New Books In South Asian Studies

Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synthesizing narrative. But how was Hinduism defined by Vivekananda and how was it understood by his American audience? How did it relate to the various South Asian religious practices and beliefs that are subsumed under this term Hinduism? In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Michael J. Altman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, tackles literary and visual accounts of religion in India to understand the production of the category Hinduism in America. He provides an episodic genealogy of the ways in which South Asians were constructed in the American imaginary. Instead of reclassifying the various terminology used by missionaries, columnists, or Transcendentalists as Hinduism Altman care

In her inspiring new book, Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mengia Hong Tschalaer charts the strivings and creative struggles of Muslim women’s organizations in contemporary North India for gender justice. Carefully historicized and brimming with nuanced analysis, this book shows the discursive and political strategies through which overlapping and at times competing women’s organizations navigate a contested and complicated public sphere, as they seek to curate a gender emancipatory understanding of Islam. The major strength of this book is the way it presents a vivid picture of the quest for gender justice on the ground, leavened by such critical processes as the composition of gender-just nikah-namas. This important book will engage the interests of a range of scholars and courses on Islam, gender, South Asia, and Islamic law and society. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marsh

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, addresses this lacuna in Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (Oxford University Press, 2017). Through a detailed analysis and lucid translation of the literary tradition of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (d. 1636), the tradition’s most important poet, Gill challenges and critiques current modes of Sikh scholarship. Bhai Gurdas’ poetry shaped early Sikh theology and practice, providing an emotive lexicon for communal identity. Gill highlights some of the most important of Gurdas’vars in articulating key themes in his writing, including spiritual death, martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine love. These tropes often emerge in the context of relationships with Sikh leadership, such as the martyr Guru

In contemporary South Asia, the question of Muslim origins emerges in school textbooks, political dialogues, or at tourist or pilgrimage cites. The repeated narrative revolves around the foreign Muslim leader, Muhammad bin Qasim, and his conquest of Sind in the year 712. Manan Ahmed Asif, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, provides a critical interrogation of this narrative in A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2017). The crux of this origin narrative stems from the Chachnama, a 13th-century Persian text, which purports to be a translation of an eye-witness account written in Arabic. Asif approaches the Chachnama by initially situating it within the spatial and political context of Medieval Sind. He then places it within the textual universe of the early 13th century, thinking about audience, genre, and themes. Through this process of unreading he concludes that the Chachnama is neither translation nor primarily concerned with conq

Kief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of the British East India Company and his travels on the Indian frontier from 1841 to 1878. Hillsbery reconstructs his ancestor’s life through his own travels to the region in the late 1970s. Believed by his family to be a gentleman gone rogue, gem smuggler, or possibly eaten by a tiger, Hillsbery unravels a fascinating tale of a man who choked under the stifling conditions of Victorian cultural norms and set out to reinvent himself at the court of Nepal during its years of self-imposed isolation. A man with limited horizons for economic and social advancement in Victorian England, Halleck was obliged to seek employment with the Company. Seeking a life of adventure and self-expression on the other side of the world, Halleck instead found a life of shallow colonial routine in Calcutta. Halleck chaffed under

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. Cultivating Community is based on the author’s two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential anti-statist movement in India’s Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and the construction of collective identity in a mass social movement. In it, the author address fundamental questions in making sense of mass movements anywhere: Where do movement ideologies come from and what makes them compelling? What motivates diverse groups of ordinary people to rise together in common cause? How can we make sense of individual p

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema? William Elison, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor at the University of Washington, and Andy Rotman, Professor at Smith College offer a layered analysis of the 1977 blockbuster in Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016). The authors examine the film through each of the narratives three brothers, as well as their mother. All four perspectives offer a new vision of modern India. Through their investigation they explore questions of religion and secularism, Indian nationalism, cinematic genres and Bollywood, politics, urban architectural space, and gender. They also examine the film as a powerful allegory of the nation, where differing religious identities, specifi

Rajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usually and problematically termed trade, between the eastern Mediterranean and coastal India in the classical period. Using insights from economic anthropology to recast the standard narrative of the time, the study explores ports and polity in south India as well as the different types of exchange relations in both the eastern Mediterranean and the subcontinent. A provocative, fascinating and deeply detailed study, the book is sure the shake up existing scholarship on the topic.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speaking Islamic elite around the cultural framework of the central royal court. These projects often revolved around cross-cultural textual production and translation, putting Sanskrit and Persian works in conversation. The production of Mughal-backed texts, and the literary reflection or silence about Brahman and Jain participation reveals unexplored horizons for understanding South Asia imperial history. In our conversation we discussed the dynamics of the Mughal court, the influential leaders Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah

Covering sporting activities from ancient times right up to the modern day, Ronojoy Sen’s Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2016) is at once broad in its scope, yet detailed in its analysis of key events. From football, to the Olympics, to cricket the book explores how sporting life changes in relation to wider societal transformations. I found it both highly readable, and packed full of the type of stories that appeal to sports aficionados.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specifically debates about law’s effects on religion, Schonthal challenges the widely-held idea that constitutional law, properly administered, is a useful tool for reducing conflict between and within religious communities. Drawing on unpublished and previously unexamined archival materials written in Tamil, Sinhalese, and English, Schonthal argues that in the case of Sri Lanka constitutional law has actually hardened pre-existing religious conflicts and encouraged religious actors to use the law and courts to frame a variety of legal fights in explicitly religious terms. The pyrrhic constitutionalism in the subtitl

Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014), edited by Anastasia Piliavsky, explores this question and many more across a range of historical and cultural contexts. The volume’s collective drive to ask difficult and theoretically nuanced questions about the role of patronage in South Asia, gives the book a coherence that plays wonderfully against the contributions’ eclecticism and diversity.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studies that each describe the incorporation of a particular technology into Ayurvedic practice, resulting in a braiding together of strands of sciences and the production of a new body image. Mukharji develops and engages a number of key concepts in the work, significantly introducing a notion of physiograms (materialized physiologies or materialized body metaphors, a development of John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms) and a way of thinking about the braiding of strands of science and medicine. It’s a beautifully written and compellingly argued work that will be of interest to a wide range of readers of

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Singh. Her book examines sub-nationalism in India. Prerna’s book is How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India and was published by Cambridge University Press. Next up is Marc Lynch who came on the podcast to talk about international relations in the Middle East. Here is an excerpt from our interview. Marc’s book is titled The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East and was published by Public Affairs in 2016. In a year with Republicans on the rise in Washington, I enjoyed Bob Lacey’s book of political theory. Bob’s book is Pragmatic Conservatism. Palgrave MacMillan published the book this year. And finally, Deepa Iyer came on the podcast to talk about social movements and South Asian American politics. Deepa’s book, with my favorite co

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations? How are they perceived by their foreign clients? In her new book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), Carol Upadhya tackles these questions and many more. Based on extensive research in Bangalore – the large southern Indian metropolis that has led the IT buzz – the book explores the way capital, work and class are remade within the “new India.” Combining deep, rich and detailed accounts of life within “software factories” with a theoretical eclecticism and clear writing style, the book is a truly wonderful anthropological account of an offshore economy. Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India.Learn more about your a

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation of Dalits (those subordinated populations once called untouchables). In The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (Columbia University Press, 2014) Rupa Viswanath unpacks the creation and application of this so called “problem.”The interview explores the ways in which land, labour and ritual combined in producing the Pariah and the affect Protestant missionaries had in reshaping Pariah-ness, as well as the role of the colonial state and changes in house site ownership among other issues. Amazingly rich in detail and theoretically dynamic throughout, the book is relevant to numerous discussions in present day India and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and medical activities. The interview explores how varmakkalai relates to the wider field of manual therapies and martial traditions in the subcontinent, the theories that inform the practice, the relationship between healing and fighting, as well as the role of secrets. A truly fascinating study that raises questions about topics such as categorisation, concealment and learning that go way beyond the confines of South India, Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to many.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford University Press, 2016) to study how this seminal series of translations had started a novel way of understanding religions through a comparative study of texts and how it led to the shaping of the Western understanding of Eastern faith-traditions. Molendijk critically analyzes this rise of “big science” and also discusses the problems inherent in this approach of “textualisation of religion.” He revisits the limitations of translation and questions the assumptions behind them. He also looks into the person of Max Muller, specifically his scholarly aspect.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization, but also the remarkable ways in which nature survives in one of India’s largest cities. From the ecology of slum life and propensity for home gardens to the differing conceptions of parks and uses of trees, the book brings together the various ways in which nature changes and is changed by the city. As such, Nagendra offers a truly unique retelling of Bengaluru’s story that cuts across academic disciplines, making for an outstandingly innovative yet richly detailed book.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were engaged in a series of such projects in Asia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This already difficult task was made more complex by the need to maintain unity and discipline among individual Jesuits when travel was dangerous and time consuming and letters might take years to reach their destinations. In his masterful book, The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2014), Liam Brockey explores these issues through a study of the life of Andre Palmeiro, who traveled throughout Asia settling disputes over complex questions of belief, practice, and ritual. This informative work is not only a biography, as Brockey skillfully uses the career