New Books in South Asian Studies
1,058 episodes - English - Latest episode: 24 days ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Taylor C. Sherman, "Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths" (Princeton UP, 2022)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesNehru's India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton UP, 2022) brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his pr...
Uddipana Goswami, "Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency" (Routledge, 2022)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesGendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency (Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally. In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in an interlaced environment of militarization, hyper-masc...
Ching Keng, "Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
March 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022). Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, and introducing Tathagatagarbha notions into his translation...
The Great Goa Land Grab
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 26 minutesThe small Indian state of Goa has witnessed a veritable land rush over many decades, with shifting state governments, leading politicians, and private investors moving in to acquire large tracts of land for a wide range of projects. But what are the drivers of land grabbing in Goa? And what are the consequences for local communities and the environment? In this episode, we discuss these questions with the authors of the recently published book The Great Goa Land Grab. Based on extensive field...
Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, "Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appe...
Divya Cherian, "Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia" (U California Press, 2022)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMerchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022) explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and allia...
Andrea Acri and Paolo E. Rosati, "Tantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins" (Routledge, 2022)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesTantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins (Routledge, 2022) explores the cross- and trans-cultural dialectic between Tantra and intersecting 'magical' and 'shamanic' practices associated with vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia. With a chronological frame going from the mediaeval Indic period up to the present, a wide geographical framework, and through the dialogue between various disciplines, it presents a coherent enq...
Julia Kowalski, "Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesWomen’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin. This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women...
Ezra Rashkow, "The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesPerhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combi...
Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 18 minutesIt’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the approach. Guest Tulasi Srinivas, associate professor of anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism, among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...
Rahul Sagar, "The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao's Hints on the Art and Science of Government" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHints on the Art and Science of Government was the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. It consists of lectures that Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao delivered in 1881 to Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III, the young Maharaja of Baroda. Universally considered the foremost Indian statesman of the nineteenth century, Madhava Rao had served as dewan (or prime minister) in the native states of Travancore, Indore and Baroda. Under his command, Travancore and Baroda came to be seen as 'model states', ...
Audrey Truschke, "The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule" (Columbia UP, 2021)
March 10, 2023 10:00 - 1 hourIn her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Histo...
Greg Bailey, "The Vinayaka Mahatmya" (Dev Publishers, 2023)
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesThe Vinayaka Mahatmya is a late Puranic text which contains myths of eight of Gaṇeśa’s avatāras. It presents Gaṇeśa as the supreme deity who empowers Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva to perform their traditional activities of creation, preservation and destruction. It offers descriptions of many darśanas of Gaṇeśa and several stotras praising his worship. This book contains the first translation of this text into a modern European language and also includes a transliterated version of the Sanskrit text...
Rotem Geva, "Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital" (Stanford UP, 2022)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesDelhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital (Stanford UP, 2022) revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decoloniza...
Rohit De, "A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic" (Princeton UP, 2018)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesRohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republi...
Birth Rates and the Future of Social Movements: A Discussion with Jack Goldstone
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their disconten...
Nikhil Menon, "Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesThe Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial world's most ambitious experiments. Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how India fused Soviet-inspired economic management and Western-style liberal democracy at a time when they were widely considered fundamentally contradictory. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning was meant to be independent India's route to prosperity. In this engaging and innovative account, Nikhi...
Isabel Huacuja Alonso, "Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders" (Columbia UP, 2022)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesFrom news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners. Huacuja Alonso argues that desp...
Veena R. Howard et al., "The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutes'How do gender constructions transform religious experiences?' 'What is the role of bodily materiality in ethics and epistemology?' 'How does rethinking gender and sexuality force us to reconceptualise settled ontological frameworks?' The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (Bloomsbury, 2019) provides the first research resource to Indian philosophical gender issues, exploring a variety of texts and traditions from Indian philosophy where the treatment of gender is dy...
Affective Masculinities
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 19 minutesAmrita De talks about affective masculinities, aspirational linkages with dominant scripts of masculinities, socially organized. As she expands her work beyond her study of South Asian masculinities, she talks about how understanding and loosening these linkages entails crucial feminist work. She also talks about Shah Rukh Khan. Amrita De is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Center of Humanities and Information at Penn State University. Her research focuses on global south masculinity studies and ...
Elizabeth Lhost, "Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia" (UNC Press, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesBeginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But professionals, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere,...
Shannon Philip, "Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesShannon Philip's book Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the gendered story of a changing India through the lives of its young middle class men. Through time spent ethnographically 'hanging-out' with young men in gyms, bars, clubs, trains and gay cruising grounds in India, this book critically reveals Indian men's violence towards women in various city spaces and also shows the many classed and masculine...
The UW-Madison Center for South Asia
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesAnthony Cerulli and Sarah Beckham share the history, mandate and vision for the UW-Madison Center for South Asia, especially its vibrant annual conference. Find out more about the conference (which takes place this year from October 18-21) here. Anthony Cerulli, CSA Director Sarah Beckham, CSA Associate Director Andrea Fowler, CSA Assisant Director and ACSA Coordinator (not present) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium membe...
Elora Halim Chowdhury, "Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh" (Temple UP, 2022)
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesAn exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory, Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh (Temple University Press, 2022) examines contemporary, woman-centered Muktijuddho cinema--features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and justice. She analyzes the Bangladeshi ...
Michael Schiltz, "Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesThe second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international monetary regime. The processes leading up to this remarkable feat are, however, far less documented or understood. Economic historians have only recently started digging into the causes behind the 'fall of silver' that preceded the scramble for gold. It is nowadays clear that its effects were felt worldwide. Not in the least, silver depreciatio...
Monima Chadha, "Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBuddhists are famous for their thesis that selves do not exist. But if they are right, what would that thesis mean for our apparent sense of self and for ordinary practices involving selves—or at least persons? In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha answers these questions by considering Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selve...
Justin W. Henry, "Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 16, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesRavana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impressio...
M. Christhu Doss, "India after the 1857 Revolt: Decolonising the Mind" (Routledge, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesIn India after the 1857 Revolt: Decolonising the Mind (Routledge, 2022), M. Christhu Doss brings together some of the most cutting-edge thoughts by challenging the cultural project of colonialism and critically examining the multi-dimensional aspects of decolonization during and after the 1857 revolt. He demonstrates that the deep-rooted popular discontent among the Indian masses, followed by the revolt, generated a distinctive form of decolonization movement—redemptive nationalism that chall...
Ijlal Naqvi, "Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesPakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road investments, the Pakistani power sector continues to stifle economic and social life across the country. Why? In Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan (Oxford UP, 2022), Ijlal Naqvi explores state capacity in Pakist...
Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock, "The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia" (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesAndrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and isl...
Nilakantan RS, "South vs. North: India's Great Divide" (Juggernaut, 2023)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesCompare two children – one born in north India, the other in the south. The child from south India is far less likely to die in the first year of her life or lose her mother during childbirth.She will also receive better nutrition, go to school and stay in school longer; she is more likely to attend college and secure employment that pays her more. This child will also go on to have fewer children, who in turn will be healthier and more educated than her. In a nutshell, the average child born...
Buddhist Responses to COVID: A Discussion with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana
February 04, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesDr Pierce Salguero sits down with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana, chief abbot at the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center and a scholar of modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka. We talk about his role in adapting Buddhist practices to address social and mental health needs during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also compare Buddhist responses to Covid in Pittsburgh and Sri Lanka. Along the way, we talk about how he became a monk, the health benefits of drinking boiled coriander water, and the dire situation in his...
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, "Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesCitizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2018) investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwo...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIdentity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla neg...
Ute Hüsken, "Laughter, Creativity, and Perseverance: Female Agency in Buddhism and Hinduism" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesIn most mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, women have for centuries largely been excluded from positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, as this volume shows, in an increasing number of late-20th-century and early-21st-century contexts, women can and do undergo monastic and priestly education; they can receive ordination/initiation as Buddhist nuns or Hindu priestesses; and they are accepted as religious and political leaders. Even though these processes still take p...
M. R. Sharan, "Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages" (Westland, 2021)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesM. R. Sharan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, studying questions centred around development economics and political economy. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2020 and was previously at the Delhi School of Economics and Hansraj College. His novel, Blue, was published in 2014. His writings have appeared across various publications, including the Economic and Political Weekly, The Hindu, The Times of India and The Economic Times. He is at www.mrsharan.com an...
Rukmini S. "Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India" (Context, 2021)
January 29, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow do you see India? Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities, the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing, prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians, who vote beyond the constraints of identity, and paradoxically, by an unchecked population explosion and rising crimes against women. Is it, though? In 2020, the annual population growth was down to under 1 per cent. Only thirty-one of hundred Indians live in a city ...
Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamas...
Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamas...
Padma Kaimal, "Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space" (U Washington Press, 2020)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIn Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide light, shadow, sound, and footsteps—Kaimal offers insights that complement what surviving texts tel...
Uther Charlton-Stevens, "Anglo-India and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesIt can be easy to think of colonies as having two populations: colonial subjects, and colonial overlords from Europe. It’s an easy narrative: one has power, status and privilege, the other does not. But in practice, European colonies created many populations in-between: groups who benefited from imperial power, yet not one of the elite. Britain’s almost two-and-a-half centuries-long presence in India created its own local Eurasian community: the Anglo-Indians, the descendents of marriages bet...
Shaping Civilisations: The Sea in Asian History
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesThe ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the various littorals of Asia into a segmented, yet at the same time, a unitary circuit over roughly the past 500 years since the so-called age of contact initiated a quickening of patterns and engagements that already existed. But despite the centrality of the maritime domain, there hasn’t really been a single study looking at Asia’s seas through a bro...
Catholic in Karachi: Living as a Christian in an Islamic Country
January 23, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesAyyaz Gulzar, journalist and Catholic youth leader in Pakistan, describes the challenges and persecutions the Church faces in the Islamic Republic, which includes the county’s blasphemy laws. He also talks about the many successes and joys he has seen—and some surprises, for example Muslim women praying the ‘Hail Mary’ for Our Lady’s help during childbirth. We recorded this conversation during the floods of the summer of 2022 which have been described as the worst in the country’s history. A...
Namita Vijay Dharia, "The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction" (U California Press, 2022)
January 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. In The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction (U California Press, 2022), the personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita ...
Malini Ambach et al., "Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives" (HASP, 2022)
January 19, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesFor many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but st...
The Ideology of Innovation in India
January 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourScience and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Irani’s work examines the ideological role that ideas of “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” have played in India and the people who are left behind by such visions. Irani and Vinsel also discuss her other work and activism focusing on the politics of the Bay Area in California, including organization against the digital techn...
Simon Brodbeck, "Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata" (Cardiff UP, 2022)
January 12, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesDivine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the Krishna avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? The Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes a massive war facilitated by God and the gods. That war took place between the third and the last ages of a 12,000-year cycle; within the cycle, moral behaviour and human lifespan always decrease in steps before being rebooted for the next cycle (initial lifespa...
Patrick Olivelle, "Reading Texts and Narrating History: Collected Essays III" (Primus Books, 2022)
January 09, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutes"The close attention required for editing and translating gives Olivelle an unparalleled understanding of the texts and inspires numerous articles and essays contained in this volume that draw out key ideas and insights from those same sources. Only careful philological editing and the hard, interpretive choices of translation enable progress in our historical understanding of India. Among the advances that philology makes possible is an improved sense of chronology in ancient India. Although...
Afsar Mohammad, "An Evening with a Sufi" (Red River, 2022)
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAfsar Mohammad's An Evening with a Sufi (Red River, 2022) is a collection of Afsar's Telugu poems translated into to English by Asfar and Shamala Gallagher. The stunning poems in the collection capture the stark realities of religious landscape of post-partition South Asia and is set against the backdrop of a barren panorama of village life that is reeling from political and social friction. The poems evoke Sufi saints and motherly figures (or ammas) to explore caste dynamics and sectarian di...
Robert M. Geraci, "Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesTwenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of t...