New Books In South Asian Studies

In Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke University Press, 2020), Professor Anustup Basu provides a genealogical study of Hindutva. The interview is a discussion upon the connection drawn by the author between the Hindu nationalism and Carl Schmitt’s idea of political theology to portray the orientalist and Eurocentric nature of the Hindutva ideology. Further, the podcast is an enquiry into the ideas portrayed by Professor Basu throughout his book, ranging from complications that accompany the Hindutva insistence on the original varna system, the journey of Indian modernization, and the emergence of Hindutva 2.0 as advertised monotheism. As pointed out by the author, this book is not an answer to the present but an investigation of the present ground. Shruti Dixit is a PhD Divinity Candidate at CSRP, University of St Andrews, researching the Hindu-Christian Dialogue in Apocalyptic Prophecies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:/

Devotional Hindu Dance: A Return to the Sacred (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) sheds light on the purpose of Hindu dance as devotional. Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall explains the history of Hindu dance and how colonization caused the dance form to move from sacred to a Westernized system that emphasizes culture. Postcolonialism is a main theme throughout this text, as religion and culture do not remain static. MisirHiralall points to a postcolonial return to Hindu dance as a religious and sacred dance form while positioning Hindu dance in the Western culture in which she lives. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

More than one million Indian soldiers were deployed during World War I, serving in the Indian army as part of Britain's imperial war effort. These men fought in France and Belgium, Egypt and East Africa, and at Gallipoli, in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia. While Indian contributions to the war have long been recognized (unlike other colonial contributions), it has long been disparaged and lacked significant scholarly attention, especially in the western academy. In Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Andrew T. Jarboe reconstructs the Indian experience of the war, examining the contested representations that British and Indian audiences drew from the soldiers' wartime experiences and the impacts these representations had on the British Empire's racial politics. Presenting overlooked or forgotten connections, Jarboe argues that Indian participation contributed decisively to the war effort. At the same time, Indian participation in the w

Pink Revolutions: Globalization, Hindutva, and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India (Northwestern UP, 2021) describes how queer politics in India occupies an uneasy position between the forces of neoliberal globalization, on the one hand, and the nationalist Hindu fundamentalism that has emerged since the 1990s, on the other. While neoliberal forces use queerness to highlight India’s democratic credentials and stature within a globalized world, nationalist voices claim that queer movements in the country pose a threat to Indian national identity. Nishant Shahani argues that this tension implicates queer politics within messy entanglements and knotted ideological triangulations, geometries of power in which local understandings of “authentic” nationalism brush up against global agendas of multinational capital. Eschewing structures of absolute complicity or abject alterity, Pink Revolutions pays attention to the logics of triangulation in various contexts: gay tourism, university campus politics, diasporic cu

In Elusive Nonviolence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa (Westland, 2021), Jyotirmaya Sharma argues that Gandhi acknowledged the absence of any serious tradition of non-violence in India. His uncompromising insistence on ahimsa, then, was a way of introducing non-violence as an Indian value by fabricating a tradition around it. Gandhi offered a unique interpretation of Hindu texts and philosophical practice while engaging with certain strands of European and American intellectual traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Raj Balkaran interviews Atmadarshan Laura Santoro co-owner of Dharma Kshetra Yoga and author of forthcoming book The Song of Your Soul (an original new translation of the Bhagavad Gita) on the role of yoga and Indian spirituality in fostering life wisdom. They discuss her rich relationship to the Bhagavad Gītā and issues of cultural appropriation in modern yoga movements. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In her multilayered and thoroughly researched new book The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship (I. B. Tauris, 2021), Sana Haroon examines the interaction and intersection of varied legal regimes, devotional practices, and conceptions of sacred space invested in the institution and structure of the mosque in South Asia. This book combinies dense yet markedly accessible archival research with the close reading of a range of texts and legal/political strivings of a range of previously unexplored actors, including prayer leaders, scholars, mosque managers, lawyers, colonial magistrates, and local notables. Through this exercise, Haroon documents in vivid detail the aspirations and ambiguities that drove a variety of claims over the meaning and place of the mosque in South Asian Islam and Muslim identity during the colonial moment fraught with vigorous intra-Muslim and interreligious contestations over this question. Lucidly composed and theoretically invasive, this book is

This interview continues the conversation with Martin Gluckman, Researcher at University of Capetown and Director at Sanskrit Research Institute. We discuss his Panini Research Tool, Sanskrit Writer, Text to Speech Sanskrit tool and research into the Indus Valley Script. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

By studying the history and sources of the Thomas Christians of India, a community of pre-colonial Christian heritage, this book revisits the assumption that Christianity is Western and colonial and that Christians in the non-West are products of colonial and post-colonial missionaries. Christians in the East have had a difficult time getting heard—let alone understood as anti-colonial. This is a problem, especially in studies on India, where the focus has typically been on North India and British colonialism and its impact in the era of globalization. A novel intervention, Clara A. B. Joseph's Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn (Routledge, 2020) takes up South India and the impact of Portuguese colonialism in both the early modern and contemporary period. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Religious Studies, Christianity, and South Asia. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see raj

In Kali in Bengali Lives: Narratives of Religious Experience (Lexington Books, 2021), Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis' personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees' own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee's self. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a

In his new book In Search of New Social Democracy: Insights from the South - Implications for the North (Zed-Bloomsbury), Olle Törnquist has returned to findings from fifty years of research on democracy and social rights movements in especially Indonesia, India and the Philippines, to address the major puzzle of our time: why the vision about development based on social justice by democratic means has lost ground, and if there are openings. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Olle Törnquist to discuss the main results and arguments in what he calls his endbook. Olle Törnquist is a Swedish global historian and Professor Emeritus of Politics and Development at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has written widely on radical politics, development and democratisation. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with o

This interview features amazing open-access digital Sanskrit projects spearheaded by Martin Gluckman, Researcher at University of Capetown and Director at Sanskrit Research Institute. We discuss Martin’s Sanskrit and computer science backgrounds as well as the on-line Sanskrit dictionary.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots, consumed by lust and luxury. Bejewelled parasites, they cared more, we are told, for elephants and palaces than for schools and public works. The British cheerfully circulated the idea that brown royalty needed ‘enlightened’ white hands to guide it, and by the twentieth century many Indians too bought into the stereotype, viewing princely India as packed with imperial stooges. Indeed, even today the princes are either remembered with frothy nostalgia or dismissed as greedy fools, with no role in the making of contemporary India.  In False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (Juggernauth, 2021), Manu S. Pillai disputes this view. Tracking the travels of the iconic painter Ravi Varma through five princely states – from the 1860s to the early 1900s – he uncovers a picture far removed from the clichés in which the princes are trapped. The world we discover is not of dancing girls, but of sedition, legal battles, the defiance of impe

Clemens Cavallin, Sudha Sitharaman and Åke Sander's The Future of Religious Studies in India (Routledge, 2020) looks at how religious studies is framed and taught in India. It addresses the contradiction between the country’s vibrant religious life and the dearth of comparative and social scientific religious studies programs across Indian universities. The book is divided into three sections with six chapters. The first section discusses the notion of religion, spirituality, and religious studies. The second section discusses the study of religion in India, delving into the contribution of Indian thinkers along with the different education policies. This section also deliberates on the failure of the ‘secularization thesis’ in modern India and the emergence of Indian middle-class religion. The third section provides elaborate and concrete suggestions on how to develop religious studies in relation to global citizenship and Indian cultural heritage with the hope of initiating a more extensive discussion. The

Kunti, a rare matriarch in the Mahabharata and one of the revered Pancha Satis, holds an unforgettable position in the Indian literary imagination. Yet, little is known about the fateful events that shaped her early life. Taking on the intricate task, Koral Dasgupta unravels the lesser-known strands of Kunti’s story: through a childhood of scholarly pursuits to unwanted motherhood at adolescence, a detached marriage and her ambitious love for the king of the devas. After the remarkable success of Ahalya, the first book in the Sati series, Kunti: The Sati Series II (Pan Macmillan India, 2021) presents a brilliant and tender retelling of a story at the heart of our culture and mythology. * In the Sati series, Koral Dasgupta explores the lives of the Pancha Kanyas from Indian mythology and reinvents them in the modern context with a feminist consciousness. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc

At the start of 2021, a widespread belief held that India had escaped the Covid-19 pandemic relatively unscathed - this was evidenced, the story went, in the country's comparatively low death rates. Narendra Modi boasted to the World Economic Forum in January 2021, "that the country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen (Norwegian Network for Asian Studies) is joined by Alf Gunvald Nilsen to discuss the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India. Nilsen argues how the second wave was the outcome of various forms of mismanagement and manipulation integrally linked to the construction of a narrative of victory in a purported war against the coronavirus, and reflects on whether the deadly reality of India's second wave is likely to erode Modi's public image. Alf Gunvald Nilsen is professor of sociology at the University of Pretoria. His research focuses on the political economy of development and democracy in the global South. The Nord

Katherine Young, Turbulent Transformations: Non-Brahmin Śrīvaiṣṇavas on Religion, Caste and Politics in Tamil Nadu (Orient Blackswan, 2021) studies the interlinking of religious, social and political identities in modern Tamil Nadu. Through interviews with non-Brahmin Śrīvaiṣṇavas of many castes, but especially belonging to the lower-caste groups, it analyses their histories of discrimination, their negotiation of lived realities, and hopes for the future. In addition, the author also addresses colonial changes, Telugu connections, the non-Brahmin movement, Dalit mobilisation, post-Independence caste hierarchies, government policies, party politics, Brahmin reactions, court cases, and inter-religious competition. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

A Passage North (Granta, 2021) is a novel set in contemporary post-war Sri Lanka. A young, privileged Tamil man takes a train journey from the capital Colombo to former war-torn Kilinochchi to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker. But the journey of the title is equally the philosophical journeys he undertakes to the deepest recesses of his mind, to the past and future. An intense thread of longing runs through the novel: the nature of his people's longing that must have led to events that led to the devastating war, his longing for the non-existent Tamil homeland of his imagination, the caretaker's impossible longing for the impossible return of her sons dead in the war, his longing for his estranged romantic partner. Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and received a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2019. A Passage North is his second novel and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our

Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, University of Sheffield, highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018), she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography.  To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, s

Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement (SUNY Press, 2020) brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of "Western" and "Oriental" ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth