New Books in South Asian Studies

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. 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 does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join us as we speak to Kenneth R. Valpey about his new book Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Valpey discusses his methodological odyssey looking at ancient Hindu scriptural accounts of cows, to modern Hindu thinkers (Gandhi, Ambedkar) on cow protection, to ethnographic work on individuals engaged in the modern Indian cow protection movement.This book is Open Access, and you can download a free copy here.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

Dr. Alice Collett’s monograph Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford University Press, 2016) delves into the lives of six of the best-known nuns from the period of early Buddhism: Dhammadinnā, Khemā, Kisāgotamī, Paṭācārā, Bhaddā Kuṇḍalakesā, and Uppalavaṇṇā, all of whom are said to have been direct disciples of the historical Buddha. Collett does the thankless task of sorting through the biographical information scattered throughout the canonical and commenterial literature to present a richly textured account of the these six extraordinary women’s lives. She further analyzes the differences between the various biographical accounts to glean historical information about the position of women and changing gender relations in the early centuries of Buddhism in India. One of the main contributions of her monograph is the finding that women were treated more favorably in the Pāli Canon than is commonly presented. She also gains insight into an impressive number of other themes ranging from notions of beauty and bodily adornment, to family, class, and marriage to name just a few. This book is sure to be of value to a wide audience, especially those interested in women in Buddhism, early Buddhism and early Indian society.Alex Carroll studies Buddhist Studies at the University of South Wales and is primarily interested in Theravāda and early Buddhism. He lives in Oslo, Norway and can be reached via his website here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

You've probably seen the film Gandhi and you likely think that you know all about the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. After all, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 academy award winning film did an incredible job of recreating every detail of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordering his Gurkha and Sikh troops to open fire on a peaceful crowd listening to a nationalist speech. Right? Well, professor Kim Wagner of the University of London Queen Mary wants to undo the mythology that surrounds this event.Critiquing both Indian nationalist narratives and Raj nostalgia, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale University Press, 2019) puts this act of colonial violence in its proper historical context. Based on meticulous archival research and presented in a lively and engaging style, Wagner argues that this massacre was not an aberration from an otherwise just and well-managed British colony. Rather, the massacre was part of a longer history of violence that includes the suppression of the Thugee, the brutal crushing of the 1857 mutiny, and a series of other violent events. Indeed, Wagner sees British violence as central to the imperial project. The book also explores the afterlife of the massacre, including popular British support for the disgraced Dyer and the uses of the event by the Indian nationalist movement. Considering President Trump’s recent pardoning of a Navy SEAL convicted of war crimes, our discussion of Amritsar 1919 resonates with current events.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. 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 is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question of caste inheritance and privilege in the making of merit and meritocracies. Focusing her attention on the premier institutions of engineering education in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Subramanian provides an insightful account of their emergence is post-independence India as a set of distinct and “world class” institutions underwritten by the Indian state. As Subramanian traces the colonial career of technical knowledge as the prehistory of the formation of IITs as well as the global circulation of ‘Brand IIT’, she provides us an account of how the alibis of caste inheritance emerge against graded inequalities. Whether it is through the language of law that only names caste discrimination as the basis of non-achievement while leaving unnamed caste inheritances as the basis of achievement, or through the judicial monikers of ‘general category’ and ‘reserved category’ or better still the ‘middle classness’ of those who claim educational achievement as their only capital, Subramanian’s book unravels the claims to casteless-ness crucial to the discourse on meritocracy in India and in the United States.Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Tune in to listen to the author talk about the dual value of technical education, the relationships between caste and mobility, the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley and the methodological repertoire and dilemmas of (not) talking about caste privilege.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

While typically circulating as a separate text, The Harivamsha forms the final part of the Mahabharata storyline. Beyond this, it is rich storehouse of cosmological, genealogical, theological materials, detailing the biography of Krishna (avatar of the Hindu great god Vishnu), along with much more mythic material. Join us as we speak with Simon Brodbeck about the significance of the Harivamsha, and about his process producing this fine, accessible English translation, Krishna's Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyasa's Mahabharata (Oxford University Press, 2019).For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. 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 his notes for a speech to be delivered in the House of Commons in the wake of American Independence, the MP and imperial reformer Edmund Burke observed that ‘Some people are great Lovers of uniformity - They are not satisfied with a rebellion in the West. They must have one in the East: They are not satisfied with losing one Empire - they must lose another. Lord North will weep that he has not more worlds to lose’. At its eighteenth-century height, the British Empire extended its power over two vast indigenous spaces: one in North America, and the other in India. The question of what this empire was, and how it should be governed was the subject of intense debate in Britain. For decades, historians have maintained that the acquisition of vast territorial domains was unexpected and unplanned – in a ‘fit of absence of mind’.In The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (Yale University Press, 2019), James M. Vaughn offers an powerful challenge to the received view that the Asian domains were acquired by accident and formed part of an empire of liberty. By charting a fundamental shift in British politics during the eighteenth century, he reveals that the imperial project in India was defined by conquest and domination and driven by a new kind of politics.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Sidharthan Maunaguru’s Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press 2019) is an unusual ethnography of the ‘in-betweenness’ and ‘potential’ of marriage in the time of political violence and conflict. Maunaguru sketches for us the journeys and scenes of transnational Sri Lankan Tamil marriage between Sri Lanka, India, the United Kingdom and Canada during the ‘wedding season’ and the lives of those involved in making it happen across time and space. Marriage brokers, relatives and friends, astrologers and priests, wedding photographers and immigration lawyers enact different kinds of possibilities for those seeking to ‘marry for a future’. The fragmented communities from the civil war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil militants strive to recreate the communities, rituals and relatedness which is now dispersed across the globe. Maunaguru takes the readers through the offices of the wedding brokers, the guest houses where weddings are celebrated, the archives of colonial law on marriage, the immigration cases and documents of refusal and redress where this striving occurs – first to be united in marriage and then to be reunited as a couple and family.Listen to Maunaguru talk about living with hope in shadow of conflict, the trouble with the dichotomy between ‘arranged marriage’ and ‘love marriage’ and the authority of the ‘modern wedding album’ in the global immigration regime. This is one of the most significant contributions to the anthropological study of migration, mobility, diaspora and kinship.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

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Sebastian Prange provides a fascinating window into the Muslim world of the medieval (12-16th century) Malabar Coast and the development of Islam that was defined by significant trade networks. Prange conceptualizes this particular development of Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast as Monsoon Islam. Subverting any notions that Islam developed systematically or through organized political efforts, the book uses the history of the pepper trade across the Indian Ocean to map spatial developments, such as of mosques and ports, and the early Muslim trading communities who inhabited these realms. We have before us a global history of Monsoon Islam that utilizes trade networks to capture far more complex cross-cultural exchanges that included kinship, religious, textual, Sufi, and political networks. The latter dynamics led to instances of negotiated establishment of legal and religious codes, as well as familial and economic ties. For instance, the book highlights how legal norms or religious practices became localized and translated to a new context by minority Muslims within a predominately Hindu society, such as in mosque architecture or marriage practices. Prange’s detailed study asks us to think of both global and local processes that led to the formation of a cosmopolitan and transoceanic Monsoon Islam and thus complicates how we study the spread of Islam across diverse regions in South Asia, and the vital role of traders, scholars, and saints. The study’s deep engagement with diverse historical sources, and its beautifully written analysis, makes it an accessible and critical read for scholars interested in the world of Islam in the Indian Ocean and South Asia, as well as Islamic economics, politics, and history broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies