New Books in South Asian Studies

Secularism and Islam in Bangladesh: 50 Years After Independence (Routledge, 2025) comprehensively analyses the syncretistic form of Bengali Islam and its relationship with secularism in Bangladesh from pre-British to contemporary times. It focuses on the importance of understanding the dynamics between religion and secularism within specific cultural contexts. Arguing that extremist interpretations of Islam, which aim to establish a theocratic state, have not been able to influence the pluralistic religious and cultural life of Bangladesh substantially, the book shows that religious and cultural pluralism will continue to thrive despite the apparent threat posed by increasing religiosity among Bangladeshi Muslims. This book is a timely and significant contribution to the discourse on secularism and Islam, with relevance beyond Bangladesh and the wider Islamic world. It will appeal to scholars and researchers working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religions, and the Sociology 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

Gazi Mizanur Rahman's In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman's study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign policy amidst rising global tensions. The conversation focuses on India's balancing act between the US, China, and its own strategic autonomy in a contested Indo-Pacific region. Key topics include India's evolving role as a middle power, responding to China's assertiveness along the India-China border and in the Indo-Pacific, while maintaining its traditional non-alignment stance. India's foreign policy is at a crossroads, shaped by five tense years since the Galwan Valley clash with China. Despite rounds of talks, the border remains uneasy and trust is scarce. Today, China's assertiveness drives nearly every major Indian strategic decision-from military deployments and Quad partnerships to concerns over Beijing's mega-dams on the Brahmaputra. Meanwhile, the US sees India as a key counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, but Delhi is determined to maintain its independence and avoid being boxed into alliances. As India watches China's moves from the Himalayas to Taiwan, the question is clear: Are we witnessing a true pivot in Indian foreign policy, or simply a sharp recalibration to meet new realities? The answer will shape Asia's balance of power for years to come. The podcast was brought to you by host Dr. Kikee Doma Bhutia a Research Fellow and India Coordinator at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her current research combines folkloristics, international relations and Asian studies, focusing on the role of religion and culture in times of crisis, national and regional identities, and geopolitics conflict between India and China. The podcast guest speaker Aadil Brar is a journalist and international affairs analyst based in Taipei, currently a Reporter at TaiwanPlus News. His reporting focuses on international security, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian security. Previously, he was a China news reporter for Newsweek and has contributed to the BBC World Service, The Print India, and National Geographic. In 2023, he was a Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Fellow and a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Brar holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MSc. in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. ​ 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

Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network.  Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is 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 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn't the first actress of Asian origin to be nominated. In 1935, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for the role of Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel, only her second film in the U.S. film industry. But no one knew Oberon was Asian. Her public biography said she was born to white parents in Tasmania, eventually moving to India and, from there, to the UK. But Merle Oberon, in truth, was of Anglo-Indian origin, born in Bombay. She'd hidden her heritage to get around U.S. censorship and immigration laws—a secret she took to her grave, even if many in the industry suspected the truth. Mayukh Sen tackles Oberon's life in Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (W.W. Norton: 2025). Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (W.W. Norton: 2021). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, and has written on film for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Criterion Collection. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Love, Queenie. 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

Dr. Catherine Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Asian Religions in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at University of Wyoming. She received her B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2011, M.A. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 2013, and a Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University in 2020. Dr. Hartmann's engagement with Religious Studies arises out of a longstanding interest in religion as a force that shapes our experience of the world, and in the practices religions develop to transform that experience. Her work focuses on the history of Tibetan pilgrimage to holy mountains and the goal of transforming perception while on pilgrimage. She is also interested in Buddhist ethics, vision and visuality, theories of place, and autobiographical writing. Her most recent book, Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage (Oxford UP, 2025), asks the following question: How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when, to the ordinary eye, the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the challenge that the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition poses to pilgrims, who are told to overcome their ordinary perception to see the hidden reality of the holy mountain. Drawing on multiple genres of Tibetan literature from the 13th to 20th centuries--including foundational narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy sites, advice texts, and personal diaries--this book investigates how the pilgrimage tradition tries to transform pilgrims' perception so that they might experience the wondrous sacred landscape as real and materially present. Catherine Anne Hartmann argues that the pilgrimage tradition does not simply assume that pilgrims experience this sacred landscape as real, but instead leads pilgrims to adopt deliberate practices of seeing: ways of looking at and interacting with the world that shape their experience of the holy mountain. Making the Invisible Real explores two ways of seeing: the pilgrim's ordinary perception of the world, and the fantastic vision believed to lie beyond this ordinary perception. As pilgrims move through the holy place, they move back and forth between these two ways of seeing, weaving the ordinary perceived world and extraordinary imagined world together into a single experience. Hartmann shows us how seemingly fantastical religious worldviews are not simply believed or taken for granted, but actively constructed and reconstructed for new generations of practitioners. Previous interview with Dr. Hartmann on the New Books Network: Teaching Buddhist Studies Online A Discussion with Kate Hartmann. Milarepa, the One Who Harkened, by Nicholas Roerich. Dr. Hartmann's website with contact information: https://www.drkatehartmann.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Mirror of Ornaments (Alaṅkāradappaṇō) defines and exemplifies 42 figures of speech or “ornaments” in 134 verses. It is the only surviving work of poetics in Prakrit, a literary language closely related to Sanskrit. It is one of the earliest representatives of the larger Indian discourse on poetics, and is especially closely linked to Bhāmaha's Ornament of Literature (Kāvyālaṅkāra). This book includes an introduction, annotated translation, glossary, and diplomatic and critical editions of the single surviving manuscript of the Mirror of Ornaments. 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

Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This spatial pairing has transformed the experience of moviegoing, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also passing through the other. The rise of the mall-multiplex signals a broader shift in the spectatorial imagination: away from cinema halls built for the subaltern male viewer, toward environments curated for the aspiring, mobile, and consuming middle-class woman. Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of this infrastructural and cultural transformation as it unfolded across media industries, architectural design, urban planning, and popular cinema. Tracing the multiplex's evolution in post-liberalization India, Tupur Chatterjee reveals how this new built form not only reconfigured cinematic space, but also reshaped the aesthetics, publics, and gendered politics of the contemporary Indian city. Rather than narrating a linear history of technological replacement, the book situates the multiplex within a longer genealogy of postcolonial urban design—one marked by caste- and class-based anxieties around visibility, safety, and leisure. It argues that the architectural mediation of cinema is central to how desire, modernity, and risk are organised in India's media cities. Drawing on industrial and organisational ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, discourse and textual analysis, and archival research, Projecting Desire maps the multiplex as a space where film, infrastructure, and aspiration intersect. In doing so, it offers a critical framework for understanding how gendered publics are produced through the infrastructures of cinematic experience in the Global South. Dr Tupur Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in Global Film and Media in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Her research spans global media industries, feminist media studies, urban spatial politics, and the material life of media technologies. Her work has been published in journals like Television and New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and Porn Studies among others.  Dr Priyam Sinha is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and is based at Humboldt University in Berlin. She earned her PhD from the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. More information on her research can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com. She can also be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha 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

Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh (Cambridge UP, 2023) analyzes the growth of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan during the 1950s and 60s, highlighting the interplay of global politics and local socio-economic changes. The book posits that the 1969 revolution and the 1971 liberation war were influenced by the "global sixties," which reshaped Pakistan's political environment and paved the way for Bangladesh's creation. It challenges the conventional view of Bangladesh as solely a consequence of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, instead portraying it as a nation forged by Bengali nationalists resisting internal colonization by the Pakistani military-bureaucratic regime. The narrative explores how this resistance and nation-building process was inspired by concurrent decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while also being influenced by the Cold War competition between the USA, the USSR, and China. 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

Metaphysics As Therapy: List-Making and Renunciation in Gnostic Yogas (Springer, 2025) examines the significance of metaphysical list-making as a determining feature of 'spiritual exercises' in South Asian gnostic yogas. It examines how these ancient traditions sought spiritual transformation through the dialectical practice of taxonomy. It highlights the gnostic thread that intersects 'spiritual exercises' and 'ways of life' in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina circles.  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 Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Shailendra Kumar Singh's Between Resistance and Conformity: Premchand's Fiction in Colonial North India (Routledge, 2024) examines the questions of conformity and resistance with respect to Premchand's literary corpus. Mapping the various complexities, challenges, and contradictions of interwar India, it demonstrates how the passive peasant protagonists of the writer's fictional works present a diametrically opposed definition of dharma as compared to their dissident nationalist counterparts. Through a relatively similar logic of comparative assessment, it further foregrounds the fundamental asymmetry that exists between Premchand's literary representations of women as compliant domestic subjects and those that portray them as rebel patriots of colonial North India. Juxtaposing several genres, including novels, short stories, letters, and journalistic writings to offer a reconsideration of Premchand's work, this book will interest scholars of peasant narratives, nationalist fiction, and gender 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

Christopher Harding's The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) is a fascinating survey of two millennia of Western encounters with Eastern culture, thought and religions. From Herodotus to Alan Watts, Harding profiles a range of engaging figures who have had a sometimes-overlooked impact on the way we in the West engage with and understand Asia. From the myths of antiquity through to the impact of the hippie movement, the book asks; ‘What is real? Who says? How should I live?', and provides a wealth of historical analysis, anecdotal sketches and philosophical insight to explore how the Western and Eastern ways of thinking about these fundamental questions have intersected, conflicted with and complemented each other. Guest: Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at The University of Edinburgh. His previous books include The Japanese: A History in 20 Lives (2020) and Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present (2018). A frequent contributor to BBC Radio, he also writes the Illuminasia Substack. Host: Matt Fraser writes and podcasts for the Ill-Read Millennial. He lives in Berlin. 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

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. 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

Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2024) is the first comprehensive history of India's secret Cold War. It examines interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India and their strategic, political, and socio-cultural impact on the subcontinent. It showcases how the interventions of these intelligence agencies have had a significant and enduring impact on the political and social fabric of South Asia. The specter of a 'foreign hand', or external intelligence activity, real and imagined, has occupied a prominent place in India's political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. The book probes the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in South Asia. It analyses how the relationships between agencies and governments helped shaping Indian democracy. Through a lively cast of characters and an analysis of covert operations, the book explores Western (US and UK) as well as Soviet perceptions of India during the Cold War. At the same time, it points to India's agency in plying the Cold War game. The book also moves beyond the Cold War to explore Indian intelligence in the post-Cold War years and in the aftermath of 9/11. Looking at the relationship between intelligence, politics, society, and (pop)culture, the book asks why, in contrast to Western assumptions about surveillance, South Asians associate intelligence with covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression. In doing so, it uncovers a fifty-year battle for hearts and minds in the Indian subcontinent. Paul McGarr is a lecturer in intelligence studies at King's College London. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on South Asian security and intelligence issues These have appeared in Intelligence & National Security, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomatic History, The International History Review and many other journals and edited collections. He is also the author of two monographs, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India's Secret Cold War published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Mentioned: The Church Committee Report (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976), Paul Mc Garr, The Cold War in South Asia (2013) Luca Trenta, The President's Kill List (2023) Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024) JFK Assassination Records 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 and why do local political processes in rural Nepal become an arena for political mythmaking? And, how do political myths obscure their own historical construction, thereby making hierarchical power structures appear inevitable? In this episode we discuss these questions with Ankita Shrestha whose ethnographic explorations into these issues foreground the persistent centrality of caste, gender and indigeneity to everyday forms of domination and hierarchy in contemporary rural Nepal. Ankita Shrestha holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and the leader of the centre for South Asian Democracy. 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

Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures (Oxford UP, 2025) examines some of the most well-known and widely circulated narratives in the history of Sanskrit literature, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Visnusarman's famed animal stories (the Panchatantra), Somadeva's labyrinthine Ocean of Rivers of Stories (the Kathasaritsagara), Kalhana's Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (the Rajatarangini), and two of the most famous plays in the history of Sanskrit literature, Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntala and Harsa's Ratnavali. Offering a sustained close, intertextual reading, John Nemec argues that these texts all share a common frame: they feature stories of the mutual relations of ksatriya kings with Brahmins, and they all depict Brahmins advising political figures.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderstandings caused by her identity as a western researcher. And finally, she describes how doing performance ethnography helped her understand how individuals play roles, not just in theater, but everyday life. 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

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The SāṃKhya System: Accounting for the Real (SUNY Press, 2024) brings new life to an ancient Hindu system of thought. Sāṃkhya spans the fields of philosophy, physics, metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. Although notably not theological, its key premises can be found in virtually all religious traditions that originate from India. Sāṃkhya espouses a reciprocity between Prakṛti, the realm of activity, and Puruṣa, the silent witness. It also delineates the phenomenal experiences that arise from Prakṛti, including the operations of the human body, the five great elements, and the eight mental states. Sāṃkhya proclaims that knowledge of world and self can lead to freedom. This book presents a new translation of Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṃkhya Kārikā, with grammatical analysis.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In The Golden Road (Bloomsbury. 2025), William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone.  Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Philip Harling examines how the British imperial state facilitated the mass migration of its impoverished subjects as labor assets, shipped across vast expanses of ocean to contribute to the economy of the Empire. Dr. Harling analyzes the ideological framework which underpinned these interventions and discusses the journeys taken by emigrants across four continents, considering the varied outcomes of these significant projects of social engineering. In doing so, this study demonstrates how the British imperial state harnessed migration to ensure and maintain a racialised global economic order in the decades after Emancipation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. You can find Miranda's episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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

Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as "India's 9/11" or simply "26/11," the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt "modern" homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise. Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford UP, 2024) traces 26/11's political and policy fallout, concentrating on the efforts of Israel's homeland security industry to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. Through a focus on the often unseen and overlooked political struggles at work in the making of homeland security, Rhys Machold details how homeland security is a universalizing project, which seeks to remake the world in its image, and tells the story of how claims to global authority are fabricated and put to work. Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His work focuses on imperialism, colonialism, and empire, working from a transnational approach. He is an editor at Critical Studies on Security and an editorial board member at International Studies Review. He held research and teaching appointments at York University (Canada), the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Wilfrid Laurier University. Deniz Yonucu is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, and racism. Her monograph Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize for the best book in urban anthropology, awarded by the Critical Urban Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association. 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

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India's current economy. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. 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

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana 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 former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge UP, 2024) focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond. 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 small town of Vṛndāvana is today one of the most vibrant places of pilgrimage in northern India. Throngs of pilgrims travel there each year to honour the sacred land of Kṛṣṇa's youth and to visit many of its temples. The Building of Vṛndāvana: Architecture, Theology, and Practice in an Early Modern Pilgrimage Town (Brill, 2023) explores the complex history of this town's early modern origins. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines to examine history, architecture, art, ritual, theology, and literature in this pivotal period, the book examines how these various disciplines were used to create, develop, and map Vṛndāvana as the most prominent place of pilgrimage for devotees of Kṛṣṇa. 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

Period Matters is a groundbreaking anthology edited by Farah Ahamed that explores the cultural, social, and political dimensions of menstruation in South Asia. Through a diverse collection of essays, personal narratives, poetry, and artwork, the book sheds light on the stigma, myths, and challenges surrounding periods. Featuring contributions from writers, activists, academics, and artists, it examines issues such as menstrual health, period poverty, gender inequality, and sustainable solutions. By amplifying voices that are oft excluded mainstream discussions, Period Matters challenges taboos and calls for greater awareness, education, and policy change in the region. Farah Ahamed is the editor of Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia, published by Pan Macmillan India in 2022 (periodmattersbook.com). The book has been described as ‘an essential book about the female body that dispels misconceptions,' by Book Riot. In 2022, Farah was selected as the Financial Times's Woman of the Year for her work in breaking the stigma around menstruation. Farah and her sisters run a charity in Kenya called Panties with Purpose, which is helping to raise awareness of period poverty, menstrual health, and also supports underprivileged schoolgirls. Since 2011 they have distributed over 70,000 pairs of underpants to more than 16,000 girls across Kenya. Farah is a Kenyan lawyer with a background in human rights. She lives in London. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana 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

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Macau. Josh is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. We spoke with Josh in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book is a deeply researched and well-written account of how East India Company officials developed and deployed ideas about knowledge to bolster its own authority, and to manage the transition from corporate sovereignty towards unitary state sovereignty. In the process, Josh develops a novel methodological approach that he calls the history of ideas of knowledge – an approach that allows us to recover past meanings and usages of concepts about knowledge to make them available again in the present. 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 Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis. 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

Crossing Lines: Cross-Ethnic Coalitions in India and Prospects for Minority Representation (Routledge, 2024) explains why, how, and where ethnic political parties unexpectedly seek votes from non-coethnics and when voters support non-coethnic parties. It draws on case studies of three Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan) and of Indian national elections to demonstrate how differences in party systems impact political party strategies and voter choices. It shows that multipolar party systems encourage political parties to provide physical security, representation, and economic benefits for minorities, especially Muslims, in India and as a result, foster cross-ethnic links between parties and voters. However, as political arenas become dominated by two or even one party, advocacy for the interests of marginalized groups declines, weakening cross-ethnic linkages. The book thus explains why representation and advocacy for Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and at the national level has alternated dramatically in the 21st century. Yash is a PhD candidate 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: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What is the global attention economy, and how does this perspective help us make sense of the relationship between India and the Global North? In this episode, we discuss these issues, focusing particularly on the current and oftentimes critical coverage of Indian politics and democracy in the western media. Our guest is Harish Pedaprolu from the University of Oslo's Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo Harish Pedaprolu is at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. 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 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in the Second World War. The trial sparked outrage across the country, among ordinary people, members of the pro-independence movement and, worryingly for the British Raj, members of the Indian army. The end-result? Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian army, commuted the INA officers' sentences. Just over a year later, India and Pakistan were independent countries. Ashis Ray joins us today to talk about these events, described in his recent book The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence (Routledge, 2024) Ashis Ray has been a foreign correspondent since 1977, broadcasting on BBC, CNN and ITN and writing for Ananda Bazar Group, The Times of India, The Tribune, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Financial Times and Nikkei Asia, among other publications. He was CNN's founding South Asia bureau chief before becoming the network's editor-at-large. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Trial That Shook Britain. 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

Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer is an in-depth, spiritual biography of a British fighter pilot (WW I), Ronald Nixon (1898-1965). Raised in an intellectually vibrant family, educated at Cambridge, he had a religious experience during one of his flights as a RAF pilot, and when the war ended, he embarked on a religious/philosophical journey that carried him to India, first as a university professor, and then into the religious world of his mentors, the university's vice-chancellor, G.N. Chakravarti and his wife, Monica (Yashoda Mai). Initiated by Yashoda Mai, he joined a movement celebrating the 16th century saint and reformer, Sri Krishna Chaitanya (1486-1533) and helped establish the still-functioning Mirtola ashram. Along the way he studied Theosophy and Buddhism and towards the end of his life developed a philosophy of his own that, though based on the religious traditions and philosophies he practiced and studied, was more universal in scope than the traditions he was formally connected with. Chapple's deep research succeeds in introducing readers to a wide cast of historically important religious figures, often with "warts and all." 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

Punjab Sounds (Routledge, 2024) nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the region only emerges in 'regioning', i.e., in words, gestures, objects, and techniques that do the region. Regioning sound reveals the relationship between sound and the region in three interlinked ways: in doing, knowing, and feeling the region through sound. The volume covers several musical genres of the Punjab region, including within its geographical remit the Punjabi diaspora and east and west Punjab. It also provides new understandings of the role that ephemeral cultural expressions, especially music and sound, play in the formulation of Punjabi identity. Featuring contributions from scholars across North America, South Asia, Europe, and the UK, it brings together diverse perspectives. The chapters use a range of different methods, ranging from computational analysis and ethnography to close textual analysis, demonstrating some of the ways in which research on music and sound can be carried out. The chapters will be relevant for anyone working on Punjab's music, including the Punjabi diaspora, music, and sound in the Global South. Moreover, it will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the following areas: ethnomusicology, cultural studies, film studies, music studies, South Asian studies, Punjab studies, history, and sound studies, among others. Radha Kapuria is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Durham University, UK, and the author of Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, and Connoisseurs, 1800–1947. Vebhuti Duggal is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi, and Associate Editor of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Khadeeja Amenda is PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. 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

Mick Brown's The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern spirituality across a century. It traces the life of multiple characters that intersected across time and space to create a network of interlinking stories about saints, salesmen and scoundrels all involved in spirituality. From Edwin Arnold, whose epic poem about the life of the Buddha became a best-seller in Victorian Britain, to the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley; and from spiritual teachers Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba and Ramana Maharshi to the controversial guru Rajneesh, The Nirvana Express is an exhilarating, sometimes troubling journey through the West's search for enlightenment. Archit Nanda is PhD scholar in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. 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 Other Rāma (SUNY Press, 2020) presents a systematic analysis of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma ("Rāma with the Axe"), an avatára of Viṣṇu best known for decapitating his own mother and annihilating twenty-one generations of the Katriya warrior caste in an extermination campaign frequently referred to as "genocide" by modern scholars. Compared to Rāma and Ka, the other human forms of Viṣṇu, Paraśurāma has a much darker reputation, with few temples devoted to him and scant worshippers. He has also attracted far less scholarly attention. But dozens of important castes and clans across the subcontinent claim Paraśurāma as the originator of their bloodline, and his mother, Reukā, is worshipped in the form of a severed head throughout South India. Using the tools of comparative mythology and psychoanalysis, Brian Collins identifies three major motifs in the mythology of Paraśurāma: his hybrid status as a Brahmin warrior, his act of matricide, and his bloody one-man war to cleanse the earth of Katriyas. Collins considers a wide variety of representations of the myth, from its origins in the Mahābhārata to contemporary debates online. He also examines Paraśurāma alongside the Wandering Jew of European legend and Psycho's matricidal serial killer Norman Bates. He examines why mythmakers once elevated this transgressive and antisocial figure to the level of an avatāra and why he still holds such fascination for a world that continues to grapple with mass killings and violence against women. 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 Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) to the Integral Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) co-created for his ashram. Scholars have ignored Mirra for Aurobindo, which prevents a full understanding of their spiritual practice. Scholars have also avoided examining work Aurobindo produced after they began their partnership in 1920 until his death in 1950, and privilege the written output in his journal Arya from 1914 to 1921. In this initial fertile period, he put forth his innovative teaching about what he called the “Supermind,” an emergent human faculty that he said would manifest a new humanity and a new earth through Mirra's body. Mirra claimed that after his death in 1956 this manifestation happened as he foretold. Mirra's work in the ashram from his death until hers in 1973 reveals important ways that she both fulfilled and changed Aurobindo's initial vision. These developments are chiefly based on her experiences of mental dissolution while her body gained a new supramental form and consciousness. 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, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with David Gordon White, a distinguished indologist and scholar of Tantra. Our conversation focuses on David's most recent project tracing the transregional histories of spirits, gods, demons, and their associated rituals across Eurasia. Along the way, we dive into an intellectual conversation about dog-headed men, angry goddesses, alchemical mercury, body-snatching yogis, the origins of Dracula, and much, much more. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned David Gordon White, Daemons are Forever (2021) David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (1991) David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body (1997) David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini (2006) David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (2011) Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine (2002) Michel Strickmann, Mantras et Mandarins (1996) David Gordon White, “Three Shades of Tantric Yoga,” in Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies (2024) David Gordon White, "Were-Creatures of the Eurasian Ecumene," Journal Asiatique(2020) David Gordon White, "Dracula's Family Tree," Gothic Studies (2021) Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.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 Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford UP, 2024), Nadira Khatun explores the contentious Muslim identity in contemporary India as reflected in recent Bollywood films. She argues that the approach towards Muslim identity in Bollywood films are influenced by the changing political landscape from Nehruvian India to the rise of BJP, which views Hindus and Muslims as separate religious communities instead of recognizing the syncretic culture manifesting in Hindu-Muslim unity. By analyzing the representation of Muslims in various films like Roja, Fanna, Mission Kashmir, Black Friday, New York, A Wednesday, Sarfarosh, she shows that the militant portrayal of Muslims is good for commercial success as opposed to a secular image. Overall, the study problematizes Muslim identity formation in Bollywood against the backdrop of nationalism and communalism in India. Author: Dr. Nadira Khatun, Associate Professor of Communications, Xavier University, India Host: Dr. Nilanjana Paul, Associate Professor of History, Department of History, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She is the author of Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854-1947: A Study of Curriculum, Educational Institutions and Communal Politics, Routledge, 2022. 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 years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a major front in the Indian struggle against colonial rule, as well as a crucial Allied outpost in the British/American war against Japan, Bengal stood at the crossroads of complex and contentious structural forces - both domestic and international - which, taken together, defined an era of political uncertainty, social turmoil, and collective violence. While for the British the overarching priority was to save the empire from imminent collapse at any cost, for the majority of the Indian population the 1940s were years of acute scarcity, violent dislocation and enduring calamity. In particular there are three major crises that shaped the social, economic and political context of pre-partition Bengal: the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Calcutta riots of 1946.  Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford UP, 2015) examines these intricately interconnected events, foregrounding the political economy of war and famine in order to analyze the complex nexus of hunger, war and civil violence in colonial Bengal at the twilight of British rule. NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism's more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulnerability may heighten the allures of long-distance ethnonationalism. The three explore various questions. Does the successful rise of Hindu ethnonationalism in the UK stem from a perceived contrast between benign Hinduism and dangerous Islam? Does the need for popular ratification through electoral democracy limit the scope of long-distance ethnonationalism? Is there a limit to how effectively Zionists and Hindutvites in the US and UK can wield claims to wounded religious minority sentiment while benefiting from from the hollowing out of democratic institutions? And finally, the three ask if the ominously successful assimilation of Zionism into American right-wing politics may also start working for Hindutva. Mentioned in the episode: Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands Recall This Book with Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane Ben Lorber on masculinist “Bronze-Age” Zionism Recallable Books: Lori singles out The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, (1979) by Rosemary Sayigh, anthropologist and oral historian. It explores the ways Palestinian nationalism and organized resistance to their dispossession and oppression took hold in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Ajantha's choice is Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies, published in 2020, a readable, poignant, and edgy account of US empire, Islam, and race and the challenges of being an South Asian American Muslim. She also recalls the film Mississippi Masala from 1991, a compelling take on race and class dynamics in the US Indian diaspora. John proposes Paul Breines' Tough Jews and Gita Mehta's Karma Cola–to which Ajantha adds Hanif Kureshi's Buddha of Suburbia. 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