New Books in South Asian Studies
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New Books in South Asian Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000...
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Rituparna Patgiri and Gurpinder Singh Lalli eds., "Food, Culture and Society in India: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives" (Berghahn Books, 2025)
Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection Food, Culture and Society in India: Social,...
Charlotte Macdonald, "Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire" (Bridget Williams Books, 2025)
The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire . . . In fewe...
Maria Bach, "Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Originating in the Nineteenth Century, the European idea of development was shaped around the premise that the West possessed progressive characterist...
Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his gli...
Nayanjot Lahiri, "Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels t...
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to...
Ithamar Theodor, "The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two cen...
Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests" (Melbourne UP, 2024)
In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationsh...
Luke Gibson, "Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition" (Columbia UP, 2025)
This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and liter...
David Boyk, "Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of...
Steven W. Ramey, "Hinduism in Five Minutes" (Equinox, 2022)
Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narra...
Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist...
Sonia Faleiro, "The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern Asia" (Columbia UP, 2025)
When the robe becomes a weapon, who can stop the violence?
We think of Buddhism as a faith of peace—rooted in compassion, patience, and n...
Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler eds., "Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (SUNY Press, 2025) explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contem...
Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’...
Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019)
In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how r...
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around...
Harini Nagendra, "Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery" (Pegasus Crime, 2025)
Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home...
William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrarian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban exper...
Anand, "The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire" (India Viking, 2025)
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 publi...
Kalathmika Natarajan, "Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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...
C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between...
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciti...
Deana Heath, "Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodie...
Wendy Doniger, "The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales From The Mahabharata" (Speaking Tiger, 2024)
How did Brahma create alluring women, and for what purpose? Why did the righteous King Bhangashvana choose womanhood? How did the sage Markandeya's...
Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India
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...
Mukul Sharma, "Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a specia...
Ashis Roy, "Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-muslim Relationships" (Yoda Press, 2024)
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 happen...
Karen Pechilis ed., "A Cultural History of Hinduism: Volumes 1-6" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
In this episode, Raj Balkaran speaks with Karen Pechilis, Jarrod Whitaker, and Valerie Stoker about A Cultural History of Hinduism (Bloomsbury, 2024),...
Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India
Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces.
In...
John Mathias, "Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala" (U California Press, 2024)
How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John...
Clara A. B. Joseph, "India's Non-violent Freedom Struggle: The Thomas Christians (1599-1799)" (Routledge, 2023)
India's Nonviolent Freedom Struggle focuses on the Thomas Christians, a group of Christians in South India who waged a nonviolent struggle against Eur...
Subah Dayal, "Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India" (U California Press, 2024)
Dr. Subah Dayal recently joined the New Books Network to discuss her new work Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Cir...
Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state tol...
Gen Z Uprising: Youth, Protest and Political Change in Nepal
In early September 2025, Nepal witnessed an extraordinary week of upheaval that many now refer to as the ‘five-day revolution’. Within the span of a s...
Kenneth R. Valpey, "Yoga and Animal Ethics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
This open access book, Yoga and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) offers a comprehensive understanding of yoga theory and practice as it bears...
Debaditya Bhattacharya, "The Indian University: A Critical History" (Orient BlackSwan, 2025)
Is there such a thing as an ‘Indian university’? Is there an ‘idea’ of an Indian university? Were universities in India living and breathing products...
Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian hi...
Ruth Perini, "Varaha Upanishad: The Path to Supreme Knowledge" (2025)
This conversation examines the newly published translation of the Varāha Upaniṣad, a lesser-known but deeply transformative scripture from the Kṛṣṇ...
Matthew Bowser, "Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma" (Manchester UP, 2025)
In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Matth...