New Books in South Asian Studies

The Jain tradition, with roots in ancient India but now spread across the globe, is anything but static and monolithic. In Engaged Jainism, an interdisciplinary cohort of academics and practitioners explore the manifold ways in which Jains and Jain ideas become engaged in social worlds—historically, philosophically, philologically, and anthropologically. Following the legacy of Engaged Buddhism, the groundbreaking volume edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, this volume shows how Jain traditions become engaged in everyday life, puts Jain ideas in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, and examines the ways in which Jains have maintained Jain identity in their engagement with other religious traditions and cultural influences in the past and present. Across all of these disciplinary approaches, Jainism emerges as a dynamic, protean, and diverse tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. For over a thousand years, Muslim pilgrims, merchants, scholars, and soldiers have passed through “Lanka” or “Sarandib”, leaving traces in Arabic, Tamil, Persian, Malay, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, and Sinhala. Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean (University of Texas Press, 2026) brings together many of those voices for the first time in English. From medieval travellers marvelling at Adam’s Peak to modern novelists and newspaper editors wrestling with reform, nationalism, and civil conflict. Dr. Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the celebrated author of ten monographs and the editor of seven books and several journal issues, with a particular focus on Islam and the Indian Ocean world. He also hosts the excellent podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam. Dr. Ahmed AlMaazmi is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University. His research explores the intersections of empire, occult sciences, slavery, law, environmental infrastructures, and material culture in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led to a normalization of daily violence? These are the key questions that inform the analyses in this volume by lawyers, academics and activists. Divided into four broad sections, it begins by looking at the origins of the modern police force in the 1860s and demonstrates their role in maintaining socio-cultural, economic and political hierarchies even in post-Independence India. The second section explores how the law and legal infrastructure, as well as the bureaucracy in India, work to effectively facilitate police violence and to further marginalize and criminalize certain groups, like lower castes and Muslims. The penultimate section complicates this picture, examining how police violence is shaped by historical ambivalence towards democracy, the personal and systemic dynamics between police personnel and the accused, and the fraught identity of police in conflict zones like Kashmir, where authority is both granted and withheld by the state. The final section contains interviews of and reflections by prominent critics of police violence, including former Haryana DGP V.N. Rai and Abdul Wahid Shaikh, falsely accused of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai blasts. Questioning its foundational purpose and envisioning pathways to accountability and reform, Policing and Violence in India ignites a long-overdue conversation about the nature of policing in India. Deana Heath is Professor of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool. She has written widely on issues relating to policing and violence in colonial India, particularly on torture and sexual violence. Her latest book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, New Jersey. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press and Orient Blackswan, and Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India, published by New York University Press in 2011 and Orient Blackswan in 2012. Shailza Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization shifts in the Hindi film industry in India. The book investigates Bollywood as a media system that has moved away from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s to an industry contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and the ascendency of the material-affective redressals offered by religious ethnonationalism. The monograph examines 19 Hindi-language films released post-2010 to study contemporary India’s precarious public sphere which has been characterized by a pervasive sense of professional-personal insecurity experienced by the vast majority. This is a book about the role of cinema, or cultural texts more generally, in a period marked by incredible insecurity, violence, and the absence of collective political alternatives. Screening Precarity is an intervention in the politics of representation, particularly, of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened in precarious times. It is also a cultural analysis of how the biggest film industry in the world is embedded in global media networks, and marshals state power and star power, national histories and transnational fantasies, structural impossibilities and individual agency. Megha Anwer is a theorist of literature and visual culture. Her research areas include contemporary postcolonial literature, global cinema, Victorian literature and visual culture. Anupama Arora is a professor of English and Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at NewBooksNetwork and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com and you can follow her on https://x.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic ‘India experts,’ Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state published by the Oxford University Press. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used by these individuals for a number of German organisations to fulfil the demands of Nazi politics. This monograph also inspects the links between the knowledge providers and embodiments of National Socialist politics like the Nazi party and its affiliates. In this study, Baijayanti Roy aims to ascertain whether such political engagements were actually more rewarding for the scholars than their 'practical services' to the state in the form of strategic deployment of their knowledge of India. The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism offers case studies of four organisations which incorporated such complicated entanglements of knowledge and power: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie in Munich, the Special Department India of the German Foreign Ministry, the Seminar for Oriental languages and its successor institutions at the University of Berlin, and the Indian Legion of the German Army. The knowledge networks underlying these organisations were dominated by German Indologists, but non-specialist knowledge providers, both German and Indian were also included. The Nazi regime expected all scholars and intellectuals to engage in Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), which entailed propagating the glories of the 'Reich' and its supreme leader as well as collecting 'politically valuable' knowledge within and outside Germany. For the four organizations concerned, this meant conducting pro-German and from around 1938, anti-British propaganda aimed at Indians. Loosely following an analogy provided by Herbert Mehrtens in the context of natural sciences, this monograph posits that there were ‘patterns of collaboration’ between the knowledge providers and the representatives of the Nazi regime. At the core of these 'patterns' was, to borrow Mitchell Ash’s theory, an exchange of resources and capital in which scholars and experts offered their knowledge of Indian languages, history and culture to authorities like the Foreign Ministry, the SS and the Army. In return, they received increased professional opportunities, financial remuneration or in some cases, increased power and influence. Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Kannada language boasts an ongoing literary tradition spanning more than a millennium, with a rich array of social positions and roles, religious traditions, and poetic styles that developed over the dramatic history of the region. Yet translations from premodern Kannada to English have been inconsistent, with only a handful of works that have endured. Stories of Shiva's Saints is the first English translation of selected stories from a thirteenth-century text by Hampeya Harihara that sheds light on the rapid spread of Shiva devotion in the region through edified biographies of figures who lived a few decades earlier, and the stories' historical significance is matched by their gripping plots and emotional expressivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.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.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics..Alastair McClure is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. .Saumya Dadoo is a Ph.D Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Caste has been a huge topic of conversation in modern India. Yet debates and activism around caste discrimination have spread beyond South Asia. Caste activists looked to African-American literature and leaders to connect their fight with the battle against racism in the U.S. And as Indians moved around the world–to America, to elsewhere in Asia, and to the Middle East–they way they thought about caste changed. Suraj Milind Yengde tackles this global angle in his latest book: Caste: A Global Story (Hurst, 2025) Suraj is Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies and a Ford Foundation Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His prior appointments were W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Fellow and postdoc at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and a founding member of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He is also the author of Caste Matters (Penguin Random House India: 2019) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Caste. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

"Engaging Hindu Narratives and Practices in the Contemporary World"Special Issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies: Volume 29, Issue 2 (August 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies