New Books in South Asian Studies

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 University, explores both of these approaches for thinking trauma in the the context of a range of historical examples. The book offers a detailed eng...

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. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), Michael Levien explores the causes and consequences...

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 American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Merin Shobhana Xavier, Assistant Professor of Religi...

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, offers a comparative look at the tensions that arose in settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as white settlers protested Asian m...

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 overwhelming majority reject violence, yet endorse attitudes that are not only militant but create an environment conducive to extremism. Based on r...

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, metaphysics, and politics. His analysis offers an innovative stance on the very study of Hinduism, and tensions between scholars and practitioners of Hin...

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 a war? – leads to an extended discussion of such themes as rebirth and reincarnation and the personal paths to unity with the universe through the...

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, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclect...

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 Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014) explores the extent to which the great medieval Hindu thinker Rāmānuja himself loo...

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).  The essays in this volume look at a variety of topics ranging from Shaivite religious texts to biographies, novels, and dance forms to show how Hinduism cannot be understood only through texts...

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), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also...

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. Taking up a geographic organization around global “contact zones,” Mukherjee skillfully guides readers through multiple sites of Indian suffragette network...

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, egg donors and doctors in a setting marked by hierarchies of income, race, nationality and gender. Based on three years of fieldwork in Mumbai, India, Deomampo shows how assisted...

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the d...

Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in precolonial times. Drawing on Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil sources, Fisher argues for a uniquely South Asian form of religious pluralism, evidenced by religious performances in the public space.  Her work...

Why do Indian voters knowingly vote for politicians with pending criminal proceedings against them? Why do political parties recruit criminal politicians among their rank and file? If money and muscle do not mean the failure of democracy, but instead are how things work under certain circumstances, then what are the remedies against the growing prevalence of criminal politicians? In When Crime Pay...

For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers, those folks who were most intimately working with language, were at the center of this political realignment. In Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and...

How did Nepal become synonymous, in the minds of many Westerners, with the idea of a mystical paradise and a place to find enlightenment? How did Kathmandu become the subject of songs by countercultural icons such as Janis Joplin and Cat Stevens? What did Nepalis make of the strange seekers who turned up on their doorsteps? In his book Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in...

How does the portrayal of a character like Apu matter? What does the representation of South Asian TV characters tell us about society at large?  In her new book, South Asians on the U.S. Screen: Just Like Everyone Else? (Lexington Books, 2018), Bhoomi Thakore uses interviews and audience studies to explore these questions and more. By having participants list South Asian characters they’ve seen o...

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and Sout...

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses to Japanese and South Asian mobility i...

In her fascinating and path paving new book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad (I. B. Tauris, 2017), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont reorients our understanding of the 1857 rebellion in India, while offering a nuanced theorization of religion, religious identity, and questions of violence. The title of...

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India. Based on more than a decade of feminist longitudinal ethnographic research, Sen investigates why independent women small farmers growing tea on their own land experience market-based...

Today I talked to Fahad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Bishara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. In this podcast, Dr. Bishara discusses his sophisticated history that explor...

Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India (Hyderabad). In her study, Parvez maps the complex ways in which Muslims, especially women, engage in religious and political activism in secular states where they are minorities. Her study challenges ma...