New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studie…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Book-centered interviews connect South Asian history to material culture, caste, translation, memory, and the methods scholars use to interpret them.
New Books in South Asian Studies treats a newly published book as the start of a sustained scholarly conversation. Its interviews move between historical argument and the evidence behind it, making room for subjects as varied as Jain shrine hangings, media history, devotional…
A gold-thread Jain hanging gives your next art-history rabbit hole a surprisingly expensive entrance.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful conversation about how Christian assumptions shape religious-studies categories, focused through the case of Hinduism.
Nathan McGowan's Seeing Through Religion treats religious studies as a classroom problem with larger consequences: categories that look neutral can still carry Christian, especially Protestant, assumptions.
A measured discussion of Purana as material practice, cultural production, and living diasporic form.
Purana Media sets up a thoughtful scholarly conversation around a simple but fertile question: what changes when Purana is considered as material practice, not mainly as text.
A focused conversation on culinary authenticity, gender, and power in the kitchen.
Food becomes a lens on gender, power, and identity in this conversation about Food, Culture and Society in India. The co-editor traces how meaning shifts around food, then turns to culinary authenticity as a gendered question.
A garrison's everyday permanence becomes the episode's key to New Zealand's colonial wars.
Charlotte MacDonald's Garrison World gives the episode a clear way into the New Zealand wars: the battles matter, but so does the longer garrison presence that kept imperial power visible between campaigns.
Cities are read as sites where beauty, violence, memory, and mortality stay tied together.
Ananya Vajpayee's conversation about Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities keeps circling one hard question: how do you write about a place without sanding off its pain?
A steady look at how Hyderabadis lost old patronage, then rebuilt work and mobility through the Gulf.
The piece traces Hyderabadis after 1947, when a ruling religious minority became a numerical minority inside a democratic order and lost the landed income, government jobs, and business access that had once anchored it.
A sharp conversation about caste, savarna academia, and how dissent gets folded back in.
Ajanta Subramanian and Ravi Kant Kisanath have a sharp, unsparing conversation about caste, academia, and family privilege. The strongest passages follow Kisanath's point that performance-oriented savarna academia can miss caste's deeper structure, and that youthful dissent,…
A study of how Nazi-era scholarship, anti-colonial politics, and empire collided over India.
Baijayanti Roy's The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism treats knowledge of India as something that was moved around, traded, and put to work inside Nazi-era institutions, with Aryan theory, the India Institute, and Indian anti-colonial politics all held in the same…
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
This episode segment introduces Dr.
This episode features an interview with Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra about her book exploring colonial Sri Lanka through early photographs and collections, examining visual history and cultural influences.
This segment includes a promotional announcement for the 2026 NewBooks Network audience survey and an introduction to an episode featuring Alaina M.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate to help improve the platform and offering a chance to win a gift card.
This segment promotes the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey and introduces a special edition publication in Indian studies.
This episode segment introduces an interview with Aidan Seale-Feldman about her book on disaster, crisis, and care in the Himalayas, focusing on fieldwork, humanitarian aspects, and mental health challenges.
The segment begins with a promotional survey announcement for the New Books Network, followed by an introduction to an interview with Dr.
This podcast segment discusses the 2024 Gen Z-led uprising in Bangladesh that led to the fall of Sheikh Hasina's regime, exploring its causes, the regime's nature, and implications for autocratization and protests globally.
This podcast segment features an interview with historian Sugata Bose about his book 'Asia after Europe', focusing on concepts like colorful cosmopolitanism and Asian universalisms.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate to help improve the platform and offering a chance to win a gift card.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for a chance to win a gift card and help improve the network.
Dr.
This episode introduces Susan Banki's book on the dynamics of exile politics for Bhutanese activists, focusing on how proximity and precarity shape their advocacy.
This segment promotes the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey and introduces an interview with Eric Chopra about his book 'Ghosted,' which explores haunted monuments in Delhi.
The podcast introduces an inaugural episode featuring scholars Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao discussing caste, following a promotional segment for an audience survey.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the 2026 NewBooks Network audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for feedback and a chance to win a gift card.
This episode features an interview with Stephen Legg about his book exploring anti-colonial politics in Delhi through a spatial governmentality framework in the decades before India's 1947 independence.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for a chance to win a gift card and help improve the platform.
This episode segment introduces a discussion with Namit Arora and Romila Thapar on the challenges of historiography in India, including politicization and distortions in public history.
This transcript is entirely a promotional message for the NewBooks Network audience survey and does not contain any substantive content about Leah Lowthorp's book on Kutiyattam and cosmopolitanism in Kerala.
This episode segment discusses a protest in New Delhi over air quality that led to arrests, connecting it to broader issues of policing, violence, and indigenous struggles in India.
This episode segment introduces Professor Alastair McClure discussing his book on the legal history of mercy and discretion in British India from 1857 to 1922.
This episode introduces an interview with Dr.
The NewBooks Network promotes its 2026 audience survey to gather listener feedback for improving partnerships and resources, offering a chance to win a gift card.
This episode segment introduces a podcast on democracy research and announces a listener survey, focusing on India's democratic challenges and academic discussions.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for a chance to win a gift card and help improve the platform.
This episode segment introduces an interview with Dr.
This episode introduces a sourcebook on Sri Lanka's role in the Islamic Indian Ocean, featuring translations of historical texts from various languages.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for feedback and a chance to win a gift card.
Dr.
This segment is a promotional announcement for the NewBooks Network's 2026 audience survey, encouraging listeners to participate for a chance to win a gift card and help improve the platform.
This episode introduces Dr.
This episode segment introduces an interview with Professor Bradley R.
This episode segment introduces a conversation with Satya Shikha Chakraborty about her book on the history of ayahs, exploring race, caste, and gender in British India.
Anthropologist David Gellner discusses his co-edited book 'Nepal's Dalits in Transition,' exploring how Nepal's democratic development interacts with persistent caste hierarchies.
Ananya Vajpeyi discusses her book 'Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities,' exploring how personal memory, language, displacement, and gender shape our relationships with urban spaces.
This episode features an interview with P.
Scholar Ravikant Kisana discusses his book 'Meet the Savarnas', analyzing how India's upper-caste elites have maintained power through performance of modernity rather than substantive innovation.
Author Daneesh Majid discusses his book 'The Hyderabadis,' which tells the history of Hyderabad from 1947 to today through personal stories and oral histories.
Host Dr.
Historian Baijayanti Roy discusses her book on how German scholars of India traded their expertise for career advancement within the Nazi state, weaponizing knowledge of Indian anti-colonialism for propaganda.
Scholar Gil Ben-Herut discusses his new English translation of 12th-century Kannada poet Harihara's 'Ragale' stories about Shiva's saints.
Author and journalist Yashica Dutt discusses her memoir 'Coming Out as Dalit,' exploring why Dalit writers often turn to personal narrative, the backlash within communities over 'passing,' and the intersections of caste with gender, class, and Black feminist thought in both India and the United States.
Afghanistan appears as a crossroads, but not a neat one.
Railway work made hierarchy hard to miss.
Velvet matters here.
Host Dr.
Mumbai politics becomes a problem of watching and being watched.
Host Dr.
This segment introduces an interview with Dr.
Nicholas Gordon interviews Suraj Milind Yengde about Caste: A Global Story, which follows anti-caste politics from Nanded and India into Trinidad, the United States, Malaysia, and the Middle East.
Shatir Jain interviews Nathan McGowan about his 2025 Routledge book Seeing Through Religion, which grew from teaching Intro to Asian Religions at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Dr.
Rituparna Patgiri discusses Food, Culture and Society in India, a five-year project co-edited with Gurpinder Singh Lalli and published by Berghahn Books in 2025.
Charlotte MacDonald discusses Garrison World, a history of redcoat soldiers in New Zealand and the British Empire from 1840 to 1870.