New Books in South Asian Studies

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how agrarian communities cultivate democratic values—solidarity, reciprocity, and ethical citizenship—through practices embedded in their daily lives. Dr. Banerjee challenges conventional notions of democracy as confined to elections and state institutions, instead presenting it as a process deeply rooted in cultural-social practices and values. She highlights how rural communities, through cooperation in agriculture, rituals, festivals, and even moments of conflict and repair, create and sustain the democratic spirit. In doing so, the book underscores the resilience of these practices, even as procedural democracy faces erosion under broader political and economic pressures. At its core, Cultivating Democracy compels us to reimagine democracy not as an abstract ideal but as a lived and ongoing project shaped by the rhythms of everyday life. Through its rich ethnographic detail and theoretical insight, the book offers profound lessons on the fragility and strength of democracy, making it both a deeply scholarly and urgently relevant work.Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, linguistics, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's trails and petting the canines he meets along the way. 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 has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment?In this episode, Professor Marina Svensson talks to Professor Anne-Marie Brady about her research on China’s strategic thinking and economic and political influence in the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on the small island states. The need for collaboration among like-minded partners in the region and other actors such as the EU is also addressed. This episode was produced and edited by Lisa Sihvonen and Tabita Rosendal.Anne-Marie Brady is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Professor Brady is a specialist on Chinese politics, polar politics, China-Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal. She has published ten books and over fifty academic papers and also written op eds for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, among others.Further readings:Anne-Marie Brady’s work on the indo-pacific: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-caledonia https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/facing-up-to-chinas-hybrid-warfare-in-the-pacific/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/new-caledonia-crisis-a-turning-point-in-pacific-security/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/china-in-the-pacific-from-friendship-to-strategically-placed-ports-and-airfields/ The EU strategy: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-indo-pacific-strategy_en On NATO strategy: https://www.cfr.org/blog/natos-indo-pacific-aspirations This podcast was produced as part of EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: · Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) · Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) · Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) · Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) · Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) · Norwegian Network for Asian Studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This podcast features Ammar Rashid, a leading figure in left-wing politics in Pakistan, and currently Director of the action-research organization Alliance for Urban Rights, and Research Lead at the public health think tank, Heartfile. This episode of Radio ReOrient is hosted by Sher Ali Tareen with Shehla Khan and Salman Sayyid. The conversation explores the lengthening political crisis in Pakistan by foregrounding the potential for resistance. In this vein, it ranges across several salient themes, notably the genealogy of prevalent political divisions, the current state of the Left, the prospects of coalition building, the nexus between Islamophobia and support for junta rule, and the contested notion of populism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI, 2024) explores the varieties of strategies that holy women use for gaining and expressing power in diverse roles. It examines different concepts of holiness and leadership for men and women, the role of charisma, and the arenas of activity and accomplishment for holy women in India and abroad. By relating a new idea-that of the 'influencer'-to the study of women and religious authority, the Issue contributes fresh and refined analyses and explanatory models toward a greater understanding of women's evolving relationship to the Hindu tradition. This book is available open-access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay's account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier's manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women's literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This episode features Daniel Majchrowicz, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature & Culture at Northwestern University, discussing his new book, The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. It is a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present. The book argues that travel writing in South Asia was a broadly ecumenical genre that let Indian travelers not just describe the world as they found it, but to imagine it as they wished for it to be. Opening this vast South Asian travel atlas, The World in Words introduces a new literary genre, unlocks new forms of literary subjectivity from long-ignored voices, and reveals new modes of circulation, mobility, and connection between India, Asia, and Africa, while also revealing how class, language, gender, race and power formed in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. While this is an academic book that could be used in South Asian studies courses and Islamic Studies courses, it also reads in part like a travelogue as Majchrowicz shares his own journeys discovering texts, libraries, and splendid private collections, sometimes with unexpected but fruitful leads. This text helps to decenter Western colonial travleogues and narratives, and allows for South Asian writers from Khanums' to princes' voices to be heard and studied, while also tracing the development of Urdu as a dominant regional language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urgently asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination. In India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity, and a complex colonial past, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities. Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA).Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi's India and the governments from which it has drawn inspiration, as well as military and technical support.India once called Zionism racism, but, as Azad Essa argues, the state of Israel has increasingly become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy. Looking to replicate the 'ethnic state' in the image of Israel in policy and practice, the annexation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel's settler-colonial project of the occupied West Bank. The ideological and political linkages between the two states are alarming; their brands of ethnonationalism deeply intertwined.Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, 2023) puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of Zionism and Hindutva; India's changing position on Palestine; and the countries' growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s. Lucid and persuasive, Essa demonstrates that the India-Israel alliance spells significant consequences for democracy, the rule of law and justice worldwide.Azad Essa is an award-winning journalist and author based between Johannesburg and New York City. He is currently a senior reporter for Middle East Eye covering American foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US. He is the author of The Moslems are Coming and Zuma's Bastard and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and the Guardian.Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, and Cahiers d'Asie centrale. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

An illuminating history of religious and political controversy in nineteenth-century Bengal, where Protestant missionary activity spurred a Christian conversion “panic” that indelibly shaped the trajectory of Hindu and Muslim politics.In 1813, the British Crown adopted a policy officially permitting Protestant missionaries to evangelize among the empire’s Indian subjects. The ramifications proved enormous and long-lasting. While the number of conversions was small—Christian converts never represented more than 1.5 percent of India’s population during the nineteenth century—Bengal’s majority faith communities responded in ways that sharply politicized religious identity, leading to the permanent ejection of religious minorities from Indian ideals of nationhood.Mou Banerjee details what happened as Hindus and Muslims grew increasingly suspicious of converts, missionaries, and evangelically minded British authorities. Fearing that converts would subvert resistance to British imperialism, Hindu and Muslim critics used their influence to define the new Christians as a threatening “other” outside the bounds of authentic Indian selfhood. The meaning of conversion was passionately debated in the burgeoning sphere of print media, and individual converts were accused of betrayal and ostracized by their neighbors. Yet, Banerjee argues, the effects of the panic extended far beyond the lives of those who suffered directly. As Christian converts were erased from the Indian political community, that community itself was reconfigured as one consecrated in faith. While India’s emerging nationalist narratives would have been impossible in the absence of secular Enlightenment thought, the evolution of cohesive communal identity was also deeply entwined with suspicion toward religious minorities.Recovering the perspectives of Indian Christian converts as well as their detractors, The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India (Harvard UP, 2025) is an eloquent account of religious marginalization that helps to explain the shape of Indian nationalist politics in today’s era of Hindu majoritarianism.Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies