New Books in South Asian Studies
1,030 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Ricardo Sousa Silvestre et al., "Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives" (Routledge, 2024)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesVaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) analyses the concepts of God in Vaiṣṇavism, which is commonly referred to as one of the great Hindu monotheistic traditions. Addressing the question of what attributes God possesses according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaiṣṇavism, the book analyses Vaiṣṇava traditions and texts in order to locate them within a global philosophical framework. The book is divided into two sections. The first one, God in ...
Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesThe notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-b...
Yasser Kureshi, "Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSeeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2022) discusses the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive and confrontational center of power which has been the most consequential new feature of Pakistan's political system. This book maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan's high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, wi...
Chetan Choithani, "Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesMigration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines the role of migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food access among rural households. Migration forms a key component of livelihoods for an increasing number of rural households in many developing countries. Importantly, there is now a growing consensus among academics and policymakers on the potential positive effects of migration in promoting human development. Concurrently, the sig...
Between Jesus and Krishna: Christian Encounters with South Indian Temple Dance
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesOne of the eight national dances of India, bharatanatyam, partly originates from the area around Tranquebar. During the time that Tranquebar was a Danish colony, devadasis, women who did service at temples through dance, were patronized by the Thanjavur royal court. In 1623, a Danish–Icelandic soldier routinely observed the devadasis dancing outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansborg, which he was guarding. His accounts of the dancers are interesting at two levels; first, they...
Pankaj Jain, "Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach" (Springer, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesPankaj Jain's book Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach (Springer, 2023) presents a substantive yet accessible introduction to the modern thought of Jainism. It examines the life and thought of some of the most influential 19th- and 20th-century Jain ascetic leaders that remain little known in the Western world. The book's first part provides a detailed philosophical overview of Jain thought based on the translation of a seminal Hindi text Jain Darshan. The second part introduces eight Jain ...
Stephen Legg, "Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesStephen Legg's Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled t...
Sahana Ghosh, "A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands" (U California Press, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (U California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat in relation to mobility. It recasts a singular focus on border fences and border crossings to show, instead, tha...
Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutes"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste" Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian to kick off a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." The three discuss the ideological bases of Indian ethnonationalism, including its historical links to ...
Fae Dussart, "In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesDespite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Fae Dussart sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper arti...
Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues, "Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart" (Zubaan Books, 2023)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesFood Journeys: Stories from the Heart (Zubaan Books, 2023) is a powerful collection that draws on personal experiences, and the meaning of grief, rage, solidarity, and life. Feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon and peace researcher Joel Rodrigues present a wide-ranging set of stories and essays accompanied by recipes. They bring together poets, activists, artists, writers, and researchers who explore how food and eating allow us to find joy and strength while navigating a violent history of mi...
Afsar Mohammad, "Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe story Afsar Mohammad's book Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad (Cambridge UP, 2023) follows begins on August 15, 1947. As the new nation-states of India and Pakistan prepared to negotiate land and power, the citizens of the princely state of Hyderabad experienced the unravelling of an intense political conflict between the Union government of India and the local ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad. With evidence from the oral histories of various sections - both M...
Amya Agarwal, "Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesWhat is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict? Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, Amya Agarwal's book Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women's agency through its engagement...
David McMahan on Rethinking Meditation
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIf anything, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has been a rallying cry for the disruption of the myths that abound in the world of Buddhism and meditation. David L. McMahan professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, has been something of a crusader himself, writing a much needed correction to many of the myths in western adoption of Buddhism in his seminal text, The Makings of Buddhist Modernism. In our second interview with David, we discuss his newest book, Rethinking Meditation: Bu...
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesScholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; Osella & Osella, 2008). This special issue of International Journal of Islam in Asia (Sept, 2023) instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern ...
Sima Saigal, "The Second World War and North East India: Shadows of Yesteryears" (Routledge, 2022)
December 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSima Saigal's The Second World War and North East India: Shadows of Yesteryears (Routledge, 2022) discusses the untold story of North East India's role during the Second World War and its resultant socio-economic and political impact. It goes beyond standard campaign histories and the epicentre of the Kohima-Imphal battlefields to the Brahmaputra and Surma Valley of Assam--the administrative and political hub of the region, where decisions on the allied war efforts were deliberated and effect...
Samiparna Samanta, "Meat, Mercy, Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920" (Oxford UP, 2021)
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMeat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Samiparna Samanta disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. Dr. Samanta contends that the colonial project of animal protection in late nineteenth-century Bengal mirrored an irony. Emerging notions of public health and debates on cruelty against animals exposed the disjunction between the claims of a ...
Sandra Destradi, "Reluctance in World Politics: Why States Fail to Act Decisively" (Bristol UP, 2023)
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesWhy do international actors, including powerful states, often fail to develop clear foreign policies and instead adopt indecisive, ‘muddling-through’ approaches? In Reluctance in World Politics: Why States Fail to Act Decisively (Bristol University Press, 2023), Dr. Sandra Destradi develops a concept and a theory of reluctance in world politics. Applying it to the study of regional crisis management by leading powers, it finds that reluctance emerges when governments fail to devise clear fore...
John Zubrzycki, "Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States" (Hurst, 2024)
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesPost-independence India had a big problem–about 40% of its land wasn’t, well, India. Instead, this land was in the hands of the princely states: Rulers who had signed agreements accepting the rule of the British Empire, while getting a relatively free hand to rule their local jurisdictions. And these weren’t small states. Hyderabad–whose ruler made noises about independence, at least initially–had a larger income than Belgium, and was bigger than all but twenty UN member countries. But the po...
Vedic Texts, Indus Script, Aryan Migration
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesSeasoned scholar Asko Parpola discusses his Indological career, from how it began in the 1960s to what he’s working on now. Key themes include his longstanding work on Sāmaveda Jaiminīya texts, the Indus valley script, and the ancient Indo-European Aryans. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...
Sayan Dey, "Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean" (Anthem Press, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesUsually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and hardly engage with the evolution, movements, and shifts about the Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. But multiple published, unpublished, authored, and non-authored historical documents like the historical records of Greco-Egyptian monk Cosmos Indicopleustes (sixth century BC), the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (firstcentu...
Greg Bailey, "The Brahmavaivarta Purana (Ganesa Khanda): Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology" (Motilal Banarsidass, 2022)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesGreg Bailey discusses his new translation of the Gaṇeśa Khaṇḍa of the Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa, one of the few texts dedicated solely to the popular elephant-headed Indian god Gaṇeśa. About the book: The first two khaas of the Brahmavaivarta Puraa (BvP) deal with Brahma and Prakti respectively. Both introducing the theology that enables Ka to be treated as identical with the supreme Brahma, and as Viu/ Narayaa in all his forms. Ultimately everything goes back to Ka as the source of power and bei...
Dominik A. Haas, "Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas" (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023)
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesThe mantra known as Gāyatrī or Sāvitrī (Ṛgveda III 62.10) is one of the most frequently recited texts of mankind. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the mother of the Vedas – the oldest religious literature of South Asia –, but has even come to be venerated as a goddess. Today many consider it the most important, most efficacious, or holiest mantra of all. In Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023), Dominik A. Haas...
Raj Balkaran and McComas Taylor, "Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative: Studies in the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas" (ANU Press, 2023)
November 21, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesSanskrit narrative is the lifeblood of Indian culture, encapsulating and perpetuating insights and values central to Indian thought and practice. Raj Balkaran and McComas Taylor's edited volume Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative: Studies in the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas (ANU Press, 2023) brings together eighteen of the foremost scholars across the globe, who, in an unprecedented collaboration, accord these texts the integrity and dignity they deserve. The pre-eminent contributors to...
Keith Cantú, "Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami And Śivarājayoga" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesKeith Cantú's Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami And Śivarājayoga (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the life of a nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Tamil yogin named Sri Sabhapati Swami (Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī or Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, ca. 1828-1923/4) and his unique English, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali literature on a Sanskrit-based system of yogic meditation known as the "Rājayoga for Śiva" (Tamil: civarājayōkam, Sanskrit: śivarājayoga), the full experience of which is compared to be...
Arupjyoti Saikia, "The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000" (India Allen Lane, 2023)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesThe northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller: First partition cut Assam off from the rest of India, with just a tiny “chicken neck” of land connecting the state with India proper. Then decades of tension between the Assamese and minority groups led to new states being created from within its ...
Pavitra Sundar, "Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
November 15, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesPavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic im...
Aditya Balasubramanian, "Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Toward a Free Economy: Swantantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press, 2023), Aditya Balasubramanian charts the birth and rise of a political ideology rooted in the tenets of ‘free market’ economics, and the loosely associated ideas of neoliberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism. Balasubramanian offers an altogether fresh origin story for this movement that is often framed as a Cold War North Atlantic export to the rest of the poorer, developing worl...
Steven E. Lindquist, "The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya" (SUNY Press, 2023)
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesIn The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2023), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Drawing on history, literary studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit philology, narrative studies, and philosophy, Lindquist traces Yājñavalkya’s literary life—from his earliest mentions in ritual texts, through his developing biography in the ...
I Kick and I Fly
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesProfessor Ruchira Gupta joins us to share her young adult novel I Kick and I Fly (Scholastic, 2023), which was inspired by her experience making the Emmy-award winning documentary The Selling of Innocents. I Kick and I Fly is set on the outskirts of the Red Light District in Bihar, India, where fourteen year old Heera is living on borrowed time until her father sells her into the sex trade to help feed their family and repay his loans. It is, she’s been told, the fate of the women in her comm...
Vanessa R. Sasson, "The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women" (Equinox, 2023)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesVanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition. The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts wome...
Yigal Bronner, "A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesA Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary volume that introduces a remarkably long-lasting poetic treatise, the Mirror on Literature (Kavyadarsha), whose impact extended far beyond its origins in the south of India in 700 CE. Editor Yigal Bronner does not merely collect distinct, single-authored essays but rather interweaves the voices of the other twenty-four contributors (and his own voice) through c...
David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to ...
Understanding Narendra Modi: The Poetry of a Populist Leader
November 04, 2023 04:00 - 27 minutesWhy do politicians write poems? And what does a politician’s poetry tell us about their leadership? In this episode, a collective of researchers from the University of Oslo discuss these questions by focusing on India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Modi has a highly visible and extremely complex public image. He often appears as a firm and decisive defender of the nation, intent on taking India to new global heights. At other times he may emerge as the humble son of a teaseller, who has mad...
Christopher Jain Miller, "Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation" (Routledge, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesChristopher Jain Miller's book Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge, 2023) is a refreshingly original, multi-sited ethnography of transnational yoga that obliges us to look beyond postural practice (as̄ana) in modern yoga research. The book introduces readers to three alternative, understudied categories of transnational yoga practice which include food, music, and breathing. Studying these categories of embodied practice using interdiscipl...
Faiza Moatasim, "Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesAmong urban designers and municipal officials, the term encroachment is defined as a deviation from the official master plan. But in cities today, such informal modifications to the urban fabric are deeply enmeshed with formal planning procedures. Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) examines informality in the high-modernist city of Islamabad as a strategic conformity to official schemes and regulations rather ...
Arjun Shankar, "Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India" (Duke UP, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India (Duke UP, 2023), Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have be...
Réka Máté, "Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry" (de Gruyter, 2023)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesRéka Máté's Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry (de Gruyter, 2023) examines the connection between progressivism and feminist movements in the Indian subcontinent, scrutinizing shifting portrayals of women in Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry at the time of her writing from a historical perspective, and the historical, political, social and personal influences reflected in her work and life. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at th...
Cleric, Cadre, Businessman: China’s Development Strategy in Sri Lanka
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesWhat does Buddhism have to do with harbors? Find out how China is leveraging religion in its foreign policy and why it is a vital part of China's soft power strategy, aligned closely with domestic policies. Learn how Sri Lanka's reception and reproduction of narratives can impact the country's foreign relations and domestic dynamics. Tabita Rosendal Ebbesen, Doctoral student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University unravels Chinese Development policy, governance pr...
Maitrayee Deka, "Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesMichael O. Johnston sits down with Maitrayee Deka, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex to discuss her new book Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy (Stanford University Press, 2023). The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tast...
Stephen Robert Miller, "Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature" (Island Press, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it. Never have so many undertak...
Vikram Visana, "Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Political Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUncivil liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Vikram Visana studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focussing on Naoroji's preoccupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultur...
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, "Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhile globalization is often credited with the eradication of 'traditional' constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians. This book explores the contraction of what it means to be free in post-liberalization India, examining how global capitalism has exacerbated existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities, while also creating new h...
Swati Ganguly, "Tagore's University: A History of Visva-Bharati, 1921-1961" (New India Foundation, 2022)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSwati Ganguly's book Tagore's University: A History of Visva-Bharati, 1921-1961 (New India Foundation, 2022) is for anyone who is searching for tangible ways to revamp higher education, re-organize our socio-economic life, and reimagine participatory democracy. Tagore’s University is a history of Visva-Bharati, the world centre of learning and culture founded by Rabindranath Tagore a hundred years ago. The poet’s conception entailed several autonomous centres – for Asian studies, the visual a...
Smith Mehta, "The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media" (British Film Institute, 2023)
October 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media (British Film Institute, 2023), Smith Mehta takes a deep dive into the world of social media platforms and their impact on contemporary film and television production, arguing that they have fundamentally shifted the creator dynamics of these industries. Through first-hand research with creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks, Mehta develops the concept of...
Lucy Fulford, "The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus" (Coronet, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesUganda, August 1972. President Idi Amin makes a shocking pronouncement – the country’s South Asian population is being expelled. They have ninety days to leave. After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain’s former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives – but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden...
Patrick Laude, "Surrendering to the Self: Ramana Maharshi's Message for the Present" (Hurst, 2021)
October 12, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesThe Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879- 1950) is perhaps the most widely known Indian spiritual figure of the last century, second only to Gandhi. Patrick Laude's book Surrendering to the Self: Ramana Maharshi's Message for the Present (Hurst, 2021) offers a fresh introduction to the Maharshi's life and teachings, intending to situate him within the non-dualistic traditions of Hinduism. It also delves into themes and questions particularly relevant to the spiritual crisis and search for meanin...
The Future of Superstates: A Discussion with Alasdair Roberts
October 09, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesEmpires are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent of the world’s population will live in just four polities: India, China, the US and the EU. So, in what respects are these entities imperial and is there a future for small states? Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Alasdair Roberts, author of Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century (Polity Press, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a fre...
Arunima Datta, "Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (OUP, 2023) focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia. Delving into the stories o...
India, Asia, and the Global South
October 06, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesHow should we understand the emergence of the Global South as a political actor? What is the role of India within this framework? Which challenges and tensions arise from China’s assertiveness in Asia, and how is it reshaping regional dynamics? How is the Indo-Pacific region emerging as a new geopolitical structure with the potential to redefine regional alliances and relationships? Ravinder Kaur is joined by leading foreign policy expert on India, Raja Mohan to discuss these questions. Drawi...