New Books In South Asian Studies

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports? In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. One of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science, until recently Julie was also the editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity. Hyung-Gu Lynn is AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the University of British Columbiaand the longstanding editor of Pacific Affairs. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brou

In The Hagiographer and the Avatar: The Life and Works of Narayan Kasturi (SUNY Press, 2021), Antonio Rigopoulos explores the fundamental role of a hagiographer within a charismatic religious movement: in this case, the postsectarian, cosmopolitan community of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. The guru's hagiographer, Narayan Kasturi, was already a distinguished litterateur by the time he first met Sathya Sai Baba in 1948. Drawing on years of research on the movement as well as interviews with Kasturi himself, this book deepens our understanding of this important pan-Indian figure and his charismatic religious movement. You can find oral testimonies about Sai Baba here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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 capitalis

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

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 t

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/adchoices Support 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

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 rig

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 Occide

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: @b

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

Mahakavi Subramania Bharati was a multi-faceted genius, an innovative poet who initiated a new era in Tamil literature. He was the first writer to have introduced to the Tamil literary world a new genre called ‘novella’ by his composition of Ñānaratam (‘The Wisdom-chariot’) written in elegant Tamil prose. In Soaring with Bharati in the Wisdom-Chariot (Ñānaratam), Dr Radha Raghunathan gives the biographical background of Bharati, his association with Dr. Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society and his contributions for ‘New India’ and ‘Commonweal,’ and a translation of Bharati’s ‘novella’ Ñānaratam. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke UP, 2022), Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan's most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place's patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state's infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public

Krishnamacharya on Kundalini: The Origins and Coherence of His Position (Equinox Publishing, 2022) explores a distinctive teaching of 'the father of modern yoga', T. Krishnamacharya. Whereas most yoga traditions teach that kuṇḍalinī is a serpentine energy that rises, Krishnamacharya defined it differently. To him, kuṇḍalinī is a serpentine blockage which prevents prāṇa (breath or life-force) from rising and which represents avidyā (spiritual ignorance). Simon Atkinson draws from over 20 years of study and practice under teachers following Krishnamacharya. He combines analysis of quotations from yoga workshops with a detailed study of traditional Sanskrit texts. Atkinson challenges claims that Krishnamacharya's position can be found in his religious tradition of Śrīvaiṣṇavism. He questions the tradition's reliance on textual sources, showing how the coherence of Krishnamacharya's position can only be maintained by employing elaborate arguments and rejecting texts that teach otherwise. Atkinson also explores ho

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shanghai became a cosmopolitan hub with communities of Japanese, British, Russians, Jews, and others including Indians – most of whom were Sikhs. The story of Indians in Shanghai has however been largely elided. From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945 (Brill, 2017) by Yin Cao uncovers the lesser-known story of Sikh emigrants in Shanghai across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from their arrival in the city in 1885 through the end of World War II in 1945. Cao argues that the cross-border circulation of personnel and knowledge across the British colonial and the Sikh diasporic networks, facilitated the formation of the Sikh community in Shanghai, eventually making this Chinese city one of the overseas hubs of the Indian nationalist struggle. Initially brought in as policemen by British colonial authorities to discipline the local Chinese population, Sikhs in Shanghai transformed into anti-colonial re

Raj Balkaran's 200th podcast episode: Christa Kuberry interviews him on his beautifully written new book The Stories Behind the Poses: The Indian Mythology That Inspired 50 Yoga Postures (Leaping Hare, 2022), and highlighting their significance for practice.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable?  Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure (Duke UP, 2021) tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, t

It can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak. The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determine how high one could go, and what routes to take. Even the successful expedition of Norgay and Hillary was built on the efforts of those who came before. And the first expeditions, in 1921 and 1922, are the subject of Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain (Pegasus Books, 2022). Mick tells the story of these very first attempts to climb the mountain–including the difficulties of funding, recruitment, and travel, as well as the climb itself. In this interview, Mi

Srilata Raman's book The Transformation of Tamil Religion: Ramalinga Swamigal and Modern Dravidian Sainthood (Routledge, 2022) analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity - Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. F