New Books in South Asian Studies

Interviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
1051
Snigdha Poonam, "Dreamers: How Young Indians Ar...
49.91% of India’s population was below the age of 24 in the 2011 Census...
38 min
1052
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
1053
Llerena Searle, "Landscapes of Accumulation: Re...
Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities...
44 min
1054
Jessica Marie Falcone, "Battling the Buddha of ...
What can we learn from the anthropological study of projects that are never realized, or of dreams that are never fulfilled?
59 min
1055
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, "The Politics of Common Se...
asim Sajjad Akhtar’s The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an incisive study of continuity as well as change in Pakistan that has moved the country towards religious conservatism and increased authoritarianism
56 min
1056
Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Polit...
Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties...
55 min
1057
Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conv...
People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British.
54 min
1058
Sohini Kar, "Financializing Poverty: Labor and ...
43 min
1059
Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “Forging an Ideal Educate...
Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging an Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018)  is a pathbreaking and incredibly timely monograph that combines tools of education studies,
39 min
1060
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard U...
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian...
62 min
1061
Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Eco...
Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims...
54 min
1062
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, “What Slaveholders Thi...
According to the Walk Free Foundation, there are currently 46 million slaves in the world. Despite being against international law, slavery is not yet culturally condemned everywhere. Despite being human rights violators,
38 min
1063
Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Par...
How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel Un...
32 min
1064
Michael Levien, “Dispossession Without Developm...
Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers.
54 min
1065
Merin Shobhana Xavier, “Sacred Spaces and Trans...
In 1971, a Sri Lankan Sufi arrived in Philadelphia to address a group of spiritual seekers. This trip initiated the career of one of the most influential teachers in the history of North American Sufism. In Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in A...
63 min
1066
Jeremy Martens, “Empire and Asian Migration: So...
In his new book, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018), Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia,
1 min
1067
Madiha Afzal, “Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism,...
Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings, 2018) provides a unique insight into Pakistan’s complex and multi-layered relationship with militancy and the role of the state in Islamicizing society in a way that Pakistanis may in ...
67 min
1068
Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Ph...
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing,
50 min
1069
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in...
62 min
1070
Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017)
Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance,
4 min
1071
Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classic...
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical...
36 min
1072
Lavanya Vemsani, “Modern Hinduism in Text and C...
Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
36 min
1073
Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Natio...
Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018),
48 min
1074
Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female ...
In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century.
40 min
1075
Daisy Deomampo, “Transnational Reproduction: Ra...
In Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), Daisy Deomampo explores relationships between Indian surrogates, their families, aspiring parents from all over the world,
48 min