New Books in South Asian Studies

We kick off our Fall 2023 season of International Horizons with Upendra Choudhury from Aligarh Muslim University discussing the role of India in the contemporary international system. Prof. Choudhury argues that India’s vision of a multipolar world order consists of acting as a balancing mediator between the traditional West and a rising China. In that sense, Choudhury claims that India cannot aff...

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar.  Muḥsin Jāsim Mūsawī's The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Indu...

Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India (Permanent Black, 2023) is a cultural history of western India from a fascinatingly new perspective: language use, writing practices, and relations of power. Its principal focus is the Modi script, a cursive form widely used for writing the Marathi language from the medieval era until quite recently. Examining the...

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledg...

In her scintillating and brilliant new book, Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford UP, 2023), Hafsa Kanjwal details and showcases the discursive and institutional means and mechanisms through which the Indian state made possible and maintained its occupation and colonization of Kashmir. Focused on the mid twentieth century period of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Second...

When we think of Nepal, we think of its high Himalayan mountains, or maybe the highlands of Kathmandu. But somewhere between a quarter and a third of the country is nothing like that: marshy, forested, malaria-infested swampland, along the southern border with India. This is the Tarai, the most productive region of Nepal—and also the focal point for the once-Kingdom of Nepal’s conquest. Maximillia...

On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and sing; they offer testimonials of healing, and receive the blessings of encounter from an unlikely deity. Facing this ocea...

Today I talked to Ravi Gupta and Kenneth Valpey about The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Text and Living Tradition (Columbia UP, 2013) A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of...

Annie Rachel Royson's book Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness: Cultural Translation in Kristapurana (Routledge, 2023) presents a critical reading of Kristapurāṇa, the first South Asian retelling of the Bible. In 1579, Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), a young Jesuit priest, arrived in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity to the local subjects of the Portuguese colony. Kristapurāṇa (1616), a sweepi...

The characters in Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience (Pantheon, 2023), his debut short story collection, are like many in India or in Indian communities in the United States: Working hard and enduring hardships to try to get a better life for themselves. They don’t always succeed—and even those that do lose something along the way. That tension between hope and reality is at the core of...

Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practic...

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British Empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decoloni...

In May 2019, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the world's largest election. Indrajit Roy edited volume Passionate Politics: Democracy, Development and India’s 2019 General Election (Manchester UP, 2023) brings together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain why Indians voted the way they did. Prof Roy is the Professor of Glob...

For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting–with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship–even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi....

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces?  Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public t...

In The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021), Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks t...

In Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (Duke UP, 2023), Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork...

When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse. Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my ple...

Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2022) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists' religious life and pra...

Michael Baltutis' book The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance (SUNY Press, 2023) details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources--especially the epic Mahābhārata--the book highlights the innovative ways that th...

Padma Desai grew up in the 1930s in the provincial world of Surat, India, where she had a sheltered and strict upbringing in a traditional Gujarati Anavil Brahmin family. Her academic brilliance won her a scholarship to Bombay University, where the first heady taste of freedom in the big city led to tragic consequences—seduction by a fellow student whom she was then compelled to marry. In a failed...

In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while 3 million civilians were killed by the war-induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence. This captivating new history shines...

In Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham UP, 2022), Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite differ...

Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023) by Dr. Tom Young illuminates how new modes of artistic production in colonial India shaped the British state’s nationalisation of the East India Company, transforming the relationship between nation and empire. This pioneering book explores how art shaped the nationalisation...

In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2021. India has understood its relations with Africa within the framework of South-South cooperation, where postcolonial states collaborated for scientific and techno...