New Books in South Asian Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com

Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Society & Culture
History
1051
Michael Slouber, "A Garland of Forgotten Goddes...
Slouber surveys the diversity of India's feminine divine tradition by bringing together a fresh array of captivating and largely overlooked Hindu goddess narratives from different regions....
53 min
1052
Tim Bruce, "Devi Mahatmyam: The Glory of the Go...
For millions worldwide, the Devi Mahatmyam is of central spiritual importance and of equal cultural significance within Indian Sanskrit literature to the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, and the Ramayana...
38 min
1053
Adam Auerbach, "Demanding Development: The Poli...
India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to basic public goods and services—paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communities able to secure development from the state while others fail?
58 min
1054
Rita D. Sherma, "Contemplative Studies in Hindu...
What counts as contemplative practices in Hinduism? What can Hindu Studies offer Contemplative Studies as a discipline?
56 min
1055
Ravinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dr...
It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge?
43 min
1056
E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Tra...
81 min
1057
Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nation...
What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism?
42 min
1058
Ronit Ricci, "Banishment and Belonging: Exile a...
Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time...
90 min
1059
Nicholas H. A. Evans, "Far from the Caliph’s Ga...
Evans offers a sustained and compelling critique of the doubt/belief binary in the anthropology of religion and Islam,..
44 min
1060
Chhaya Goswami, "Globalization Before Its Time:...
How did the Kachchhi traders build on the Gujarat Advantage?
60 min
1061
Debjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in t...
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta?
61 min
1062
Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and th...
Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society...
43 min
1063
Omar H. Ali, "Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery ac...
Ali provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar...
33 min
1064
Sai Balakrishnan, "Shareholder Cities: Land Tra...
Balakrishnan examines the novel phenomenon of the conversion of agrarian landowners into urban shareholders in India’s newly emerging “corridor cities.”
47 min
1065
Malcolm Keating, "Controversial Reasoning in In...
Keating offers a ground-breaking reference resource for understanding arthāpati, and debates in Indian philosophy at large....
64 min
1066
Matty Weingast, "The First Free Women: Poems of...
A radical and vivid rendering of poetry from the first Buddhist nuns that brings a new immediacy to their voices...
49 min
1067
Jonathan Lee, "Afghanistan: A History from 1260...
Lee tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising longevity of the Afghan state in the face of serious external and internal challenges over the last three centuries...
74 min
1068
Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Connections: India...
Metcalf offers an innovative remapping of empire...
46 min
1069
Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of ...
Aiyer investigates how Indian diasporic actors influenced the course of Kenya’s political history, from partnering with Europeans in their colonial mission in East Africa to political solidarity with Africans in their anticolonial struggles....
86 min
1070
Audrey Truschke, “Aurangzeb: The Life and Legac...
For many, the history of the Mughal empire looms heavy over contemporary South Asian social imaginaries. The lightning rod figure within modern day myths about the past is the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707)...
64 min
1071
Alessandro Graheli, "The Bloomsbury Research Ha...
This book spans over two thousand years of inquiry into language in the Indian subcontinent....
103 min
1072
Martin Gansten, "The Jewel of Annual Astrology:...
Gansten offers the first-ever scholarly volume on Sanskritized Perso-Arabic (Tājika) astrology...
92 min
1073
Shankar Nair, "Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim...
Nair offers intellectually daring and dazzlingly imaginative study of scholarly interactions, made visible through translation, between Sanskrit and Arabo-Persian philosophical traditions in premodern South Asia...
60 min
1074
Jeffery D. Long, "Hinduism in America" (Bloomsb...
Long explores the influence of concepts such karma, rebirth, meditation and yoga on the American consciousness, along with Hindu temples in America...
86 min
1075
Arti Dhand, "Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexu...
The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s sexuality on the other...
38 min