New Books in South Asian Studies

Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they were previously thought to have little relevance. This process indelibly shaped idioms and modes of agrarian life, just as it gave rural problems and processes a structural role in urban discourse. By illuminating the intellectual paths by which agrarian and urban processes came to be understood as co-constituting, and exploring multiple vivid, empirically rich case studies of projects where those relations were made evident, this book presents a compelling case to move beyond traditional intellectual silos and enter new theoretical territory to understand processes of urban and rural transformation. 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

Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in. Over the years, as a publisher and editor, Anand immerses himself in the works of Babasaheb Ambedkar and other anticaste thinkers. He gives up his practice of music and poetry, blaming his disenchantment on caste. One day in Delhi, Anand starts looking for Kabir. He finds him here, there, everywhere. He begins to pay attention to the many ways in which Kabir’s words are sung, and translates them. Soon, Kabir starts looking out for Anand. The songs of Kabir sung by a range of singers—Prahlad Tipaniya, Fariduddin Ayaz, Mukhtiyar Ali, Kumar Gandharva, Kaluram Bamaniya, Mahesha Ram and other wayfarers—make Anand return to music and poetry. Anand translates songs seldom found in books. Along the way, he witnesses Kabir drawing on the Buddha, often restating ancient suttas in joyous ways. The Notbook of Kabir is the result of this pursuit with no end in sight. This is the story of how Anand loses himself trying to find Kabir. You can check out the YouTube list of relevant Kabir's songs curated by S. Anand here. For readers interested in the paradoxical, downside-up language in Kabiri and its resonances with Daoist language (e.g. this translation of Daodejing), especially the mysthical atheist aspects, check out appendix B to this book by Brook Ziporyn. Feel free to check out Anand's Navayana Publishing, and his insightful blog posts 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

Over the centuries, millions of migrant labourers sailed from the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, to shape what is now the world’s largest diaspora. Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Hearst, 2025 and Oxford UP, 2026) recovers the histories and legacies of those ‘coolie’ migrants, and presents a new paradigm for the diplomatic history of independent India, going beyond high politics to explore how indenture, emigration and international relations became entangled. Before and after independence, Indian notions of the international realm as a sanctified space were shaped by migrant journeys; this was a space of anxiety in which to negotiate the ‘coolie stain’ on the country’s reputation. Discourse was defined by intersections of caste, class, race and gender—and framed the migrant worker as the quintessential ‘other’ of Indian diplomacy. Drawing on rich, multi-archival analysis spanning the vast geographies of labour migration, Kalathmika Natarajan pieces together the stories of quarantine camps en route to Ceylon; cultural and educational missions in the Caribbean; discretionary passport policies in India; and the mediation of immigrant life in Britain. The result is a nuanced history from the interwar period to the decades after independence, and a critical analysis centring both caste and the negotiation of ‘undesirable’ mobility as foundational to Indian diplomacy. About the Author:  Kalathmika Natarajan is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter. Her interdisciplinary research combines critical approaches to diplomatic history and South Asian migration. She has worked at the University of Edinburgh, and received her doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen. About the Host:  Stuti Roy works at Oxford University Press and is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by politics of cinema, in the site of Hyderabad. It traverses through the makings and remakings of Hyderabad as princely city, linguistic capital city, and global city, studied through capital, labour, and organization of the film industry. It brings together diverse, and rich historical material to narrate the social history of Hyderabad, over a hundred years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with FMGs comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law. This cohort of practitioners has not been extensively studied, rendering the impacts of immigration and foreign policy on the everyday mechanics of US health care obscure. In The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, Dr. Alam foregrounds global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imaginary. Drawing on transcripts of congressional hearings; medical, scientific, and social scientific literature; ethnographies; oral histories; and popular media, Dr. Alam explores the enduring consequences of postcolonial physician migration. Combining theoretical and methodological insights from a range of disciplines, this book analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners. Our guest is: Dr. Eram Alam, who specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, race, migration, and health during the twentieth century. She is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA and BS from Northwestern University and a MA from the University of Chicago. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor, and the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She writes the show’s newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.com Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Where Is Home? Immigration Realities Secret Harvests Who Gets Believed The House on Henry Street Womanist Bioethics Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes, or by donating here. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty.Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How did Brahma create alluring women, and for what purpose? Why did the righteous King Bhangashvana choose womanhood? How did the sage Markandeya's pupil prevent his guru's wife from committing adultery? What role did Indra play in the births of Vishvamitra and Parashu Rama? How were death, diseases, desire and anger created? Why and how did the institution of kingship come about? What can one learn from the mouse who escaped the cat, the owl, the mongoose and the hunter; or the wise jackal who was betrayed by the lion king? Why did Shiva swallow Shukra, the guru of the Asuras? Embedded within the lengthy discourse on dharma in the Shanti and Anushasana Parvans of the Mahabharata are answers to a whole range of such questions-moral lessons from a dying Bhishma to King Yudhishthira, on life, death and everything in between. The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales From The Mahabharata is a highly entertaining selection of these tales-tangled at times, insightful at others, yet always quirky-about women, both good and bad, fathers and sons, kings, gods and kings of gods, and fables. The perceptive translations by Wendy Doniger, hailed as 'the greatest living mythologist', are a treat for anyone fascinated by the bewildering complexity of Hindu myth and lore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How did India’s landmark Forest Rights Act come into being? And what difference has it made to the lives of historically marginalized forest-dwelling communities? These questions are at the heart of Anand Vaidya’s new monograph Future of the forest: Struggles over land and law in India that we discuss in this episode. Future of the forest offers a compelling account of the making, implementation, and partial unravelling of the Forest Rights Act, and traces the complex ways in which collective action and mobilization have shaped the use and impact of this potentially revolutionary legislation. Anand P. Vaidya is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a special correspondent with a leading news outlet in India and received 12 national and international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. additionally he has also been the Director Amnesty International and South Asia of Climate Parliament. His scholarly has focused on environmental politics and discourses in India and explored crucial intersections of ecology, caste, political ideology and the development rhetoric.  Abhilasha Jain is an anthropologist with an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MPhil in Gender Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently working as an independent researcher focusing on climate justice, digital infrastructure and digital rights for children/youth.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes? Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned, having partitioned itself, and the other is a Muslim other in a Hindu majority nation—the author, Ashis Roy, wants to know more about what he calls his “communal mind”, a mind that developed in a country where, “Muslims know the Hindu myths but the reverse is not true,” so a mind that was afforded an instant other to deposit its unwanted contents into. His book, Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships, explicates intimacy and asymmetry, as it delves into cross-religious desire, and in this case the forbidden desire of Hindus for Muslims, and Muslims for Hindus, which, when acknowledged, threatens social, familial, and cultural mores, and also the prerogatives of the state. Who are these people, Roy asks, who take such a step, which is a step that can lead to a kind of social death, akin, in the American context from which I write, to the experience of gay people who come out and are brutally shorn of their families, communities, and sometimes their lives? The power of desire, a power beyond us, in excess of ourselves always, can propel us to this vertiginous place. Perhaps, and only perhaps, it can also push us to live in ways that reject socially and politically enforced liminality as well. One starts to imagine these couples, engaged ongoingly by Roy, as healing a malignant split that beats at the heart of contemporary Indian life. Roy’s thinking draws from the myriad psychoanalytic theories of Kakar, Green, Erikson, Altman, Bollas, and Phillips, (among others), all of them kings of our trade, many of their names never uttered in the same breath—(I am thinking especially of Green and Altman.) Fascinatingly, he also orients himself to his material by engaging the work of two historians (queens of their own domains) and they are the American, Joan Wallach Scott and rather especially (or that is my read) the Italian scholar Luisa Passerini. Like Roy, Passerini delved deeply into her own milieu, and like Roy she performed interviews with her peers who participated in what is commonly called the anni interessante in Italy (known for its red brigades, the murder of Aldo Moro, wildcat strikes in the auto industry alongside acts of student solidarity) all of which happened while she was in Africa. Her book, Autobiography of a Generation (1983), reads as an effort to be in touch with something fundamental about her homeland that she missed. My impression is that Intimacy in Alienation serves a similar purpose for Roy, who realizes that there is a world nearby that remained visually and affectively sidelined. Both wanted to see what had previously been, for various reasons, scotomized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies