New Books In South Asian Studies

  • Author: Vários
  • Narrator: Vários
  • Publisher: Podcast
  • Duration: 1189:01:08
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Synopsis

Interviews with Scholars of South Asia about their New Books

Episodes

  • Prerna Singh, “How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

    07/09/2016 Duration: 27min

    Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute. How do sub-units of government meet the everyday needs of their residents? Do they vary in how well they provide basic health and education services? Singhs book makes a novel argument about these questions with extensive original data collection. How Solidarity Works suggests that sub-national units, states and provinces, can develop solidarity between residents. When this solidarity is high it is associated with developing strong regimes of social welfare programs. Conversely, when sub-national solidarity is low, there is little basis around which to provide for those in greatest need. This intricately argued book marshals an enormous amount of original information about several states in India. The empirical fi

  • Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015)

    17/08/2016 Duration: 45min

    What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), explores the was in which the corporate governance of IT is seen as a model for urban development in contemporary India. Through ethnographic research into both a water privatization scheme and the practices of an IT company, Dasgupta reveals the similarities that cross-cut both domains as new and old inequalities are produced. Rich in detail and fascinating in its analytical drive the book opens up new avenues for thinking about citizenship and belonging.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • D. Asher Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” (Oxford UP, 2015)

    11/08/2016 Duration: 55min

    D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping and surveying are no longer the primary means for administering urban space. Rather it is a set of vague and powerful aesthetic norms derived from notions of what it is to be world class that set the contours of Delhi’s change.Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015)

    02/08/2016 Duration: 01h01min

    Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015), Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processesof mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures. Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class”city. Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Anand Pandian, “Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation” (Duke UP, 2015)

    26/06/2016 Duration: 47min

    Do we live in a real world or a ‘reel world,’ in which life begins to feel like a film? In this wonderful ethnography of the Tamil film industry, Anand Pandian explores topics as grand, rich and timeless as those explored in film itself love, desire, rhythm, wonder as a way of unpacking what it means to be creative. In doing so Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke University Press, 2015) takes its readers from the deserts of the middle east and the mountains of Europe to India’s archaeological sites and less trodden city streets. Striking in its bold writing choices and occasionally laugh out loud funny in its ethnographic honesty the book is a truly original and engaging study that speaks to topics and themes well beyond the Tamil film industry.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Srimati Basu, “The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India” (U of California Press, 2015)

    13/06/2016 Duration: 09min

    Are solutions to marital problems always best solved through legal means? Should alternative dispute resolutions be celebrated? In her latest book The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India (University of California Press, 2015) Srimati Basu answers such questions and many more through explorations of ‘lawyer free’ courts and questions surrounding understandings of domestic violence, analyses of the way rape intersects with marriage and how kinship systems change with legal disputes and by delineating the most important acts that frame marriage law in India. Theoretically and politically astute the book offers an ethnographic insight into legal sites of marriage trouble in India.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Sahana Udupa, “Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

    19/05/2016 Duration: 59min

    What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) answers this question through a fascinating and fine grained ethnography of the city’s bi-lingual news media. Exploring differences amongst the English language and local language press, class-based civic activism, novelties in news room practices and layers of journalistic identities the book shows the ways in which a certain type of aspiration that has come to characterize some news outlets, conflicts and contends with the visibility of local urban cultures and the struggle for dominance amongst different actors in the news field.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Sangay Mishra, “Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans” (U of Minnesota Press, 2016)

    12/04/2016 Duration: 23min

    Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mishra is an assistant professor of political science at Drew University. While the number of South Asian Americans living in the U.S. has been growing rapidly over the last several decades, many still ignore their politics. Instead, the model-minority myth leads many to assume the community is a homogenous and largely economically successful group. Mishra dispels this dominant myth with his nuanced account of how the desi community has been shaped by recent political events, especially September 11th, 2001, and has begun to itself shape politics. His book draws attention to the trans-national dimensions of this community and the ways links to home country continue to link those living in the U.S. to political events elsewhere.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Nayanika Mathur, “Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India” (U of Cambridge Press, 2015)

    08/04/2016 Duration: 44min

    A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a detailed account of paper that reveals the unintended consequences of reforms, the problems with implementing new programs and the inability of state officials to act when faced with crises. Rich, lively, and theoretically compelling Paper Tiger pushes us to rethink how the state operates in India and beyond. Ian M. Cook is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on small cities, rhythms and everyday life in south India. His publications can be accessed at ceu.academia.edu/IanCook. He can be reached at ianmickcook@gmail.com.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Jeff Koehler, “Darjeeling” (Bloomsbury, 2015)

    31/03/2016 Duration: 01h21min

    Darjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and lifelong dedication. The result is a small output of unparalleled quality. The town where Darjeeling tea grows, in West Bengal, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is a setting of immense beauty, complicated history, and environmental fragility. Even transporting this precious tea to Kolkata, where it is traded 400 miles away down on the Indian plains, is subject to the whims of climate: monsoons and narrow mountain roads, often washed out by mudslides. Does a tea warrant such efforts? In Darjeeling (Bloomsbury, 2015), Jeff Koehler explains why the answer is “yes.” There is nothing simple about Darjeeling, this single estate agricultural product. He weaves a web of stories: how this non-native plant came to India, how a tea garden functions, what the role of tea taster is (there’s lots of sp

  • Mitra Sharafi, “Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

    02/03/2016 Duration: 44min

    Parsis, also known as Zoroastrians, were deeply entwined with the colonial legal system of British India and Burma, far beyond what one might expect from their relativity small numbers. Mitra Sharafi, in her wonderful new book Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), explores this anomaly and how – as legislators, lawyers, litigants, judges and lobbyists – they managed to maintain the contours of their distinctive ethno-religious community. With fascinating legal cases, lively personalties and a deep discussion of how identity and litigation interact, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia is a compelling and engaging account of a community with a unique and intriguing relationship with colonial rule.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Tasneem Khalil, “Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia” (Pluto Press, 2016)

    24/02/2016 Duration: 39min

    State executioners in their various guises are explored in all their horrific detail by Tasneem Khalil, in his new book Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia (Pluto, 2016). From the Rapid Action Battalion of Bangladesh to the men in white vans in Sri Lanka, the book interrogates both the brutal specificities of state agents, as well as the underlying themes that cross cut state terror in the region. Strong, brave and relentless Jallad is an important and timely book.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Sara Shneiderman, “Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

    03/02/2016 Duration: 58min

    Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Sara Shneiderman is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a Himalayan community who move between Nepal, India and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. Through a careful and rich analysis of orality, funerary rituals, the practices of gurus and circular migration (to name just a few of the topics covered) the book makes a forceful case for ethnicity as something people do rather than are and explores how such performances of ethnicity speak to questions of citizenship and belonging across national borders.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Anita Weiss, “Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

    26/01/2016 Duration: 01h04min

    Pakistan is often caricatured and stereotyped as a volatile nuclear country on the precipice of disaster. Such depictions are often especially acerbic when comes to the issue of Women’s rights in the country. In her important new book, Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Anita Weiss, Professor of International Studies at the University of Oregon, provides a much-needed corrective to such sensationalist stereotypes. By exploring how multiple state and non-state actors have engaged the question of gender and women’s rights over time and space, Weiss demonstrates ways in which a diversity of voices in Pakistan conduct what she calls “everyday Ijtihad,” thus offering a much more nuanced and informed perspective. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues such as the history of the Pakistani state’s approach towards defining and engaging women’s rights, the role of Progressive NGOs like the Aurat Foundation,

  • Arthur Dudney, “Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History” (Hay House India, 2015)

    18/01/2016 Duration: 01h10min

    Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History (Hay House India, 2015) by Arthur Dudney tells the story of India’s capital and beyond through the lens of Persian literary culture. A lively read written for a mass readership, the book details the lives of poets and emperors along with the origins, rise and decline of Persian in the subcontinent.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Peter van der Veer, “The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India” Princeton University Press, 2013

    07/12/2015 Duration: 59min

    What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the multiple understandings are merely derivative of western assertions about secular modernity. In The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton University Press, 2013), Peter van der Veer, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, explores how Chinese and South Asians interpreted western discourses about religion and spirituality. Through his work he demonstrates that cross-cultural comparison provides us with a complex interactional history, where non-western participants shape their own visions of society, nation, and self, often in dialogue with westerners but not dependent on them. In our conversation we discussed scholarly conceptualizations of Asian traditions, secularism, European imperialism, Mohandas Gandhi, nationalism, moder

  • Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013)

    08/11/2015 Duration: 58min

    Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we now associate with Theravada Buddhism today. Maria Heim‘s new The Forerunner of All Things (Oxford University Press, 2013) is one of the few books to explore Buddhaghosa’s extremely wide corpus of work on a whole. She focuses on the theme of intention (cetana) to explore how Buddhaghosa articulates a moral psychology very different from modern Western conceptions of ethics that focus on individual choices and decisions. The book is an important work for philosophers in moral psychology as well as students of Theravada.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Sanjay Srivastava, “Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon” (Oxford UP, 2015)

    02/10/2015 Duration: 44min

    Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthropology, the book explores the ways spaces and processes are interconnected in the city. From temples that resemble shopping malls, through the gates of luxury apartments and into the electricity supply networks of slums, the book pulls together the threads that entangle city dwellers with one another.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  • Amanda Lucia, “Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace” (University of California Press, 2014)

    26/09/2015 Duration: 56min

    Waiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia, Associate Professor of Religion at UC Riverside, provides a rich ethnographic account of Amma’s American followers and convincingly argues that there is much to learn here about gender, interpretation, and contemporary American religiosity. Amma’s devotees in the United States are usually “inheritors” or “adopters” of Hindu traditions, which shapes their interpretive vantage point and understandings of Amma as Hindu goddesses or feminist. American multiculturalism and romantic orientalist attitudes frequently reifiy cultural differences further structuring the interrelations between South Asian and non-Indian devotees in the American context. In our conversation we discuss female religious leaders, darshan, gurus in American context, p

  • Neha Vora, “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” (Duke UP, 2013)

    22/09/2015 Duration: 53min

    Neha Vora‘s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, in Dubai. Through an analysis of these perpetual outsiders, that are crucial to the Emirati economy, Vora sheds new light on our understanding of citizenship, belonging and Dubai itself. In the finest tradition of anthropology, the book is simultaneously minutely detailed in its descriptions and global in its analytical reach, opening up new ways of thinking about migrants in the contemporary world.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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