New Books in South Asian Studies

Why Would I Be Married Here?: Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell UP, 2022) examines marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India, unable to marry locally, who travel across the breadth of India seeking brides who do not share the same caste, ethnicity, language, or customs as themselves. Combining rich ethnographic evidence with Dalit feminist and political economy frameworks, Reena Kukreja connects the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to analyze the lived reality of this set of migrant brides in cross-region marriages among dominant-peasant caste Hindus and Meo Muslims in rural North India.Why Would I Be Married Here? reveals how predatory capitalism links with patriarchy to dispossess many poor women from India's marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It reveals how, within the context of the increasing spread of capitalist relations, these women's pragmatic cross-region migration for marriage needs to be reframed as an exercise of their agency that simultaneously exposes them to new forms of gender subordination and internal othering of caste discrimination and ethnocentrism in conjugal communities. Why Would I Be Married Here? offers powerful examples of how contemporary forces of neoliberalism reshape the structural oppressions compelling poor women from marginalized communities worldwide into making compromised choices about their bodies, their labor, and their lives. 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 stories in Bombay Hangovers (Vishwakarma Publications, 2021) are laced with the grit, sleaze and dynamism of Bombay. They explore the nerve centre of a great metropolis with caustic wit and uncompromising realism. From the red-light corner of Kamathipura and the race course of Mahalaxmi, from South Bombay where a perfume maker works on exotic fragrances to the throbbing epicentre of Thana and the township of Kalyan, from Bandra to Andheri, the city is brought alive through memorable characters, piquant situations and no holds barred language. With the occasional foray into Goa, the poet Rochelle Potkar makes an impressive debut in short fiction, a genre unfairly neglected by most publishers in India.Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a graduate student in the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Abhishek Avtans talks about the apabhraṃśa, a word that refers to the middle stage of the Indo-Aryan languages, crucial links between ancient languages like Sanskrit, and modern South Asian languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Marathi, Nepali, and others. The first mention of apabhraṃśas is in Mahabhasya, a 2nd century BCE text by Patanjali, where the author refers to languages considered deviations from Sanskrit. However, research into apabhraṃśas, for the same reason, has become crucial in dispelling notions of linguistic purity and politics that is dependent on these notions.Abhishek Avtans is a lecturer of Indic language/s at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He loves to work on literature and linguistics of languages spoken in south Asia. He has contributed in making dictionaries of Great Andamanese, Bhojpuri and Brajbhasha. He writes a column Dialectical for the Himal SouthAsian Magazine. He tweets at @avtansa.Image: © 2021 Saronik Bosu(the stanza of verse in the image comes from the text of Bāhubalī rāsa by 13th Century AD Jain poet Shalibhadra Suri, it is an onomatopoeic stanza that describes the activities done by elephants, soldiers and horses.)Music used in promotional material: “Rajasthani Folk Instrumental Music” by Rupayan Sansthan, Jodhpur, from the collection of Shri Komal Kothari 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 Botanical Ecstasies: Psychoactive Plant Formulas in India and Beyond, Dr Matthew Clark proposes that soma/hoama is instead an ayahuasca-like plant complex made from many different species.He discusses a range of candidates that reliably grow in the right areas and which in combination might produce an effect similar to the so-called 'classic' psychedelics. These early ecstatic experiences, he suggests, contributed to the emergent concept and ritual techniques of mysticism.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. 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

In October 1946, shortly before Independence, Mulk Raj Anand founded Marg, a magazine that soon became a pioneering forum for research on Indian and South Asian art and architecture. Over its 75 years, Marg (in its quarterly magazine as well as books) has promoted a deeper understanding of eras past while examining contemporary art practices. To mark our platinum anniversary, we are delving into Marg's archive of writing on temple art and architecture, to understand the shifts in perspective over the decades. The result is a lavishly illustrated magazine, which could also serve as a guide for educators teaching the Indian Temple over a semester. It presents a cross-section of themes and covers both key sites—Khajuraho, Thanjavur and Konarak—and those less written about—Kashmir, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Kerala. These are unique not only architecturally, but also from the point of view of patronage and the diverse public functions they served. Conceptualized and curated by our General Editor, Dr Naman P. Ahuja, the essays have been contextualised through a contemporary lens.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. 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

The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (NYU Press, 2022) is the first book to look at the impact of the H-4 dependent visa programs on women and men visa holders in Indian families in America. Comparing two distinct groups of Indian immigrant families -families of male high-tech workers and female nurses-Pallavi Banerjee reveals how visa policies that are legally gender and race neutral in fact have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses.Drawing on interviews with fifty-five Indian couples, Banerjee highlights the experiences of high-skilled immigrants as they struggle to cope with visa laws, which forbid their spouses from working paid jobs. She examines how these unfair restrictions destabilize-if not completely dismantle-families, who often break under this marital, financial, and emotional stress.Banerjee shows us, through the eyes of immigrants themselves, how the visa process strips them of their rights, forcing them to depend on their spouses and the government in fundamentally challenging ways. The Opportunity Trap provides a critical look at our visa system, underscoring how it fails immigrant families.Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.Leila Neti is an associate professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles.  Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. 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. Nilanjana Paul of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley speaks about her new monograph, Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854-1947: A Study of Curriculum, Educational Institutions and Communal Politics (Routledge, 2022). The book is a micro history of the spread of education among Muslims in Colonial Bengal. Dr. Paul discusses the role played by Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education and examines how segregation in education, supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. By examining the conflict of interest between Hindu elites and Muslim aristocrats over education and employment, Dr. Paul shows how discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy amplified religious separatism that would eventually culminate in the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.Bekeh Ukelina is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of Gender and Intercultural Studies at State University of New York, Cortland. Twitter: @bekeh/ Instagram @mwalimuwakusafiri/ 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 live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge UP, 2022) looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the 'city'. Properties of Rent is a study of how a vernacular form of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary urban Delhi.Sushmita Pati is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She studied Political Science at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is interested in studying the intersections of Urban Politics and Political Economy. Her recent book, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi is now out from Cambridge University Press.Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on literary rhetoric and economic thought. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies