New Books In South Asian Studies

The Rādhā Tantra is an anonymous 17th-century tantric text from Bengal. Mans Broo's The Rādhā Tantra: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation (Routledge, 2019) offers a lively picture of the meeting of different religious traditions in 17th century Bengal, since it presents a Śākta version of the famous Vaiṣṇava story of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. This book presents a critically edited text of the Rādhā Tantra, based on manuscripts in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, as well as an annotated translation It is prefaced by an introduction that situates the text in its social and historical context and discusses its significance.  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

Turning the Mirror: A View From the East is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and award-winning writer Pankaj Mishra. The conversation provides behind-the-scenes insights into several of Pankaj’s books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and An End To Suffering: The Buddha In The World, and his motivations to write them. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.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 speaks with Wendy Doniger about her new book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History (University of Virginia Press, 2021), along with her translation of the final four books of the Mahābhārata's Critical Edition translation project, the power of the purāṇas, cultural appropriation, and more! 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

The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda's Sivadrsti and His Philosophical Interlocutors (Oxford UP, 2021) is a sequel to a volume published in 2011 by OUP under the title The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda's Sivadrsti and his Tantric Interlocutors. The first volume offered an introduction, critical edition, and annotated translation of the first three chapters of the Sivadrsti of Somananda, along with its principal commentary, the Sivadrstivrtti, written by Utpaladeva. It dealt primarily with Saiva theology and the religious views of competing esoteric traditions. The present volume presents the fourth chapter of the Sivadrsti and Sivadrstivrtti and addresses a fresh set of issues that engage a distinct family of opposing schools and authors of mainstream Indian philosophical traditions. In this fourth and final chapter, Somananda and Utpaladeva engage logical and philosophical works that exerted tremendous influence in the Indian subcontinent in its premodernity. Throughout this chapter, Somananda endeavors to explain hi

Gidi Ifergan's new book The Psychology of the Yogas (Equinox Publishing, 2021) explores the dissonance between the promises of the yogic quest and psychological states of crisis. Western practitioners of yoga and meditation who have embarked upon years-long spiritual quests and who have practiced under the guidance of a guru tell of profound and ongoing experiences of love, compassion and clarity: the peaks of spiritual fulfillment. However, after returning to the West, they reported difficulties and crises in different areas of their lives. Why did these practitioners, who had apparently touched the heights of fulfillment, still suffer from these crises? 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

The Koli community in Mumbai-which has been practicing fishing for centuries-has experienced rapid changes over the last few decades, in the forms of increased mechanization, export of fish to global markets, and the pressure of urbanization on their living and workspaces. The capitalist transformation in fishing has altered what was once a caste-based practice to one that brought to it investors from outside the community, migrant workers, and ecological degradation. The resultant loss of revenue, jobs, and catch for artisanal fishers has led to movements demanding fishing rights to be granted to traditional fisher communities alone and for a return to older fishing practices. This call found resonance with populist politics in the city: Koli women organized themselves to stridently resist the entry of migrant men into the sector and Koli men-particularly the young-became inclined to move out of the practice of fishing. Through an examination of the lives and struggles of fishers in one of India's wealthiest

This podcast interviews Kusumita Pedersen on the first book-length study of the thought of Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007) and his teaching of a dynamic spirituality of integral transformation. The Philosophy of Sri Chinmoy: Love and Transformation (Lexington, 2021) is a straightforward and unembroidered account of his philosophy, allowing Sri Chinmoy to speak for himself in his own words, in poetry as much as in prose. 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 the first complete English translation of a monumental 14th century Sanskrit philosophical text, the Jewel of Reflection on the Truth about Epistemology (Bloomsbury 2020), Stephen Phillips introduces modern readers to a classic of Indian philosophy. The author of the Jewel, Gaṅgeśa, is a comprehensive examination of epistemology and its interrelationship with metaphysics, taking up topics in philosophy of language and logic along the way. The translation itself includes a commentary by Phillips, explaining Gaṅgeśa’s historical position in the long tradition of Nyāya philosophy, as well as the relationship of philosophy to contemporary thought. Gaṅgeśa’s treatise argues for realism about the external world, a broadly reliabilist theory of knowledge and justification, and systematically takies up and refutes potential objections to his own systematic account, resulting in a tightly interwoven masterpiece of Sanskrit-language philosophy. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College

Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship? In Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India (Seagull Books, 2021), Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a genre-bending exploration of a litigation bat

Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha's book Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments (Oxford UP, 2021) examines diverse retellings of the Ramayana narrative as interpreted and embodied through a spectrum of performances. Unlike previous publications, this book is neither a monograph on a single performance tradition nor a general overview of Indian theatre. Instead, it provides context-specific analyses of selected case studies that explore contemporary enactments of performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw: Kutiyattam, Nangyarkuttu and Kathakali from Kerala; Kattaikkuttu and a "mythological" drama from Tamilnadu; Talamaddale from Karnataka; avant-garde performances from Puducherry and New Delhi; a modern dance-drama from West Bengal; the monastic tradition of Sattriya from Assam; anti-caste plays from North India; and the Ramnagar Ramlila.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more a

The horse is an important symbol in India’s culture, as shown by the many stories and works we see of Indian royalty and adventurers on horseback. As noted by Mughal chronicler Abu Fazl, “The horse is a means of attaining personal excellence.” Yet the horse isn’t native to India, with thousands of horses imported from Central Asia and the Middle East to meet the demands of India’s riders Yashaswini Chandra’s The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback (Picador India: 2021) uses the horse as a way to discuss and frame India’s history. The book covers caravan trade routes, the Mughal empire, the Rajput horse warriors, and others to outline how India’s politics and economics changed throughout history. We’re joined again by David Chaffetz, who’s a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou. In this interview, the three of us talk about the central role the horse plays in Indian history, and how understandi

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence withi

Jelle J. P. Wouters' book In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (Oxford UP, 2018) declutters and reconceptualizes the top-down notion of conceptualizing and understanding Naga village, social bodies, state, and violence. As the title suggests it goes to the shadows or the ground reality of political life that affects the everyday life o the people offering a rich ethnographic purview. Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. The book locates the historical experiences and agency of the Naga people and relates these to ordinary villagers’ perceptions, actions, and moral reasoning vis-à-vis both the Naga Movement and the state and its lucrative resources. It thus presses us to rethink

Medieval Kashmir in its golden age saw the development of some of the most sophisticated theories of language, literature, and emotion articulated in the pre-modern world. James D. Reich's book To Savor the Meaning: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in this period by looking at debates about how poetry communicates emotions to its readers, what it is readers do when they savor these emotions, and why this might be valuable.  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

Dr. Don Davis (Professor and Chair, Department of Asian Studies) speaks about the newly launched Resource Library for Dharmaśāstra Studies, a digitized open educational resource hosted at the University of Texas, Austin. We discuss the genesis and utility of this important online resource, highlighting the herculean efforts of Dr. Patrick Olivelle. 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

Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists.  Nayanika Mathur's book Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytell

In Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Cambridge UP, 2021), Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agricultural sciences in shaping the history of tea plantations in British Colonial India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Climate change is one of the key challenges of our time and large amounts of development aid are allocated towards adaptation in the Global South. Yet, to what extent do such projects address local needs and concerns? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Camelia Dewan to discuss her latest book: Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, 2021), and her fieldwork experience in Bangladesh. Vulnerable to floods, erosion and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Both an ethnography of Bangladeshi development professionals and rural people in the coastal zone, “Misreading the Bengal Delta” critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a "climate change victim". Dewan examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Camelia Dewan is an e

Tanya Jakimow's book Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents - people tasked with designing or delivering development - are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their 'sense of self'. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to engender feelings in development agents: an overlooked form of power. Susceptibility in Development proposes a new analytical framework to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development. Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development program in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between individu

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is a seminal work in the field of postcolonial culture studies. It critiqued Western scholarship about the Eastern world for its patronizing attitude and tendency to view it as exotic, backward and uncivilized. Arvind Sharma, longstanding professor of comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, now takes up the Palestinian academic's groundbreaking ideas - originally put forth predominantly in a Middle Eastern context - and tests them against Indian material. He explores in an Indian context Said's contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West.Scholarly and accessible, The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule Over India from a Saidian Perspective (HarperCollins, 2018) throws fresh light on Indian colonial history through a Saidian lens. Dr. Pankaj Jain is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at FLAME University, where he is heading the Indic Studies Initiative in the FLAME School