’s end. And most significantly, the playoff rounds took place under the cloud of a spot-fixing scandal, as three players for the Rajasthan Royals and eleven bookies were arrested in Delhi in May. Following upon previous scandals, the fixing arrests brought another blow to the IPL’s integrity. Observers point to the flood of cash that has overwhelmed Indian cricke

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the sta

Justin Jones‘ book, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is all about Lucknow, and colonial India, and Shia Islam – and the links and interlinks between these and the outer world. Jones’ is a fascinating study, that draws upon English, Persian and Urdu sources, official and otherwise, to detail a narrative of Shi’ism in Lucknow after the deposition of its nawabs – who had done more than most to foster a Shi’ite ‘culture of governance’ – down to today.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colonial encounter profoundly shifted the ways South Indian Karnatic music was performed, circulated, and talked about in the twentieth century. The violin became the standard accompanying instrument largely because of the way it could imitate the voice and was seen as modernizing the musical tradition. Karnatic music began to be performed in large concert halls where music reformers expected “pin drop silence” as one would find in European symphony orchestra halls. When musicians published various forms of notation to capture music that had been traditionally passed down orally, new ideas came into being about the composer having sole authorship of a composition. The performers of the music changed as well. Before the early decades of the twentieth century, the only women who could perform South Indian musi

Have you seen North Indian vocalists improvise? Their hands and voices move together to trace intricate melodic patterns. If we think that music is just made of sequences of notes, then this motion may seem quite puzzling at first. But the physical motion of singers reveal that there is much more going on than note combinations: spiraling, swooping, twirling–even moments of exquisite stillness in which time seems to stop. This kinetic aspect of melodic action is the topic of Matt Rahaim‘s new book, Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Rahaim first traces a history of ideas about moving and singing in Indian music, from Sanskrit treatises to courtesan dance performance to the 20th century boom in phonograph recordings. He then leads the reader through vivid melodic and gestural worlds of ragas with illuminating and concise analyses of video data and interviews from years of training in North Indian vocal music, and suggests ways in which melodic

Presenting- and being granted an audience- at the court of a foreign potentate was the way to gain legitimacy, acceptance, and often, protection to be able to trade in the territory. Of course arriving at a court contained an element of risk; and not every representative returned from such a venture, but it was imperative to make these visits. Of course, the most well-documented of such encounters are those of the English to the Mughal courts, but there were other players in other regions of the sub-continent. Markus Vink‘s book Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court in the Seventeenth Century (Manohar, 2012), looks at these highly formalized points of contact between the Dutch and the people of southern India; specifically the state of Madurai. Mission to Madurai is about three encounters between representatives of the Dutch East India Company and the state of Madurai. As the author notes, they shared an interest in trade, of course- the Dutch were some of the earliest European traders

It was the last in a long line of ‘Acts’ designed to ensure better colonial governance for the Indian sub-continent. It was an Act which was vociferously opposed by, amongst others, Winston Churchill. It is the Act upon which the Constitution of modern India is for the most part based. Andrew Muldoon‘s new book, Empire, Politics and the Creation of the 1935 India Act: Last Act of the Raj (Ashgate, 2009) is all about the Government of India Act, 1935. The Act was long in the making; it replaced the eponymous 1919 Act, and there were many who were interested in it- politicians Indian and British, commercial conglomerates, and of course, your average Indian or Briton. When it took shape, after six years of ‘legislative, administrative and political’ work, it met with receptions ranging from the welcoming to the hostile; despite everything, it became the blueprint for the development of post Independence Indian polity and its impact may be yet be discerned today. It was an act which

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender roles. The battlefield wedding of Qasem and Fatimah Kubra on 7 Muharram is commemorated annually by Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims. In Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Karen Ruffle, Assistant Professor of History of Religions and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, explores the relationship between devotional literature and ritual practice in the formulation of social consciousness and embodied ethics. She accomplishes this task through great ethnographic detail and deep investigation into a rich literary tradition of devotional hagiographical texts. Ruffle argues that hagiography when enacted through contemporary ritual performances establishes typologies of Shi’i sainthood. Altogether, these localized

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were the guardians of the sport, who were reluctant to respond to the changes around them. The men of the Marlyebone Cricket Club and administrators of county sides held to the old class division, preferring amateur gentlemen to serve as their captains, even when there were few Oxbridge graduates with enough money or free time to devote themselves to the sport–or enough talent to merit a captaincy. And while other governing bodies of international sport were cutting ties with apartheid South Africa, the MCC still saw that country’s side as a legitimate competitor and made plans for tours. As Guy Fraser-Sampson shows in his history of English cricket in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these o

In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was intended to get into Hartsinck’s good books; Angel had been recalled to the VOC-headquarters at Batavia in disgrace for engaging in private trade and was to account for his actions in a hearing. Back home in Holland, Philip Angel had been a painter and a published author. The manuscript, convincingly edited by Carolien Stolte as Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600-1672 (Manohar, 2012) recounts the well-known Puranic myths of the avataras of Vishnu. It conformed to all the contemporary conventions of an ‘exotic’ gift manuscript and reflects his artistic skills. But Angel offered no details of how he acquired the manusc ript, in what language, or who assisted him. This requires an investigation into the practices of information-gathering on Indian