New Books In South Asian Studies

Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India by Andrew Flachs (University of Arizona Press, 2019) tells a story of how farmers in rural south India evaluate agricultural success through shifting calculations of social meaning, performance, and economic aspirations. Navigating multiple avenues of incentives, Dr. Flachs moves beyond the hidden links of consumption and production to concerns about how people engage with global change on the level of the farm field. By choosing to plant either genetically modified or certified organic cotton seeds, farmers risk their livelihoods by participating in diverging courses of sustainable agriculture. The farmer’s choice of seed reflects a performance of transformation regarding knowledge and agrarian sensibilities within rapidly changing socioeconomic and material realities that are influenced by both a colonial past and the neoliberal present. As Andrew put it, “a seed is a choice that cannot be taken back.(3)” L

First Words, Last Words: New Theories for Reading Old Texts in Sixteenth Century India (Oxford UP, 2021) charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea explore this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vednta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. First Words, Last Words traces both the issue of sequence and the question of innovation through an in-depth study of this debate and through a comparative survey of similar problems in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revealing that the disputants in this controversy often pretended to uphold traditional views, when they were in fact radically innovative. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information

When we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology. Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders traveled through today’s India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, sharing commodities and goods, culture and information, under both Indian and British rulers. In this interview, Jagjeet and I talk about the Indian caravan trade, and the routes traders took as they transported goods, cultures and ideas across Central Asia. We’ll also talk about what we miss in the way we talk about globalization in the present. Jagjeet is Associate Professor in the History of Early Modern and Modern India at University College London, where

What is Open Access Publishing and why is it important? Listen in as Raj Balkaran interviews Dominik A. Haas on his Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS) initiative which maintains a list of relevant publishers, journals, book series and other publication media. The list is available here. If you know of any other FOA publishers, journals etc. with an emphasis on Indological / South Asia-related research, or have feedback about the list, feel free to contact Dominik directly at dominik@haas.asia Dominik A. Haas, BA MA, is a DOC Fellow, Austrian Academy of Sciences and a PhD Candidate, University of Vienna 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

Janaki Bakhle's book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford UP, 2005) is a provocative account of the development of modern national culture in India using classical music as a case study. The author demonstrates how the emergence of an “Indian” cultural tradition reflected colonial and exclusionary practices, particularly the exclusion of Muslims by the Brahmanic elite, which occurred despite the fact that Muslims were the major practitioners of the Indian music that was installed as a “Hindu” national tradition. This book lays bare how a nation’s imaginings—from politics to culture—reflect rather than transform societal divisions. 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 of Liberal Education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south

In this episode, Camilla T.N. Sørensen joins Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS for a conversation about the Indo-Pacific region as seen from a Danish and broader European perspective. Camilla was recently tasked by the Danish government to provide an assessment of current development trends in the Indo-Pacific ahead of a forthcoming new Danish foreign and security policy. Apart from discussing the scope, character, and drivers of Denmark/Europe’s growing interest in the Indo-Pacific, she offers an insightful account of China’s increasingly prominent role in the region. Camilla TN Sørensen is an associate professor at the Danish Royal Defense Academy in Copenhagen, at the Institute for Strategy and War Studies. Apart from being one of the leading China specialists in Denmark, Camilla covers a wide array of research areas, including Danish foreign and security policy, great power relations, and the Arctic and Indo-Pacific regions. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordi

Noted for their haunting melodies and enigmatic lyrics, Bauls have been portrayed as spiritually enlightened troubadours traveling around the countryside in West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh. As emblems of Bengali culture, Bauls have long been a subject of scholarly debates which center on their esoteric practices, and middle class imaginaries of the category Baul.  Adding to this literature, the intimate ethnography presented in Kristin Hanssen's book Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living With Bengali Bauls (Routledge, 2020) recounts the life stories of members from a single family, shining light on their past and present tribulations bound up with being poor and of a lowly caste. It shows that taking up the Baul path is a means of softening the stigma of their lower caste identity in that religious practice, where women play a key role, renders the body pure. The path is also a source of monetary income in that begging is considered part of their vocation. For women, the Baul path has the

There's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even so, it's been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world - Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Geniza, and Tabriz - this fascinating and much-needed book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent. ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place

Today I talked to Dr. Emilia Bachrach about In the Service of Krishna: Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-Four Vaishnavas from a 1702 Manuscript in the Amit Ambalal Collection (Mapin, 2020). The Pushtimarg, or the Path of Grace, is a Hindu tradition whose ritual worship of the deity Krishna has developed in close relationship to a distinct genre of early-modern Hindi prose hagiography. This bookintroduces readers to the most popular hagiographic text of the Pushtimarg which tells the sacred life stories of the community's first preceptor Vallabhacharya (1497-1531) and his most beloved disciples. This book focuses on the only extant Chaurasi Vaishnavan ki Varta manuscript dated to the beginning of the 18th century, now in artist Amit Ambalal's collection. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of Indian art and literature, to those who have grown up in the Pushtimarg tradition, and more broadly to those with an appreciation for the distinct ways in which pictures can tell stories that unite the everyday

Jainism evokes images of monks wearing face-masks to protect insects and mico-organisms from being inhaled. Or of Jains sweeping the ground in front of them to ensure that living creatures are not inadvertently crushed: a practice of non-violence so radical as to defy easy comprehension. Yet for all its apparent exoticism, Jainism is still little understood in the West. What is this mysterious philosophy which originated in the 6th century BCE, whose absolute requirement is vegetarianism, and which now commands a following of four million adherents both in its native India and diaspora communities across the globe?  In Jainism: An Introduction (I. B. Tauris, 2009), Long makes an ancient tradition fully intelligible to the modern reader. Plunging back more than two and a half millennia, to the plains of northern India and the life of a prince who - much like the Buddha - gave up a life of luxury to pursue enlightenment, Long traces the history of the Jain community from founding sage Mahavira to the present da

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response (Stanford UP, 2021) captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of s

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best. In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In Special Treatment: Student Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Stanford UP, 2021), Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's

Every day millions of Tamil women in southeast India wake up before dawn to create a kolam, an ephemeral ritual design made with rice flour, on the thresholds of homes, businesses and temples. This thousand-year-old ritual welcomes and honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and alertness, and Bhudevi, the goddess of the earth. Created by hand with great skill, artistry, and mathematical precision, the kolam disappears in a few hours, borne away by passing footsteps and hungry insects. This is the first comprehensive study of the kolam in the English language. It examines its significance in historical, mathematical, ecological, anthropological, and literary contexts. The culmination of Vijaya Nagarajan's many years of research and writing on this exacting ritual practice, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India--an Exploration of the Kolam (Oxford UP, 2018) celebrates the experiences, thoughts, and voices of the Tamil women who keep this tradition alive. You can visit the book's website h

How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state? In Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke UP, 2018), Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state. Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and 1917, Mongia illuminates the genesis of central techniques of migration control. She shows how important elements of current migration regimes, including the notion of state sovereignty as embodying the authority to control migration, the distinction between free and forced migration, the emergence of passports, the formation of migration bureaucracies, and the incorporation of kinship relations into migration logics, are the product of complex debates that attended colonial migrations. By charting how state

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about how people have moved in India historically, and his 2020 book the Age of Pandemics 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World (HarperCollins, 2020). The book argues that the period between the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century - an age otherwise known for the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution, imperialism, and globalization - was also the 'age of pandemics'. It documents the scale of devastation caused by different pandemics, cholera, the plague, influenza, and finally Covid. The bo

Set in the eastern state of Odisha in a district known as the “Somalia of India,” Everyday State and Politics in India: Government in the Backyard in Kalahandi (Routledge 2018) studies a development project in a region iconic for development failure. Drawing on rich fieldwork with a watershed development project in district Kalahandi, anthropologist Sailen Routray moves beyond the question of success and failure to ask: how has the state itself transformed in the process of trying to develop Kalahandi? By analyzing the implementation of WORLP (Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Project), the book shows the morphing of the state on the ground, and the ways in which it is perceived by the agents and objects of statist actions. It argues that since the 1980s, the state has come to not only be seen but also felt as it has made its way into the interstices of rural society through the mission-mode of state-fabrication. The book also identifies an increasing convergence in the everyday practices of governmental and n

In her magnificent and lyrical new book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard UP, 2020), Supriya Gandhi reorients and adds unprecedented depth to our understanding of the much memorialized but less understood Mughal prince and thinker Dara Shukoh (d. 1659), and of his broader political and social milieu. Written with exceptional clarity and in dazzling narrative form, this book marshals overwhelming evidence to disrupt the popular and common view that sees Dara Shukoh as either an absolute interfaith inclusivist or a failed political aspirant to the Mughal throne. Alternating between social and political history, and close readings of a range of religious texts, this book not only thoroughly complicates our conception of Dara Shukoh, but also presents an intimate view of the political and family life of the Mughal elite. Operating at the intersection of Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies, and Empire Studies, this eminently accessible book is sure to spark interest and discussion a

Listen in as we speak with McComas Taylor (Associate Professor and Reader in Sanskrit, The Australian National University) about his brand-new translation of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. This is the second time the Viṣṇu Purāṇa has been translated into English, the last time being nearly two centuries ago. Attentive to out the aesthetics of out-loud utterance, this beautiful translation is in blank-verse, faithful to the original Sanskrit, and available Open Access. We also speak about the World Sanskrit Conference, an upcoming Sanskrit Narrative volume, and studying Sanskrit online with McComas Taylor. 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

Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (Fordham UP, 2021) recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practic

“A map is the greatest of all epic poems, its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” --Gilbert Grosvenor The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India. These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate efforts to explore and chart out uncharted regions. Two distinct groups would rise to this challenge: a band of army officers, who would become the classic Great Game players; and an obscure group of natives employed by the Survey of India, known as the Pundits. While the game played out, a self-educated cartographer named William Lambton began mapping the Great Arc, attempting to measure the actual shape of the Indian subcontinent. The Great Arc would then be lauded as one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of