New Books in South Asian Studies

Speaking with Professor Shalva Weil, one receives a glimpse into the wider world. Through her family ties, her personal journeys, and her research, she has gained, and shares, an understanding of the unique nature and histories of different groups. In this interview she shared the significance of a Jewish community that lasted less than 200 years but made an incredible impact whose reverberations can be felt to this day. Jewish life has existed on the Indian Peninsula for over 2,000 years by most accounts. Prof Weil is a leading scholar in the Bene Israel community of Baghdad, the Jewish communities of Cochin, as well as this more recent community of Baghdadi Jews in India. The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity (Routledge, 2021) is an anthology of scholars reviewed by Prof Weil to allow us a glimpse into the unique nature and interactions of Baghdadi Jews in India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought as the nascent stage of Savarkarite Hindutva, and highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu Nationalism’. Showing that, by 1915, Lajpat Rai moved towards ‘Indian’ nationalist narratives, it challenges the assumption that all ideas of Hindu nationhood necessarily culminate in Hindutva. An examination of Lajpat Rai’s final nationalist narrative as a Hindu Mahasabha leader in the 1920s confirms the revisionist historiographical rejection of the oppositional binary that was long drawn between Hindu communal politics, on one hand, and secular Indian nationalism and secularism, on the other. Lajpat Rai organized a Hindu politics in service of a secular Indian nation-state. Nevertheless, the book pushes back against revisionist assumptions that Hindu communal politics and secularism can be championed together comfortably, and that the articulation of a Hindu politics alongside a vision for secularism reduces that secularism to little more than Hindu majoritarianism. Being Hindu, Being Indian argues for the need to take the analytical tension and contrast between ‘Hindu politics’ and ‘secularism’ seriously. Methodologically, the book constitutes an argument to resist reductionism and respect the nuances, complexities, fluidity, and internal tensions in an individual thinker’s thought.Dr. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia, with interests in nationalism, secularism, and religious and political thought more broadly. After receiving a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the “Multiple Secularities” Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and at ICAS: M.P. in New Delhi, India. She is now an incoming Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, India.Anamitra Ghosh is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of History, South Asia Institute, Universität Heidelberg, Germany. He can be reached at anamitra.ghosh@sai.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Michael C. Baltutis' book What is Hinduism?: A Student's Introduction (Routledge, 2024) is an engaging introduction to the complex religious tradition of Hinduism. Central to its focus is demonstrating the fundamental diversity within Hinduism through the multiplicity of its core beliefs and traditions. Chapters are divided into four historical categories – Vedic, Ascetic, Classical, and Contemporary Hinduism – with each examining one deity alongside one key term, serving as a twin focal point for a more complex discussion of related key texts, ideas, social structures, religious practices, festivals, and concepts such as ritual and sacrifice, music and devotion, and engagement and renunciation. ith study questions, glossaries, and lists of key contemporary figures, this book is an essential and comprehensive resource for students encountering the multiplicity of Hinduism for the first time. 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 episode, we are joined by the anthropologist Tone Bleie for a discussion of her book A New Testament: Scandinavian Missionaries and Santal Chiefs from Company and British Crown Rule to Independence (Solum Bokvennen, 2023), a pioneering piece of scholarship that innovatively rethinks the economic, legal, and social history of the power-laden relationship between a Scandinavian Transatlantic mission and the Santals, Boro and Bengalis of Eastern India, Northern Bangladesh, and Eastern Nepal. Based on decades of research, the book offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of historical encounters across the longue durée, transporting readers back to the medieval period and Danish and British Company Rule, through to the British Raj and the early post-Independence period.Tone Bleie is Professor of Public Planning and Cultural Understanding at the University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Today I talked to Hari Dutt Sharma about Gulmini: An Anthology of Sanskrit Lyrics and Gazals (Rākā Prakāśana, 2023). The book presents 51 lyrical poems in rythmic and melodious Sanskrit in free metre, The poems examine various sentiments and emotions (rasa and bhāva) on various subjects, from depictions of beautiful seasonal nature to reflections on international travels and the transmission of Sanskrit poetry, and on the experience of poetic creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers a new history of the partition. Based on previously unexamined archives and rare films, it investigates key questions around film production, partition and the provenance of the nation in South Asia: How did partition transform the dynamic and transcultural film industry of undivided India? What has been the relationship between Pakistani and Indian Cinema? Could the cinematic rendition of Pakistan have preceded its territorial realisation? Focussing on the unravelling of artistic and economic ties between two formerly intimate film cities of colonial India, Bombay and Lahore, this book follows their transition into the nationally discrete production centres of independent India and Pakistan. Pursuing inflections, migrations and shifts across national lines, Evacuee Cinema explains how filmmaking interpreted national danger and examines the expulsion and rehabilitation that went into the making of ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’ cinema.Dr Salma Siddique is research faculty at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, specializing in South Asian popular cinema, Islamicate screen cultures and immigrant media. Her research has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Third Text, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is a core editor at BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, published by Sage.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of social media and internet studies, platforms and film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at 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

Bhakti Ethics, Emotions, and Love in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Metaethics (Lexington Books, 2024) explores the broader implications of understanding bhakti, “devotional love to the divine,” as an ethical theory based on a “realist” account of emotions, where emotions are sensory perceptions of the real ethical qualities of classes of actions. The work discusses how emotions are understood metaphysically as extra-mental, objectively real qualities, what Cogen Bohanec refers to as “affective realism.” This follows from a cosmogenic model where the universe emanates from the loving relationship between the divine feminine, Rādhā, and her intense loving relationship with her masculine counterpart, Kṛṣṇa. Since the origin of all of reality emanates from the ultimacy of an affective relationship, then the fabric of reality can be described as having objectively real affective qualities and that is the basis for grounding this ethical system. 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 episode Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Ruth Westoby a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga. We discuss Ruth’s work on the body in early hatha yoga texts. We talk about the broad diversity of approaches to the material body in these sources, including their ideas about gender, the cultivation of powers, and approaches to liberation. Along the way, we touch on yogic sex, practices to stop menstruating, and the courageous work that modern practitioners have been doing to expose abuse by yoga gurus.If you want to hear more from experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality then subscribe to Blue Beryl and don’t miss an episode!Resources mentioned in the episode: Preliminary published results from Ruth’s research Mallinson and Szántó, The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla (2021). Jason Birch, The Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Gorakṣanātha(2023). Elena Valussi, “The Physiology of Transcendence for Women” (2009) BBP episode with Dominic Steavu Hatha Yoga Project Articles on guru abuse by Pattabhi Jois: Anneke Lucas, Karen Rain, Amanda Lucia Inform Project Video footage of Ruth doing historical āsanas Ruth’s website and email newsletter, Facebook page, Instagram Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.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

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge UP, 2024) develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, it shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters' future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence. By centering political parties as key actors in the production of conflict, and bringing together evidence from both Africa and South Asia, Playing with Fire contributes new insights to the study of political violence.Yash is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.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

Today’s globalized society faces some of humanity’s most unprecedented social and environmental challenges. Presenting new and insightful approaches to a range of these challenges, Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington, 2019) draws upon individual cases of exemplary leadership from the world’s Dharma traditions—Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Taking on difficult contemporary issues such as climate change, racial and gender inequality, industrial agriculture and animal rights, fair access to healthcare and education, and other such pressing concerns, Beacons of Dharma offers a promising and much needed contribution to our global remedial discussions. Seeking to help solve and alleviate such social and environmental issues, each of the chapters in the volume invites contemplation, inspires action, and offers a freshly invigorating source of hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies