New Books in South Asian Studies

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender roles. The battlefield wedding of Qasem and Fatimah Kubra on 7 Muharram is commemorated annually by Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims. In Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (Universi...

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were the guardians of the sport, who were reluctant to respond to the changes around them. The...

In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was intended to get into Hartsinck’s good books; Angel had been recalled to the VOC-headquarters at Batavia in disgrace for engaging in private trade and was to account for his actions in a hearing. Back home in Holland, Philip Angel had been a painter and a...

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) discusses the life and times of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hikkaduve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by b...

This is a book about horses. Donna Landry‘s Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009) is all about how horses were a means of cultural exchange between the Orient and England. More than just exchange- there was theft and diplomacy as well. Over two hundred horses were imported into the British Isles from the Orient between 1650 and 1750....

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Susan K. Harris‘ latest book, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) targets the religious references in McKinley’s and Twain’s comments, assessing the role of relig...

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it is these that Peter Robb has so magnificently re-worked as Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822 (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2 vols). Richard’s diaries are quite literally a chronicle of th...

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), though, goes beyond trade- there was also lots of curiosity, in Britain and abroad, about the strange new peoples and products beg...

Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office; so that, he said, ‘all may know that here is true Russian soil, where no Russian need be ashamed to lie.’ Certainly not after Kaufmann’s efforts- he set out to create a planned city on the lines of St. Petersburg, and in fact succeeded in creating...

North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India (or even South Asia) proper.’ A densely wooded, sparsely populated tract of hills (in fact the Eastern Himalayas), the moniker refers to the Indian states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram,...

English common law is prevalent across large parts of the world; and all thanks to the British Empire. It was not just culture and commerce that came along to the colonies; English law, as Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne‘s new book, Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) demonstrates, made the trip as well, and it was English law that wa...

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity. In her new book, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (University of California Press, 2011)...

Horticulture is not an activity normally associated with Empire building. But Eugenia Herbert‘s book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). But ‘garden imperialism’ was all too common in the Indian subcontinent, as its many conquerors attempted to tame and order a land that seemed simultaneously alien and unwelcoming. The last of these conq...

In his new book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (Penguin Press, 2011), Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, chronicles the story of Karachi’s seemingly instantaneous population explosion, from only 350,000 inhabitants in 1941 to well over 13 million today. Inskeep looks at the circumstances that encouraged and supported the near-overnight formation of what he terms an “instant ci...

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global economy? Philip Stern‘s book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford U...

Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying commonalities; these were, after all, colonial Empires governing ‘alien’ peoples, and faced much the same problems insofar as maintaining their rule was concerned. Alexander Morrison‘s Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British Ind...

For an empire supposedly founded on the back of trade, not much attention has been paid to how the finances of the British Empire were organized- or to the people who organized them. Chris Poullaos‘ and Suki Sian‘s pioneering compendium, Accountancy and Empire: The British Legacy of Professional Organization (Routledge, 2010), however, changes all that as it examines how Chartered Accountants foug...

It’s almost a cliche to say that war dehumanizes those who participate in it – the organizers of violence, those who commit violent acts, and the victims of violence. In her new book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Duke University Press, 2011), historian Yasmin Saikia seeks to explore humanity lost, and humanity reclaimed, by women and men who experienced the war that...

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array of peoples and ethnicities into subjects subject of a Russian empire? Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studie...

Hobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the things that sustained an army of civil servants as they went about registering land records in the United Provinces, negotiating with Malay sultans or checking out logging operations in Sabah. Cecilia Leon...

The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010) explores the various ways in which this reception of the classics occurred. From museums, to oratorical texts, to theories of race, the classical world was a reference point for the imperial British...

The odds are that if you don’t figure in an administration’s records, you won’t figure in the historical record. But what do you do to get into those records? Raising a ruckus is one way. But that works only if someone else hasn’t managed to raise more of a ruckus than you can ever hope to – and this, as Vinayak Chaturvedi tells us in Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (University...

As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek’s lovely book, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Indiana University Press, 2011), can only give a boost to its campaign. This book is a discrete, yet integrated, collection of narratives from Ahmedabad throughout the twentieth century. The stories t...

Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them. Now here comes a fantastic new book on the much touted ‘cosmopolitan culture,’ as the natives call it, of colonial Bombay- with a twist. Nile Green‘s well received B...

The Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph when they took over the port of Melaka in 1641, effectively replacing the Portuguese as the masters of maritime Asia. The famed ‘Dutch spirit of commerce’ was, as Robert Parthesius’s fine book Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Du...