New Books in South Asian Studies

Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's most significant yet understudied lingua francas. From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.Alexander Jabbari is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the literature, history, and philology of the Middle East and South Asia. Can be found on Twitter @yakabikaj.Iskandar Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in Iranian linguistics at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on the syntax of the Yaghnobi language. His other research interests include Tajik dialectology, Sino-Persian heritage, Persianate literature, and modern Persian literature in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. He blogs about the shared lexical heritage of the Persianate cultural sphere and beyond on his blog Vājabāz.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, 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 Delhi, former street children guide visiting tourists around the streets that they used to inhabit and show how the NGO they work for tries to resocialise the current street children. What social, cultural and economic structures are in the backdrop of slum tourism in Delhi? Why are emotions and personal stories important to understand in slum tours?In this episode, Dosol Nissi Lee is joined by Dr. Tore Holst to discuss slum tourism and affective economies in Delhi, focusing particularly on the emotional labour of the former street children and the ethical position of tourists.Dr. Tore Holst is a Lecturer at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen and the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. His intellectual works; including his latest article “The Emotional Labor of Former Street Children Working as Tour Guides in Delhi” in 2019, provide insightful discussions of post-humanitarianism, tourism and human migration.Dosol Nissi Lee is a Master's Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a Master's Student at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She researches human security and human mobility by testing out her theoretically vigorous and methodologically innovative ideas on research topics such as refugee sur place, intercountry adoption and floating city.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-... 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 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover from the country’s time as a socialist country. It was an ignoble end to the government body, which in the early days of independence charted the country’s Five-Year Plans for economic development.Nikhil Menon, in his first book Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development from Cambridge University Press (2022), looks at how India’s efforts towards economic planning helped the country find a path between Western and Soviet economic models, supercharged the growth of Indian statistics, and tried to foster a more public democracy.In this interview, Nikhil and I talk about planning and democracy, statistics, and perhaps one of the book’s central figures, Professor Mahalanobis, the father of Indian statistics.Nikhil Menon is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the political and economic history of twentieth-century India. His research explores the histories of democracy and development in independent India.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Planning Democracy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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 Brahma-sutra, attributed to Badaraya (ca. 400 CE), is the canonical book of Vedanta, the philosophical tradition which became the doctrinal backbone of modern Hinduism. As an explanation of the Upanishads, it is principally concerned with the ideas of Brahman, the great ground of Being, and of the highest good. The Philosophy of the Brahma-sutra: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first introduction to concentrate on the text and its ideas, rather than its reception and interpretation in the different schools of Vedanta. Covering the epistemology, ontology, theory of causality and psychology of the Brahma-sutra, and its characteristic theodicy, it also:- Provides a comprehensive account of its doctrine of meditation- Elaborates on its nature and attainment, while carefully considering the wider religious context of Ancient India in which the work is situated- Draws the contours of Brahma-sutra's intellectual biography and reception history.By contextualizing the Brahma-sutra's teachings against the background of its main collocutors, it elucidates how the work gave rise to widely divergent ontologies and notions of practice. For both the undergraduate student and the specialist this is an illuminating and necessary introduction to one of Indian philosophy's most important works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers the first ethnographically grounded perspective on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), which was promulgated as a welfare oriented ‘right to work’ scheme by the Indian Parliament at the recommendation of civil society organizations and development economists like Jean Dréze.The book presents a granular case study of the implementation of the scheme in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and more specifically, the process of “auditing” that addresses many of the information and technological asymmetries that exist on-the-ground. Veeraraghavan also takes us to Araria, Bihar and his initial research forays in the field (where I first met him as one of the volunteer facilitators of a social audit myself) to show the tensions in the production of these audits, and the difficulty in having marginalized citizens’ voices heard in the face of local elite pressure. Given the complexities that animate the delivery of a scheme from abstract law to tangible results like finished roads and money received by those who performed the labor to finish those roads, success itself is never a guarantee.In order mitigate these kinds of uncertainties, he argues that these landscapes are navigated by bureaucrats to produce a socio-technical, infrastructural system reliant on the mechanism of ‘patching,’—instantly familiar to anyone who has done any work in software development. Patching, here, implies an iterative and evolving practice of measuring and responding to outcomes. In the process, Veeraraghavan powerfully and persuasively makes the case for playing closer attention to how information technology and politics mix, in rural India—unsettling the narrative of urban spaces as the primary bearers of and responders to technology, and urging a thorough reexamination of development studies and science and technology studies paradigms.Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Senior scholar John Brockington discusses his scholarship, his role in establishing key conferences, and his work on an online research archive on the spread of the story of Rāma.Professor John Brockington graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1963 and joined the Sanskrit Department at Edinburgh in 1965. In 1968 Professor Brockington completed his D.Phil with a thesis on the language and style of the Rāmāyaṇa. He remained at Edinburgh throughout his teaching career and is now emeritus Professor of Sanskrit in the School of Asian Studies, of which he was the first Head (1998-1999); he was also the first Convenor of the Centre for South Asian Studies (1989-1993). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001.He was the Secretary General of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies from 2000 to 2012 (and is now a Vice President) and he was the chair of the organising committee of the 13th World Sanskrit Conference, held at Edinburgh in July 2006. Professor Brockington has given lectures by invitation at many universities in India and Europe and was awarded the honorary Vidyāvācaspati degree by Silpakorn University, Bankok, in 2015. He was a founder member the Executive Committee of the Dubrovnik International Conferences on the Sanskrit Epics and Puranas.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information 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

Nishant Kumar's Religious Offense and Censorship of Publications: An Enquiry Through the Prism of Indian Laws and the Judiciary (Routledge, 2022) analyzes the role of laws and the judiciary in the process of censorship in India. It examines the rationales and observations produced by the judiciary when demands for censorship are directed against publications that allegedly offend religious sentiments. Focusing on a micro-level analysis of censorship of publications, it presents a hard case to understand the limitations of freedom of expression and the role played by the judiciary in defining its boundaries. The volume traces the evolution of laws governing freedom of expression since the colonial period and the context in which these laws were amended after Independence. It also explicates how the legal process – the structural and functional aspects of working of judiciary – affects the fate of freedom of expression in India. Employing comparative legal analysis, it tries to understand and situate the Indian case within the larger discourse of censorship and freedom of expression around the world, thereby marking its similarities and differences. In unravelling the politics of censorship, the author also examines the interaction among different stakeholders like government, non-state actors and the judiciary.A tract for our times, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, especially constitutional law and fundamental rights, politics, especially political theory and Indian politics, modern India and South Asian studies.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: 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

There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information 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

At the intersection of history, material culture studies, and post-socialist memory studies, Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India (Routledge, 2023) is an oral history of socialist globalisation constructed around the journeys of Cold War era Soviet objects in India and Cuba. During the Cold War, an important means to perpetuate Soviet ideals of modernisation and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world was the circulation of ‘banal’ objects, produced in the Soviet Union and purchased, awarded, and gifted for use in homes across the world. Based on oral accounts of Indian and Cuban interlocutors, this book examines the itineraries of Soviet objects such as cars, washing machines, cameras, books, nesting dolls, porcelain, and many other things. Explored this way, the Cold War is a matter of personal, affective, everyday experience. At the same time, by indicating the cohabitation of things in their home from around the world, interlocutors also go on to undercut simple geopolitical binaries that pit Soviet against American techno-politics. Accounts of Soviet objects in India and Cuba reveal a bricolage of preferences that crisscrossed ideological dualities of East vs West, communist vs capitalist, making for an alternative cosmopolitanism that was in equal measure shaped by personal, local, and national histories and experiences. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. 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 climate change adaptation look like in Bangladesh? And what kind of gendered social landscape does climate change adaptation have to navigate in Bangladesh?Bangladesh is among the countries most at risk from the negative consequences, and often spoken of as ground zero of climate change. In recent years, more attention has been devoted to grappling with the question of how gender intersects with climate change and adaptation.In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Kathinka Fossum Evertsen to discuss these questions and more, as we focus on gender and climate change adaptation in Bangladesh.Kathinka Fossum Evertsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institue for Social Research. Her research interests include questions of migration, gender, and climate change, as well as the politics that shape how these issues are understood and how they intersect.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies