New Books in South Asian Studies

Mar 07 2025 1215 ep. 54 mins 2.9k
New Books in South Asian Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

  Society & Culture  History
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Nadira Khatun, "Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mar 07 2025 46 mins  
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

Janam Mukherjee, "Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Mar 06 2025 60 mins  
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 int

Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)

Mar 06 2025 46 mins  
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.

Manu Pillai, "Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity" (Allen Lane, 2025)

Mar 06 2025 62 mins  
What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to keep

Anna Lise Seastrand, "Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mar 06 2025 44 mins  
An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil

Paul G. Keil, "The Presence of Elephants: Shared Lives and Landscapes in Assam" (Routledge, 2024)

Mar 02 2025 57 mins  
How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants: Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam (Routledge, 2024) is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people’s everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of ethnograph

Esha Niyogi De, "Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Mar 01 2025 76 mins  
Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? In Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and

Material Religion, Assemblage, and the Agency of Things in South Asia

Feb 27 2025 49 mins  
This special issue of Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies is the product of a collective experiment with materials that are assembled, imagined, and agentive in the context of South Asian religions. The articles are available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.su

Raheel Dhattiwala, "Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Feb 27 2025 56 mins  
In times of extreme violence, what explains peace in some places? This book investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, an event witnessed closely by the author. Dhattiwala compares peaceful and violent towns, villages, and neighborhoods to study how political violence spreads. A combination of statistical and ethnographic methods unpack the mecha

Preetha Mani, "The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method" (Northwestern UP, 2022)

Feb 21 2025 55 mins  
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature. In this episode, we discuss Mani’s 2022 publication, The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method, which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studie