New Books in South Asian Studies

From princes to peasants, musicians to masons, cement plant owners to casual labourers—the State Bank of India (SBI) has been the go-to bank for the people of India. Widely trusted and near-ubiquitous, the SBI has come to symbolise banking across the length and breadth of the Indian nation.This book traces the SBI’s deep connection to India’s economic progress, and the bank’s proactive approach to change and to reinventing itself to meet the evolving needs of a growing nation. In its journey from ‘banking for the classes’ to ‘banking for the masses’, it has continuously striven to blend business goals with social obligations.The SBI of today had its origins in the Presidency banks of the 1800s; the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of Madras and the Bank of Bombay, set up by the British to facilitate trade and the repatriation of remittances to England, were its forebears. In The SBI Story: Two Centuries of Banking (Westland, 2021), Vikrant Pande narrates the compelling circumstances that prompted the founding of the Presidency banks, how they fared back in the day and why they coalesced to emerge as the Imperial Bank in 1921, which in turn was nationalised to form the State Bank of India in 1955.Vikrant Pande spent two decades in the corporate sector, culminating in him being appointed as the provost of India’s first ever vocational education university (TeamLease Skills University) at Vadodara, Gujarat, India. He is now a full-time author and translator, and has published twelve English translations of Marathi bestsellers. His first book, 'In the Footsteps of Rama, Travels with the Ramayana' was released in April 2021.Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at utsavsaksena@protonmail.com. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are personal and do not reflect the official position of the NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of 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

The past few months have been election season in India. Although these are state elections, many view them as a key midterm evaluation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government. What are the takeaway messages from these recently concluded assembly elections?In this episode, we zoom in on the elections in the five Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur, and Punjab. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by a panel of experts on Indian democracy and politics: Arild Ruud, Guro Samuelsen, Edward Moon-Little, Rahul Ranjan and Shreya Sinha, who analyze the results from all five states, the BJP’s impressive performance, and the many localized surprises that these elections threw up. We also reflect on the implications of the outcome for national politics as the next general election scheduled for 2024 inches ever closer.Guro Samuelsen is postdoctoral fellow at MF School of theology, Religion and Society, where she is part of the ‘Mythopolitics in South Asia’ project.Arild Engelsen Ruud is professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo.Edward Moon-Little candidate in social anthropology at Cambridge and a fellow at the Highland Institute.Rahul Ranjan is postdoctoral fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, where he is part of the ‘Riverine Rights’ project.Shreya Sinha is lecturer in international development at University of Reading.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Can subalterns speak? Now an iconic question from a prominent postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak, the question interrogates the in-built assumption about the locatable agency in an individual. Postcolonial studies have grappled with the question of legibility and limitations of archives. In her pathbreaking work, An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia UP, 2019), Poulomi Saha disrupts the binaries of nation/individual and agency/silence by arguing that women’s labor is a political one that articulate their relational aspirations through the tactile. In this contemporary moment with neoliberalism’s co-optation of ethnonationalism and an increasing disciplinary turn towards ethnicity as culture, Saha emphasizes the urgency of postcolonialism to prioritize political project in literary critiques and understand the connections between global capital and intimate, material life of women’s labor.The book is divided into three parts: “Reading the Body Politic,” “The Fetish of Nationalism,” and “International Basket Case.” In the first section, Saha provides a theoretical framework through her reading of Pritilata Waddedar’s body to disrupt the individualistic idea of agency and signify gendered refusal. In the second part, Saha brings Tagore’s understanding of fetish to rethink non-sovereignty as not a loss but rather an enthrallment that allowed women to express their attachment to desh (home). In the third part, Saha problematizes the power of a name by analyzing the production of discourses around birangona (war heroines) and connect the devaluation of clothes to the larger history of development where women’s labor simultaneously turned into an object of empowerment and erasure. Saha’s rich and insightful book will be an important read for scholars who are interested in development, history of labor, and feminist theories.Poulomi Saha is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, An Empire of Touch, was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for Outstanding First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.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

London has always been a galvanizing factor for the South Asian community—whether due to the machinations of empire, the drive for higher education, or the need to make a living. South Asians make up the largest group of foreign-born individuals in London—and South Asian politicians in the U.K. cross the political divide, from Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel to Sadiq Khan.Many of India and Pakistan’s most important historical figures also passed through London: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Bose all lived and worked in London. The head of the British Empire was the location for much of the debate and activism that drove India’s independence movement.Indians have been a part of London’s community for centuries, a point made clear in Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), by Arup K. Chatterjee. Across almost half a millennium, Chatterjee tells the stories of the South Asians that traveled to London: poor and rich, those who stayed and those who went back to change the region’s politics forever.In this interview, Arup and I talk about the four centuries worth of South Asians that traveled to London, what brought them there, and how they changed South Asia when they returned.Arup K. Chatterjee is an Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University. He is the founding chief editor of Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures, which he has run from 2011 to 2018. He has authored The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (Bloomsbury India: 2018), and The Great Indian Railways (Bloomsbury India: 2019), as well as over seventy articles and academic papers in national and international publications.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Indians in London. Follow on Facebook or 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

In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future.In Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality.Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research 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

Today we are joined by Dr. Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey (Temple University Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed how Chopra became an Indian cricket fan, the unique role that cricket plays in immigrant South Asian communities in Australia and the United States, the scholarly legacy of CLR James Beyond a Boundary, and the future of global cricket since the 1980s.In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra mixes autobiography, ethnography, memoir, exile literature, and philosophy to better understand and explain how cricket helped him recognize and reshape his own post-colonial and immigrant identity. In the process, he also shows how cricket speaks to larger global patterns such as the tension between colonialism and post-coloniality in and outside of India, the interplay of the local and the national in the subcontinent, and transcendent and ephemeral qualities of live sporting events for fans of all stripes.Chopra’s compelling work proceeds roughly chronologically recounting the experiences of a young, Indian self-avowed cricket tragic and his relationship with his own sense of identity from the 1970s until the present. In his first chapter, he tells us about his “perverse” attraction to English, Australian, and even Pakistani cricket, and his rejection of the Indian cricket team.Over the next several chapters, Chopra exhumes and examines the moments that helped bring him back to Indian cricket fandom as well as those that helped to moderate his ultimate cricket nationalism. The pathway is winding and defies easy explanation: English biases against Pakistani cricketeers lead him to a more critical view of those same English authors’ attacks on Indian players. He learns to appreciate his own national identity through the local even as his Punjabi background complicates the easy adoption of any Hindu nationalism. India’s victory in the 1983 World Cup helps him reclaim the Indian team but he struggles with the space between the genteel image of cricket he idolizes and its aggressive expression in Indian, Pakistani, Australian, and English players and fans.The latter chapters detail his life after he leaves India – living first in New Jersey, afterward Sydney, Australia, and finally back in New York City. These sections are animated by cricket’s absence and presence. In the US, Chopra despairs cricket’s invisibility and to see it, he goes to great lengths (and sometimes great distances) to watch matches. This brings him face-to-face with many Pakistani cricket fans doing the same thing and he discovers comity and confrontation, if not in equal parts. He also becomes a devotee of the early internet, discovering cricket conversations and participating avidly in them. They reflect a new and more democratic (and even at times particularly South Asian) expression of the game.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Astrology in India: A Sociological Inquiry (Taylor & Francis, 2021) critically examines the larger world of astrology in India, its ubiquity and relationship with religion, caste, gender, class, and aspirations. It looks at astrology through an empirical and phenomenological lens, analyzing different meanings and questions associated with it. How do people see astrology—as magic, science, religion, or a knowledge system? The volume analyses the role of astrology in religious and social ceremonies; the interplay of faith and fear; beliefs, practices, mysticism, and skepticism in middle-class households; and gendered negotiations in everyday life. It also delves into how astrology has emerged as a livelihood and an industry, the continued fascination with it even in an era of technological advancement, and its domination of the vernacular media. Insightful and highly comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, political sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, and urban sociology.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ 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

Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) by Michael Silvestri examines the development of imperial intelligence and policing directed against revolutionaries in the Indian province of Bengal from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. The book advances research on the imperial origins of British intelligence in the interwar period and shows how intelligence practices were diffused throughout the British Empire. Colonial anxieties about the ‘Bengali terrorist’ led to the growth of an extensive intelligence apparatus within Bengal. This intelligence expertise was in turn applied globally both to the policing of Bengali revolutionaries outside India and to other anti-colonial movements which threatened the empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolutionaries, but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and informants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the perspectives of revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolonial activists to subaltern maritime workers. By exploring how the British Empire came to define anti-colonial resistance as ‘terrorism’, this book offers new insights into the historical roots of terrorist movements and the uses of intelligence.Michael Silvestri is a professor of history at Clemson University. He is a historian of the British Empire and a specialist in modern British and Irish history.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

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband's affections.Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna does so to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, Krishna plants the tree for Satyabhama--but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. The poem's narrative unity, which was unprecedented in the literary tradition, prefigures the modern Telugu novel.Theft of a Tree is presented here in the Telugu script alongside the first English translation. Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison 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 first book on alcohol in pre-modern India, James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Religion and History (Oxford UP, 2021) uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore intoxicating drinks and styles of drinking, as well as sophisticated rationales for abstinence found in South Asia from the earliest Sanskrit written records through the second millennium CE.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, 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