New Books in South Asian Studies
1,030 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Michael Ortiz, "Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism" (Bloombury, 2023)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesWhat is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have lo...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAcross the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultu...
Caste, Music, and Microinequities with Supriya Subramani
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesIn this episode, Pat speaks with Dr Supriya Subramani. Dr Subramani's interest in morality and ethics has led her to explore morality, behaviour, and ethics in healthcare contexts. She has worked on the concepts of belonging, micro-inequities, moral habitus, the idea of the passive patient, the social construction of incompetency, and reflexivity. They discuss caste and contemporary music, resistance and poetry, and autonomy and participatory theatre. Background notes and a transcript of this...
Shakuntala Gawde, "Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha" (Dev Publishers, 2023)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesShakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. Book gives an exhaustive introduction dealing with Purāṇas, the growth of Vaiṣṇnavism and Narratology with special reference to Bhāgavata Purāṇa wh...
Radha Kapuria, "Music in Colonial Punjab" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMusic in Colonial Punjab (Oxford UP, 2023) offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from 'mirasis' (bards) and 'kalawants' (elite musicians), to 'kanjris' (subaltern female performers...
Stephen Phillips, "The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Adi-Sakara on the Isa Upanisad" (Bloombury, 2024)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara’s analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara’s commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questi...
Ashok Gopal, "A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar" (Navayana Press, 2023)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 2 hoursBhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he came to define what it means to be human. How and why did Ambedkar, who revered and cited the Gita till the 1930s, turn against Hinduism? What were his quarrels with Gandhi and Savarkar? Why did he come to see himself as Moses? How did the lessons learnt at Columbia University impact the struggle for water in Mahad in 1927 and the drafting of t...
The Pioneering Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesManu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a pioneering public servant, diplomat, and women's rights advocate, in her own right. They talk about the Nehru’s privileged upbringing and elite education, their conversion to a Gandhi inspired ascetism, the hardships of repeated jail sentences during the struggle against British colonialism, as well as the many infl...
Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists f...
SherAli Tareen, "Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire" (Columbia UP, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFriendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority?...
Eva De Clercq, ed. and trans., "The Life of Padma" (Harvard UP, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama's exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship. The second volume recounts Rama's exi...
Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long, "Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesPhilosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. In Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is ...
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourKalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in The Inhumans and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024) you'll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy's satirical novella about a lost race of Bengali supermen in Uganda. Also included are Jagadananda Ray's “Voyage to V...
Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThere are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of the Indian subcontinent than anyone else before British colonial rule. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea--"dharma"--which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. He as...
Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct ...
Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourRazak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identities of Muslims in Rampur-the last Muslim-ruled princely state in colonial United Provinces and a city that is pejoratively labelled as the center of "Muslim vote bank" politics in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. The book highlights the importance of locality and emotions in shaping Muslim identities, politics, and belonging in Rampur. The book show...
Priyanka Basu, "The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia" (Routledge, 2023)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesHow can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London, explores the history and practice of the folk performance Kobigaan. The book draws on rich archival and historical analysis, as well as fieldwork in West Bengal and Bangladesh, to tell the story of how Kobigaan has evolved over time, how it has been preserved, how it has changed media and...
Baidik Bhattacharya, "Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesIn a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the concept of ‘literary sovereignty’, the book argues that political sovereignty in colonial India went hand in hand with a massive project of textually understanding local cultures that colonial officials e...
Who owns Khadi?
March 01, 2024 09:00 - 31 minutesWhy did khadi become so central to India’s freedom struggle? How did it evolve into an international trademark – and what does khadi signify in India today? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Subhadeep Chowdhury about the political, cultural, and economic importance of khadi, the famous handspun and woven natural fiber cloth that we often associate with Mahatma Gandhi, but which is also an international trademark and part of the world of contemporary Indian fashion Subhadeep Chowdhu...
Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama, "The Play of the Feminine" (HASP, 2023)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesIn Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama's book The Play of the Feminine (HASP, 2023) explores Navarātri as it is celebrated in the South Indian temple town of Kanchipuram. It investigates the local mythologies of the goddess, two temple celebrations, and the domestic ritual practice known as kolu (doll displays). The author highlights three intersecting themes: namely th...
Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to lo...
Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)
February 29, 2024 05:00 - 44 minutesIn An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial p...
Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesKnut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant presence in many countries throughout the world. The most important cause of this global expansion is migration. This book presents and analyses the most important of the geographies, migration histories, religious traditi...
Kunal Purohit, "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" (HarperCollins, 2023)
February 20, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesCan a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with acerbic lyrics to poetry recited in kavi sammelans to social media influencers shaping opinions with their brand of 'breaking news' to books rescripting historical events, 'Hindutva Pop' or H-Pop is steadily...
Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutes1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a vie...
Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)
February 11, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing c...
Order and Disorder in South Asia with Christopher Chapple and Debashish Banerji
February 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThis episode is dedicated to introducing the South Asian Studies Association (SASA) and their annual academic conference being co-hosted by the Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies Concentration (ACTS) being held at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) on March 1st-3rd, 2024. We are joined by Chris Chapple, the president of SASA, and Debashish Banerji, board member of SASA, as well as the chair of ACTS, who describe this years hybrid, in-person and online, conference, ...
Jeffery D. Long, "Discovering Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
February 08, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesJeffery D. Long's Indian Philosophy: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2023) helps readers discover how the many and varied schools of Indian thought can answer some of the great questions of life: Who are we? How can we live well? How do we tell truth from lies? Accessibly written for readers new to Indian philosophy, the book takes you through the main traditions of thought, including Buddhist, Hindu and Jain perspectives on major philosophical topics from ancient times to the present day. Bring...
Jessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourUntil Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament of the marginalization this gender non-confirming community was subjected to under British colonial rule. This book is, therefore, important not only because of its efforts to humanize and situate this community amid the ...
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesThe East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea. As Joshua Ehrlich notes in his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press: 2023), the Company hit upon a novel justification for its work: It was committed to the pursuit...
Francesca Orsini, "East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEast of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genres-courtly, devotional, and popular-composed in the main languages of the region: Hindavi, Persian...
Amanda Lanzillo, "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India" (U California Press, 2024)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourPious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially the development of new technologies and state and colonial projects. Indian Muslim artisans, such as those who worked in electroplating, or as stonemasons, tailors, carpenters, or woodworkers, ...
Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
January 26, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesSantideva's 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist classic, "The Guide to the Practices of Awakening" (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years. In Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury, 2023), Stephen Harris guides us through a philosophical exploration of Santideva's masterpiece, introducing us to his understanding of the compassionate bodhisattva, who vows to l...
David J. Brick, "Widows Under Hindu Law" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesDuring British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? In Widows Under Hindu Law (Oxford UP, 2023), David Brick offers an exhaustive history of the treatment and status of widows under classi...
Amar Sohal, "The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourConcerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. Amar Sohal's book The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition (Oxford UP, 2023) complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri poli...
Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesA uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland's edited volume Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats (Penn State University Press, 2023) critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical f...
Jan Westerhoff, "Candrakirti's Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesA proponent of the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Candrakīrti wrote several works, one of which, the Madhamakāvatāra, strongly influenced later Tibetan understandings of Madhyamaka. This work is the subject of Jan Westerhoff’s Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2024), part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. His book situates Candarkīrti and his text within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and helps philosophical readers appreciate t...
Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesBefore she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and cla...
Veena R. Howard, "Gandhi's Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges" (Lexington Books, 2022)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhile there has been sustained interest in Gandhi's methods and continued academic inquiry, Gandhi's Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges (Lexington Books, 2022) is unique in bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who analyze Gandhi's tactics, moral methods, and philosophical principles, not just in the fields of social and political activism, but in the areas of philosophy, religion, literature, economics, health, international relations, and interpersonal com...
Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes ...
Lindsay Pereira, "The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao" (Vintage Books, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 32 minutesIn December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a re...
Tulasi Srinivas, "Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY Press, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesTulasi Srinivas' edited volume Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023) brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning of wonder in such varied joyful, tense, and creative sites and moments as Sufi music performances in Gujarat, Tamil graveyard processions, trans women's charitable practices, Kipling's Orientalist tales, village Kuchipudi dance performances, and Rajasthani hea...
Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad, "Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment" (Routledge, 2022)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesDrawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad's Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment (Routledge, 2022) directs attention to frictions around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. While docum...
Jayaseelan Raj, "Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt" (UCL Press, 2022)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesWhat does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022) offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offer...
Nilima Chitgopekar, "Shakti: An Exploration of the Divine Feminine" (DK Publishing, 2022)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesShe is benevolent and nurturing, yet fierce and terrible, a warrior and a lover. She creates and gives life, is death personified, and the one who grants eternal salvation. She is the ultimate form of reality, the cosmos. As the Saundaryalahiri says, "Only when Shiva joins with you, O Shakti, can he exert his powers as lord, on his own he has not even the power to stir. You are worshipped by Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, and other gods. How dare I, meritless mortal, offer you reverence and praise?" ...
120 A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesAjantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as ...
Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesOn this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about...
Khurram Hussain, "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDelighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But there is much more to this splendid book, framed around the profoundly consequential conceptual and political question of can Muslims serve not as friends or foes but as critics of Western modernity. Hussain addresses this question through a close and energetic reading of key selections from the ...
Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesIn his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India's attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India's politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel's book follows debates on land reform, technology and...
Alice Collett, "Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History" (Oxford UP, 2016)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Alice Collett’s monograph Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford University Press, 2016) delves into the lives of six of the best-known nuns from the period of early Buddhism: Dhammadinnā, Khemā, Kisāgotamī, Paṭācārā, Bhaddā Kuṇḍalakesā, and Uppalavaṇṇā, all of whom are said to have been direct disciples of the historical Buddha. Collett does the thankless task of sorting through the biographical information scattered throughout the canonical and commentarial literat...