New Books In South Asian Studies

Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Avishek Ray about his co-authored book Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. This book explores how the digital selfie, unlike traditional photography, turns the lens inward while reconfiguring social identities, gender norms, power relations, and everyday interactions. Drawing on rich, situated examples, it shows how selfies operate as acts of self-making and place-making in contemporary India. At once playful and political, intimate and public, selfies offer a fascinating entry point into the fast-changing cultures of digital media and visual expression. Avishek Ray is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar, India. His research spans mobility, marginality, and digital culture, with

How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John Mathias joins host Elena Sobrino to talk about Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala (2024, University of California Press). Uncommon Cause follows environmental justice activists in Kerala, India, as they seek out, avoid, or strive to overcome conflicts between their causes and their community ties. John Mathias finds two contrasting approaches, each offering distinct possibilities for an activist life. One set of activists repudiates community ties and resists normative pressures; for them, environmental justice becomes a way of transcending all local identities and affiliations, even humanity itself. Other activists seek to ground their activism in community belonging, to fight for their own people. Each approach produces its own dilemmas and offers its own insights into ethical tensions we all face between taking a stand and standing wi

India's Nonviolent Freedom Struggle focuses on the Thomas Christians, a group of Christians in South India who waged a nonviolent struggle against European colonization during the politically volatile period of 1599-1799. India's Non-violent Freedom Struggle: The Thomas Christians (1599-1799) (Routledge, 2023) has three related objectives and unique characteristics. First, it offers a comprehensive study of primary sources that scholars have referenced but rarely studied in-depth. Second, it argues that the Thomas Christian narratives provide a unique position to challenge prevalent estimations found in canonical and postcolonial critical discourse on the nation. Third, it considers how an account of a nonviolent struggle by Thomas Christians further complicates received ideas of the postcolonial nation. It sheds light on the often-overlooked contributions of the Thomas Christians in India's nonviolent freedom struggle and challenges readers to reimagine the complex and often contentious relationship between

Dr. Subha Dayal recently joined the New Books Network to discuss her new work Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India (U California Press, 2024). Her book makes a crucial intervention by moving beyond conventional dynastic narratives of the Mughal past to emphasize the role of elite household and family networks in peninsular India. Her approach defines the Mughal Frontier as a mobile entity. The empire was continuously remade and transformed through its interactions with ordinary itinerant subjects, such as scribes, soldiers, and labourers, who served under elite households and participated in imperial institutions like the army or bureaucracy. Dayal employs a bottom-up, granular portrait of this dynamism, returning to the tradition of social history to understand what the empire meant to ordinary people. The central organizational concept of the book is Ghar, defined as a continuum of relations that is neither restricted to sociological kin nor

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of how conditions shape the trajectory of non-state armed groups, this book reshapes our understanding of why such organizations become more moderate over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 single week, youth-led ‘Gen Z’ protests spread across Kathmandu and other major cities, the prime minister and his government resigned, the army intervened, parliament was dissolved, and Nepal’s new (and first female) interim prime minister was sworn in. The events revealed deep frustrations among young Nepalis with corruption, socioeconomic exclusion, and a lack of political accountability. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Jeevan Baniya joins host Hanna Geschewski to explore the deeper forces behind this moment. They discuss the grievances that brought young Nepalis to the streets, why these long-standing frustrations erupted now, and how the ‘Gen Z’ protests should be understood in relation to questions of representation and political change. The conversation also considers the diversity within Nepal’s youth movement and the pathways through whi

This open access book, Yoga and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) offers a comprehensive understanding of yoga theory and practice as it bears on several dimensions of animal-related ethical reflection and action. "Yoga" has become a household word in recent decades and, increasingly, has drawn physical yoga practitioners to explore its philosophy; significantly, classical yoga philosophy and praxis are deeply grounded in realizing the self in relation with all beings as non-material selves. Therefore yoga provides an ideal entry-way into contemporary animal ethics discourse, contributing particularly in its appeal to the experiential dimension of human self-understanding in relation to nonhuman animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 of the soil, or were they conceptual imports from a colonial heritage? What is the relationship between universities in India and the ‘publics’ that have inhabited or are alienated by them? More pointedly, how ‘public’ is the Indian public university? This volume explores the historical makings of the Indian university as it stands today, by sifting through archives, colonial/postcolonial policies, textual-literary records and political-economic developments. What results is a ‘critical history’ – navigating the force of myth and promise, revolutions and reforms, communities and markets. From the glorification of ancient ‘greatness’ to the riskiness of ‘platform futures’, this book offers a time travel through one of the most exalted and yet most abused institutions of our age – the university. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Royal T

Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today. Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, a

This conversation examines the newly published translation of the Varāha Upaniṣad, a lesser-known but deeply transformative scripture from the Kṛṣṇa‑Yajurveda, composed between the 13th and 16th centuries CE and spanning 249 verses.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Matthew Bowser examines British imperialism in late colonial Burma (from roughly 1929 to 1948) to study how imperialists attempted to protect their strategic and economic interests after decolonization: they did so by supporting ethnonationalism. This process resembles the Cold War tactic of “containment,” and the book makes a crucial contribution to the study of modern imperialism by demonstrating the continuity between “containment’s” late- and “neo”-colonial manifestations. For Burma/Myanmar, it also explores the origin of the present-day military junta’s racial regime: it emphasizes the protection of the ethnoreligious majority from ethnic minority insurgency. The Rohingya people are currently suffering a genocide because of this racial regime. As the country endures civil war against the junta, this book highlights how ethnonationalists in the late colonial peri

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people as profound labour struggles. He posits a "social conception of freedom", contrasting it with the liberal individualist view, asserting that for enslaved people, freedom was communal and collective, as no individual could break the structures of slavery alone. The book revives a "forgotten critical Marxist tradition" that consistently upheld the capitalist nature of New World slavery, drawing on three crucial thinkers: C.L.R. James, who argued that the collective labour of enslaved sugar cane workers on Haitian plantations was "closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in the world at the time". W.E.B. Du Bois, who described the overthrow

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors. Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorit

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) by Dr. Laura Murphy is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent “silent revolution” that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Professor Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success. Professor Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder t

In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global

South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on 'the laws' factoring into the administration of justice more than 'the law' as an infinitely generative norm system. This accompanied a discourse about rendering property 'absolute' defined in terms of a certainty of controlling land's rent-and made administrable mainly as a duty of revenue payment--rather than any right of ostensibly physical dominion. Leaving property external to its ontology of 'the laws, ' the Company's regime thus differed significantly from its counterparts in the Anglo-common-law mainstream, where an ostensibly unitary, physical, and disaggregable notion of the property right was becoming a stand in fo

In this episode, Dr. Raj Balkaran speaks with art historian and curator Alisa Lozhkina about her groundbreaking Ukrainian translation of the Devī Māhātmya—the first ever in the language. They explore the inspiration behind this bold project, the text’s unique reception in the Ukrainian cultural and spiritual landscape, and broader reflections on the relevance of goddess traditions in times of crisis. The conversation also ranges into the challenges and freedoms of independent scholarship and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History (Brill, 2022) is an ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The anthology presents a diverse array of essays delving into Gandhi's political activities, ethical beliefs, and philosophical stance. Distinguished Gandhian scholars contribute to this collection, setting it apart from similar compilations by focusing not just on Gandhi's impact or the debate over his relevance, but on maintaining his bold ethical ideals and progressive views in an era of skepticism. The essays delve into Gandhi's comprehensive dissection of political logic, his concept of neighbourly political bonds, his fearlessness and adeptness as a yogi. The work also discusses the worldwide landscape of nonviolence, Gandhi's perspectives on Palestine, his legal work in South Africa, his dialogues with Tagore, the pursuit of his ethical goals, and the portrayal of his persona, as well as the ongoing relevance of his nonviolent resistance methods, as seen in India's anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. These pieces portray Gandhi as a perpetual participant in limitless endeavours, as described by ph

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land. This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city. She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced