Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014),

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-19...

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Singh. Her book examines sub-nationalism in India.

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations?

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation of Dalits (those subordinated populations once called ...

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and...

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford ...

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization,

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding...

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown Univer...

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press,

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished,

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke Univ...

Do we live in a real world or a ‘reel world,’ in which life begins to feel like a film? In this wonderful ethnography of the Tamil film industry, Anand Pandian explores topics as grand, rich and timeless as those explored in film itself love, desire,

Are solutions to marital problems always best solved through legal means? Should alternative dispute resolutions be celebrated? In her latest book The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India (University of California Press,

What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press,

Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mishra is an assistant professor of political science at Drew University. While the number of South Asian Americans living...

A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law,

Darjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and lifelong dedication.

Parsis, also known as Zoroastrians, were deeply entwined with the colonial legal system of British India and Burma, far beyond what one might expect from their relativity small numbers. Mitra Sharafi, in her wonderful new book Law and Identity in Colon...

State executioners in their various guises are explored in all their horrific detail by Tasneem Khalil, in his new book Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia (Pluto, 2016). From the Rapid Action Battalion of Bangladesh to the men in white...

Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Sara Shneiderman is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a Himalayan community who move between Nepal,

Pakistan is often caricatured and stereotyped as a volatile nuclear country on the precipice of disaster. Such depictions are often especially acerbic when comes to the issue of Women’s rights in the country. In her important new book,

Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History (Hay House India, 2015) by Arthur Dudney tells the story of India’s capital and beyond through the lens of Persian literary culture. A lively read written for a mass readership,

What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the multiple understandings are merely derivative of western...