New Books in South Asian Studies

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries new kingdoms emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Sovereignty in these new kingdoms was expressed in terms we understand today as coming from ‘Theravada Buddhism’. Crucial to this tradition was the Pali language. Anne Blackburn’s new book, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena 1200-1550, examines the ‘intensification of connections’ between these polities in the region she calls, the ‘Bay of Bengal-Plus’: that is, the Bay of Bengal, the Coromandel Coast of India, Sri Lanka, the maritime and riverine areas of Burma, and the Mon and Tai territories of mainland Southeast Asia. The book highlights the importance of Pali textuality for the emerging Buddhist kingdoms of Dambadeniya, Sukhothai, Haripunjaya (present-day Lamphun in northern Thailand), Chiang Mai, Ayutthaya, and Hamsavati in lower Burma – Bago today. This was the heartland of what Blackburn calls, the ‘Pali arena’. This book is an important contribution to the emerging scholarship on the intellectual history of the early Theravada Buddhist kingdoms in South and Southeast Asia in the second millennium CE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Suruchi Mazumdar’s book addresses the complex relationship between India’s evolving, emerging media landscape, the political and economic interests of diverse media actors, and movements opposing contentious issues such as market-based economic reforms and religious nationalism. In the mid-2000s, Singur and Nandigram, nondescript semi-urban and rural areas in the east Indian state of West Bengal, suddenly became the center of national and international media attention and debates on state-led neoliberal agenda. The point of controversy were local agitations provoked by the then state government’s plans to acquire agricultural land for large scale corporate industrial projects. The movements by farmers to protect their agricultural land were described variously as challenges to neoliberal initiatives and widespread social tension that put a temporary brake to state-led market reforms. In traditional liberal narratives, the triumph of economic reforms was expected to replace value-based ideology with global economic principles, perceived as objective and neutral.  But the forces of neoliberalism became strongly entrenched in India alongside religious nationalism. Such political economic developments paralleled with the simultaneous expansion of India’s digital and traditional media sectors, consolidation of market forces, the co-option of both old and new media by powerful actors, and opportunities of mediated democratization and activism. While narratives of economic liberalization and global trends of commercialized journalism have been amply documented, this book addresses the tension between mainstream media’s political and commercial logic, movements and citizen-led activisms questioning dominant development and religious nationalist agenda, and the possibilities of political diversity and democratic participation in the Indian city of Kolkata. By focusing on the hybridities, commonalities, differences, and complexities in Kolkata’s mainstream news media and emerging digital space, this book captures the regional and linguistic variations in the studies of media, movements, and politics in India. Dr Suruchi Mazumdar is an Associate Professor at Jindal School of Journalism and Communication, O.P. Jindal Global University in India. Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Invisible Fire by Joanna Jurewicz explores early Hindu philosophy through the Manusmṛti, Bhagavadgītā, and Mokṣadharma, showing that reality is a single cognitive field manifesting through subject-object perception. Drawing from Vedic roots and cognitive linguistics, Jurewicz argues that creation, bondage, and liberation are all epistemic processes. Misrecognition leads to suffering; liberation arises through refined cognition and self-recognition. The “invisible fire” symbolizes transformative awareness latent in ritual, memory, and selfhood. Integrating modern theories of metaphor, play, and responsibility, the book reveals early Smṛti as a sophisticated philosophy of consciousness rooted in tradition and aimed at ontological and ethical integration. Fire and cognition in the RgvedaFire, Death and Philosophy. A History of Ancient Indian ThinkingInvisible Fire. Memory, Tradition and the Self in Early Hindu 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 The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904-2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu-Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism. Barua argues that the characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations were modulated by a shifting array of socio-economic and socio-political parameters. It is within these contexts that Rabindranath, Nazrul, and Annada Shankar are developing their thoughts on Hindus and Muslims through the prisms of religious humanism and universalism. 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 the book Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2025), author Jessica Ratcliff traces the changing practices of knowledge accumulation and management at the British East India Company, focusing on the Company’s library, museum, and colleges in Britain. Although these institutions were in Britain, they were funded by taxes from British India and they housed, so it was argued, the “national” collections of British India. The book examines how these institutions emerged from the Company’s unique form of monopoly-based colonial capitalism. It then argues that this “Company science” would go on to shape and eventually become absorbed into Britain’s public (i.e. state-funded) science in the later nineteenth century. Soumyadeep Guha is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production between colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, political Islamism, Sufism, gender, as well as a rich array of material culture (such as sacred spaces and art), the book maps the development of Islam in Asia, such as in Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. It considers both transnational and transregional ebbs and flows that have defined the expansion and institutionalization of Islam in Asia, while attending to factors such as ethnicity, linguistic identity and even food cultures as important realities that have informed the translation of Islam into new regions. It is the “convergence and conversation” between the “local” and “foreign” or better yet between the theoretical notions of “centre” and “periphery” of Islam and Muslim societies that are dismantled in the book, defying any notions of Asian expressions of Islam as a “derivative reality.” The book is accessibly written and will be extremely useful in any undergraduate or graduate courses on Islam, Islam in Asia, or political Islam. The book will also be of interest to those who work on Islamic Studies and Asia Studies.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca . You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This monograph outlines the core principles of equity and trusts in Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra) and traces their application in the practical legal administration of religious and charitable endowments throughout Indian history. Dharmaśāstra describes phenomena that, in Anglo-American jurisprudence, are associated with courts of equity: the management of religious and charitable trusts; and the guardianship of those who lack legal capacity. Drawing on Sanskrit jurisprudential and philosophical texts, ancient inscriptions, Persian legal documents, colonial-era law reports, and contemporary case law, Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence demonstrates that India's rulers have drawn on rich and venerable Sanskrit jurisprudential principles of equity and trusts in their efforts to regulate religious and charitable endowments. This book presents the history of India as a history of trusts, revealing how the contemporary law of Hindu religious endowments is subtended by a rich mélange of Sanskritic, Persianate, British, and constitutional jurisprudential principles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Audrey Truschke, a Professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University and bestselling author, discusses the rich tapestry of India's history over 5,000 years. She illuminates the diverse cultural, political, and religious landscape, touching on everything from Hinduism and Buddhism to the rise of Hindu nationalism. Key topics include ancient migrations, the impact of the Mughal Empire, and the consequences of the 1947 Partition. Truschke's engaging narrative offers a nuanced perspective, highlighting marginalized voices and the complexities of historical narratives.

Global Asias: Tactics & Theories is the inaugural volume in an exciting new series that explores critical concerns animating Global Asias scholarship. It challenges the silos of academic knowledge formation that currently make legible and organize the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Transits, Indigeneity, Epistemology, Language, and A/Geography: These keywords highlight potential overlaps and points of disagreement between area studies, ethnic studies, and diaspora studies. Through an inventive approach and structure, the book exemplifies how the collaborative ethos of Global Asias praxis can catalyze new methods of scholarship and pedagogy—and create innovative models of academic knowledge-production. The editors offer a substantive overview of the emergent multidisciplinary field of Global Asias followed by a set of collaboratively authored research forums and pedagogical materials by a varied group of scholars working across ranks, disciplines, fields, geographies, and languages. Global Asias: Tactics & Theories will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in learning more about this emerging field. It is crafted to provide resources for a wide range of readers: researchers, teachers, students, and administrators. The diversity and originality of the materials and approaches reflect a broad understanding of scholarly work that resists mastery by building structures of intellectual experimentation that embrace disagreement and differences. Readers will discover provocative conversations that redefine what it means to work in, at, for, and around Global Asias—not as a settled object of knowledge but a dynamic praxis of engagement. The volume is edited by Tina Chen and Charlotte Eubanks, with contributions by Omer Aijazi, Jenny Chio, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Neelima Jeychandran, Youngoh Jung, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Fiona Lee, Jerry Won Lee, Andrew Way Leong, Diego Javier Luis, Naveen Minai, Alexander Murphy, Carla Nappi, Kyle Shernuk, Erin Suzuki, Desirée Valadares, Jini Kim Watson, and Shaolu Yu.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Daanika Kamal explores why the subjectivities of women victims are constructed in particular ways, and how these subjectivities are captured and negotiated in the Pakistani legal system.Drawing on feminist poststructuralist accounts relating to the use of gendering strategies in institutional and disciplinary settings and based on an analysis of over a hundred case files and judgements, seventy-two interviews, and court observations in three cities of Pakistan, this book shadows the experiences of women victims of domestic violence in both criminal law and family law proceedings. It captures and offers empirical insights in relation to gendered subject formation in discursive spaces; ranging from the use of societal narratives that minimise and silence women's harms, to the deployment of police mechanisms that assist in maintaining the 'secrecy' of familial violence, and the application and enactment of boilerplate lawyerly strategies to present alternative legal 'truths.'Amidst regulations of the public versus the private and understandings of rights versus duties, Domestic Violence in Pakistan explores how these practices construct the victim-subject of domestic violence in a way that not only subjectivise her, but also secure her within the field of that subjectification; setting her up to be viewed by the judiciary through the lens of the allegations applied to her. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies