New Books in South Asian Studies

Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture (Duke University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies through the analytic of beauty.Through her analysis of Asian American literary fiction and performance artwork and installations, Reddy lingers on moments, objects and subjective positions that reveal the potentiality of beauty. Not just a site for neoliberal complicity, beauty, in its presence as well as absence, also emerges as something subversive. The re-articulation of the bindi and the saree, objects that are otherwise imbued with upper-caste, Hindu hetero-reproductive symbolisms, in the works of performance artists, offer queer queer subversion of power structures. Beauty also becomes the site of not just physical but also social (im)mobility as Reddy presents the complicated ways in which beauty relates to aspiration.Central to her project is upending the male-centric understanding of the relationship between the diaspora and the “nation”. Focussing not only on female narratives of movement and mobility but also interrogating the vulnerability and queer-ness of male subject positions, Reddy provides a nuanced interrogation of how “frivolous” beauty becomes the site of transformative transnational journeys. In the first three chapters, she looks at the literary fiction that either centrally or marginally deploys beauty as the site of narrating stories about the diaspora. Chapter 4 and 5 look at feminist performances and cyber representations of objects like the bindi and saree that deliberately challenge the essentialization of these objects and destabilizes them not just to narrate stories of movement but emphasize potential for mobilization through seemingly non-serious, beautiful artifacts.Vanita Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University.                     Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pritipuspa Mishra explores how the idea of the vernacular has a double effect, serving as a means for exclusion and inclusion. She argues that while regional linguistic nationalism enabled nationalism’s growth, it also enabled the exclusion of groups such as the adivasis, who become invisible as a minority in Odisha. Her book traces the role of the vernacular from colonial decisions about governance and education up through the creation of a linguistic homeland in Odisha. Along the way she looks at the construction of literary categories, the idea of the political subject, and the range of views about multilingualism in nationalist discourse. It concludes with a reflective postscript on the continuing impact of linguistic nationalism on adivasi communities in India.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Lakshmi Subramanian’s The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an amphibious history written around the juncture of the nineteenth century, when the northwestern littoral of India—largely comprising of Gujarat, Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind—was battered by piratical raids.These attacks disrupted coastal trade in the western Indian Ocean and embarrassed the English East India Company by defying the very boundaries of law and sovereignty that the Company was trying to impose. Who were these pirates whom the Company described as small-time crooks habituated to a life of raiding and thieving? How did they perceive themselves? What did they mean when they insisted that theft was their livelihood and that it enjoyed the sanction of God?Exploring the phenomenon and politics of predation in the region, Lakshmi Subramanian teases out a material history of piracy—locating its antecedents, its social context, and its ramifications—during a crucial period of political turbulence marked by the global expansion of commercial exchanges headed by the Company.She investigates the fissures within the colonial project of law and anti-piracy regulations and, through the lens of maritime politics, unravels the skeins of a distinct mode of subaltern protest. By systematically unpacking the category of piracy as it was constituted by the legal discourse of the English East India Company, she revisits the idea of legal pluralism in the Indian Ocean and considers the possibility of looking at piracy as an expression of resistance by littoral society.Lakshmi Subramanian is currently a professor of History at the BITS PILANI Goa Campus at the Humanities and Social Science faculty. Emeritus Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and holds the position of Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Join us as we continue discussion with Dr. Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Layola Marymount University as we dive into his new book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY Press, 2020). The ancient Indian philosophers conceptualized the universe as comprising 5 elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space), corresponding to the five human senses. This philosophy is encoded in Indian religion at every turn. This book draws from Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions to explore the extent to which elemental meditations in the Indian context transcend these "religious" boundaries as we understand them. It is also a fascinating look into the lived practice of ideating upon the elements.Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and director of Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography.The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including migrations of traders, indentured laborers, civil servants, sailors, and slaves throughout the entire basin. The Indian Ocean in World History also discusses issues of trade and production that show the long history of exchange throughout the Indian Ocean world; politics and empire-building by both regional and European powers; and the role of religion and religious conversion, focusing mainly on Islam, but also mentioning Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Using a broad geographic perspective, the book includes references to connections between the Indian Ocean world and the Americas. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Alpers looks at issues including the new configuration of colonial territorial boundaries after World War I, and the search for oil reserves.Edward Alpers is a professor of history at UCLA.Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2019), Johannes Bronkhorst, emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne, makes the case through an extensive introduction and select translations of important Indian texts that language has a crucial role in Indian thought.Not only does it form the subject of inquiry for grammarians, philosophers, and aestheticians, but it forms the background for the religious and cultural world which informs these investigations. Writing in, and deeply invested in, the Sanskrit language, brahminical thinkers considered the status of phonemes, words, sentences, and larger textual units, as well as the relationship between language and reality.Their interlocutors, Jains and Buddhists, wrote in Pāli as well as Sanskrit, addressing many of the same topics. A Śabda Reader includes excerpts of texts from all three groups, in new translations, which shows the interplay among these thinkers.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). 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’s love got to do with it? Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by feminist political geographer Sara Smith tell us - everything! Smith’s book centers intimacy in the consideration of geopolitics which is otherwise only seen as a game between nation states. The accounts of realized and failed inter-faith love across generations of Ladakhi Buddhists and Ladakhi Muslims in Smith’s book become the ground for the contesting of demographic fantasies, territorial futures and generation vertigo. Written with a careful consideration of the complexities of territorial politics in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and their intersections, Smith’s book also provides insights into the vulnerabilities of a minority identity--Shia Muslims and Buddhists, as well as its entanglements with the scalar politics of majoritarianism. By ‘populating territory’, Intimate Geopolitics is able to make clear the interweaving of reprosexuality, aspirations and intimacy as a territorial site in what is otherwise seen as a ‘remote’ region but crucial to the logic of the nation-state and its sovereign future.Sara Smith is associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (Oxford University Press) explores the worship world of Mount Govardhan: located in the Braj region of India, the mountain is considered an embodied form of the Hindu deity Krishna.Above and beyond providing insight into the fascinating religious practices surrounding worship of Mount Govardhan, Haberman probes the paradox of an infinite god embodied in finite form, In doing so, he offers critical consideration of the pejorative concept of idolatry in the study of religions, in particular its problematic use to when applied to Hindu religiosity.David L. Haberman is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University.For information about your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see https://www.rajbalkaran.com/scholarship Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In this interview, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Christopher Key Chapple of Loyola Marymount University about his outlook, teaching philosophy, and new developments in the field – his Master of Arts in Yoga Studies in particular. Stay tuned for Part II where we will focus on Chris’ scholarship, in particular his new book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas.Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and director of Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town (Routledge, 2020) is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.Today I talked with the author, Jonathan Parry, emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (in collaboration with Ajay TG) and John Harriss, emeritus professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University.Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies