New Books in South Asian Studies

Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices,Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. 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. Deonnie Moodie is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of Oklahoma. Her book, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the history of the Kalighat temple of Kolkata and how that temple has been a symbol for competing expressions of Bengali middle class modernity.Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Why is the Indian Goddess sometimes figured as a corpse in Tantric Traditions? What is the significance of this? How is it different from when the Hindu god Shiva is figured as a corpse? Centered on the myth of Sati (whereby the Goddess was dismembered after her self-immolation), Anway Mukhopadhyay's new book The Goddess in Hindu-Tantric Traditions: Devī as Corpse (Routledge, 2018) features a fascinating take on why the “death” of the Goddess in this myth is no death at all, especially in contrast to Shiva as corpse.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

Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so?  Sanskrit is the highly sophisticated language of ancient India which remained in vogue for Millennia as a medium of philosophy, ritual, poetry – indeed every facet of Indian culture. Above and beyond Indian culture, it affords deep insight into the grammatical structures of language.  Join us as we talk to Antonia Ruppel (Oxford University) about her Sanskrit textbook, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a much-needed accessible, comprehensive tool for learning this ancient tongue, complete with online handouts, flash cards, and videos. We delve into the unique attributes of the Sanskrit language – for example, 3 numbers, 3 genders, special case endings, sophisticated rules for combinations of sounds (elision) – and the extent to which knowledge of the Hindu ‘language of the gods’ grants us access to millennia of human enterprise that is simultaneously foreign and familiar to our own.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

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present?  Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains and racists to boot? If so University of Exeter Professor of History, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day has the very book that you are looking for, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter Books, 2019). Professor Black, in his usual mandarin style, shows the reader how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today as well, and the selective manner in which certain countries are castigated or not castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, almost total ignorance of history and historical knowledge. All from a past master of the historical art form.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.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

Why are myths of the Indian Great Goddess couched in a conversation between a deposed king and forest-dwelling ascetic? What happens when we examine these myths as a literary whole, frame and all? What interpretive clues might we find in their very narrative design? Join us in the "flip interview" as as your New Books Network Hindu Studies host Raj Balkaran (University of Toronto School of Continuing Studied) is interviewed on his new book The Goddess and The King in Indian Myth: Ring Composition, Royal Power and The Dharmic Double Helix (Routledge, 2018) by guest-interviewer Craig Ginn from the University of Calgary. Learn how the narrative design of Indian Great Goddess myths and the manner in which that design highlights the Goddess' association with royal power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s Islam in Pakistan: A History(Princeton University Press, 2018) is a landmark publication in the fields of Religious Studies, modern Islam, South Asian Islam, and by far the most important and monumental contribution to date in the study of Islam in Pakistan. This book takes the reader on an intellectual roller-coaster, that through mesmerizingly layered archival work, makes visible for the first time in the Euro-American academy the religious thought of a number of previously unknown yet extremely important actors, while thoroughly complicating conventional wisdom about a number of familiar religious and political actors. As has been the hallmark of Zaman’s previous scholarship that traverses early, medieval, and modern Islam, the main strength of Islam in Pakistan also lies in the way it seamlessly moves between the close and unexpected analyses of complex religious texts and the careful historicizing of the significance and ambiguities invested in those texts and in the careers of their authors. In this book Zaman presents a detailed account of the ambiguities surrounding the relationship between multiple claimants to Islam in Pakistan. The chapters in this book examine a range of critical themes including the career and ethical commitments of modernism in Pakistan, ‘ulama’-state relations, shifting views on religious minorities, the complicated place of Sufism’s religious history, and the nuances involved in understanding jihad and militancy in Pakistan. This lucidly written book is a must-read for all students and scholars of Islam; it will also make a great text for advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars on modern Islam, South Asian Islam, and South Asian Religions.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is 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

Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts?  What role does it serve?  Join me as I speak with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British Academy, and distinguished professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University), co-editor of In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation (Routledge, 2019). This volume presents 13 fascinating studies on the role of dialogue in Indian religious tradition, all of which are touched on in the interview. This book is part of a series entitled "Dialogues in South Asian Traditions: Religion, Philosophy, Literature and History."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

To what extent may we say that religion is a theatrical phenomenon, and that theatre is a religious experience? Can making sense of one help us make sense of the other? Join us as we dive into The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre (Routledge, 2018) with its author David V. Mason (editor-in-chief for Ecumenica: Performance and Religion and the South Asia area editor for Asian Theatre Journal) who posits an intriguing parity between theatre and religion.  Drawing heavily from Hindu aesthetic theory and Hindu religious performance, Mason examines the phenomenology of religion in an attempt to better understanding of the phenomenology of theatre, arguing that religion can show us the ways in which theatre is not fake.For information about your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/academia 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. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has worked extensively on Sanskrit kavya, a genre of highly aesthetic poetry and prose. She is the author of The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (Permanent Black and Seagull Books, 2010), and has edited Cultural History of Early South Asia: A Reader (Orient BlackSwan, 2013). The interview is about her second and recent book The Making of Early Kashmir, in which she upturns many prevalent views about the cultural history of Kashmir. As many would know, Kashmir is right now a highly contested territory within India, and as it happens with all such spaces, there is equally a contestation over the reconstruction of the historical memory related to the land. In this book, Shonaleeka Kaul challenges the view that Kashmir had an isolated, insular and unique regional and cultural identity, separate from the identity of mainstream India. She argues that it was in fact the opposite, and her argument is based on, among other things, her highly original reading of the Sanskrit kavya, Rajtarangini, composed by the Kashmiri author Kalhana in the 12th century AD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies