New Books in South Asian Studies

Epizódok

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  Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka with Luc Bulten (Brill, 2026) 03.10.2026 1ó 4p

  The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026) Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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  The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia with David Lowe (Cambridge UP, 2025) 03.10.2026 39p

  Conceived in 1950, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Development in South and Southeast Asia was a unique experiment in foreign relations. Meeting annually across what we now know as the 'Indo-Pacific', talented administrators facilitated foreign aid provision, and promoted development fuelled state-making, internationalism and experimental regionalism across postwar Asia.  In The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia (Cambridge UP, 2025), Professor David Lowe argues that this new setting and dynamic international cast created an unusually productive diplomatic environment of development internationalism. The Colombo Plan did not escape power politics or Cold War divisions. However, it did run according to its own rhythm, and, unlike other experiments, it endured, continuing today in much reduced form. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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  India, China, and Climate Change Governance: Leadership and Responsibility in the Asian Global South with Amit Ranjan and Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska (Routledge, 2026) 02.10.2026 31p

  Can we expect leadership and responsibility from the Asian Global South in climate change governance? India, China, and Climate Change Governance: Leadership and Responsibility in the Asian Global South (Routledge, 2026) is a new book published by Routledge, edited by scholars from Singapore, Estonia, and Poland, explores this intriguing question by examining not only the domestic challenges Asian countries face in exercising leadership and assuming responsibility, but also the international cooperation and competition that shape their regional and global roles. Although the book is focused on India and China, its chapters also dedicate attention to the US, Europe and international organizations. Amit Ranjan is a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska is a Research Fellow at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu, Estonia, and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science and International Relations, Civitas University, Warsaw, Poland. The episode is hosted by Linas Didvalis, an Associate Professor at Centre for Asian Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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  The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire Across China, India, and Southeast Asia with Iftekhar Iqbal (Stanford UP, 2025) 01.10.2026 48p

  Six great Asian river systems have their origins in the Tibetan glacial region: the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Red and the Yangtse ('BISMRY'). Together they comprise the largest concentration of fresh water on the planet outside of the polar regions, and they support one third of humanity. In the age of imperialism, Western colonial powers dreamed of harnessing the economic potential of these great rivers, as if an ‘empire of men’ challenged a much older ‘empire of rivers’. This is the theme of Iftekhar Iqbal’s conceptually ambitious new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, just published by Stanford University Press this year. This neo-Braudellian history of Asia’s great rivers encourages us to re-examine our thinking about the impact of imperialism, historical agency, Cold War regional categories of ‘South Asia’, ‘Southeast Asia’, and ‘East Asia’, into which the study of Asian history is usually divided, and even the humble mule, which played a crucial role in connecting this mountainous, watery region.
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  Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan with Thomas Gregory (Oxford UP, 2025) 26.09.2026 42p

  Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in Afghanistan also worked to rationalize the harm inflicted upon Afghan civilians. Drawing on declassified documents and interviews with coalition officials, the book traces how civilian protection was reimagined as a martial tactic rather than a humanitarian imperative, with coalition officials reframing civilian casualties as strategic setbacks that could imperil the entire mission. Gregory examines the restrictions that coalition officials imposed on combat operations to minimize unnecessary harm to civilians, whilst showing how these restrictions served to constitute civilian casualties as necessary in certain situations, rendering their lives losable and their deaths ungrievable. At the same time, it examines the post-incident mitigation measures coalition officials used to prevent civilian casualties becoming strategic setbacks, including the condolence payments that were offered when civilians were harmed. Rather than seeking to make amends for the harm inflicted upon them, it claims that these post-incident mitigation measures are best characterized as a necropolitical device concerned with managing mortality more effectively. Crucially, Weaponizing Civilian Protection shows that co-opting civilian protection into a martial logic that is more concerned with winning wars than protecting the civilian population works to devalue and dehumanize civilians, leaving them more vulnerable to death and destruction in future conflicts.
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  Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan with Muhammad A. Kavesh (U Washington, 2026) 26.09.2026 52p

  Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (U Washington, 2026) follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human other into the home. When cherished birds cross the militarized India-Pakistan border, they are recast as intruders and “spies," exposing the thin line between welcome and suspicion, hospitality and hostility. Through long-term ethnography, Dr. Muhammed Kavesh traces the layered meanings of arrival, both at the home and the homeland, showing how pigeons illuminate political tensions while sustaining bonds of play, care, and enthusiasm. Interweaving anthropology, South Asian studies, and multispecies studies with the Punjabi folktale of Heer Ranjha, Dr. Kavesh offers a conceptually rich account of human-pigeon relatedness. Moving from village lofts and urban rooftops to racing clubs and borderlands, the book demonstrates how animals mediate danger, belonging, and reciprocity across contested lines. Original and exciting, Spies and Other Pigeons reframes multispecies anthropology through a South Asian lens, revealing how the care and labor of pigeon keeping anchor local worlds and unsettle national borders. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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  Karline McLain, "Living with Gandhi: Experiments in Utopia" (Association for Asian Studies, 2026) 24.09.2026 42p

  Mahatma Gandhi was an anticolonial activist, lawyer, and politician. Less famously, but no less importantly, he was also a back-to-the-land farmer, a founder of communes, and a seeker of utopia. Living with Gandhi: Experiments in Utopia tells the story of everyday life at four of Gandhi's communities in India and South Africa. It explores who lived at each community alongside Gandhi, the experiments they undertook in the shared pursuit of universal wellbeing, and the connections that were forged between daily life and larger socio-political issues such as racial inequality, caste reform, and anticolonial activism. The need to simplify life and focus on the greater good is no less urgent now than it was in Gandhi's time. Reading about Gandhi's communities allows us to think about a range of topics that can help us to formulate our own conception of the good life, including how to spend our finite time together on this earth; how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion operate in our daily lives; and whether or to what extent self-sacrifice is necessary for universal wellbeing. Online Archive: here
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  Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies" (Simon and Schuster, 2026) 24.09.2026 39p

  Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab. For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many. Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order. Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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  Pushpesh Kumar et al. eds., "Sociology of Gender in India: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 19.09.2026 1ó 8p

  Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregrounding neglected areas such as femtech, queer infrastructures, and digital precarity. The volume not only reanimates classic concerns of Indian feminist sociology but also aims to intervene in global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge, and the sociology of everyday life. Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues. Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy. Deepali Aparajita Dungdung teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and care work within contemporary capitalism, with her more recent work focusing on language, education, and development. Priyam Sinha is an Early-Career Fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where her work sits at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production cultures, disability studies, gender studies, and digital media development in Asia. She previously held a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and her doctoral research was awarded by the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Her articles appear in the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and South Asian Diaspora, among others. Committed to public scholarship, she is a regular host on the New Books Network and has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, the Asian Film Archive, and FemAsia. Her work can be found at here and you can follow her on X here
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  Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 16.09.2026 57p

  What happens when a democratic state—still in the process of formation—commits to banning a substance, especially one as controversial as alcohol? Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of alcohol prohibition in India, drawing on extensive archival research and rich vernacular sources to explain its surprising resilience over time. Since its inception, prohibition has served both as an ideal and a tool of state power—a dual role that has worked to shape its shifting trajectories. Each phase of enforcement has served to reaffirm prohibition's founding logic, thereby further embedding it in the machinery of governance—even as it has constrained its future implementation. Foregrounding intersections with caste and gender, the book illuminates how diverse social responses have made prohibition a deeply contested—sobering—yet enduring project. While prohibition may be a thing of the past in the West, history helps to keep it alive in India.
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  Ashish Koul, "Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2026) 09.09.2026 1ó 23p

  Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a focus on one agrarian Muslim caste known as Arains, Ashish Koul shows how some Indian Muslims transmuted caste and emplaced it within their understanding of Islam. During this time, Arain Muslims were derogatively called mali— gardener—instead of what they wished to be seen as—respectable landholders. Seeking to refute such negative portrayals, a group of elite Arains came together to develop a new Islamic vocabulary for caste. Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 06.09.2026 1ó 2p

  What went wrong with global mental health? Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through the dominant medical model has created barriers to understanding and responding to distress with reference to cases from Malawi and Sri Lanka. Its authors argue that mental health must be understood within the overall health of an individual, and individual health is located within the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental context in which they live. Their analyses demonstrate that supplanting locally developed responses to distress with a Western medicalised model of mental health inhibits a meaningful engagement with individuals and communities in need of care. Further, they argue that this ‘supplanting’ is analogous with a colonial endeavour, and one which diverts attention from the real problems of development. Across contexts the book highlights the difficulties that mental health professionals face in facilitating individuals’ capacities within structurally damaging socio-economic environments and increasingly commercially orientated health systems. Janaka Jayawickrama is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director at the Research Centre for Health and Wellbeing at Shanghai University. Jerome Wright is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences, University of York. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024) 28.08.2026 52p

  Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi. Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms and ideas, The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024) argues that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics, when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics. Dhiren Swain is a MIPA PhD Candidate, affiliated to The University of Melbourne and IIT Madras. His current research focuses on the Urban Policies and Community Politics in India and South Asia. He can be reached at [email protected] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden eds., "Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia" (Helsinki UP, 2026) 27.08.2026 53p

  In our recent conversation about Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia, the editors Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden reflect on the need to move beyond treating the pandemic as a singular, isolated shock. Our discussion reflected on the deeper mechanics of knowledge production, how we reflect on crisis beyond its immediate occurrence, how we conceptualize South Asia today, and the process of bringing such a dynamic volume together. A central theme was the necessity of examining crisis as a revealing, prolonged condition rather than a temporary disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed pre-existing structural vulnerabilities across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Theorizing through this moment meant examining how state strategies and worker realities collided when formal safety nets faltered, forcing us to rethink South Asia not merely as a fixed geographic region, but as a shared space of cascading socio-economic pressures and labor struggles. While this volume traces state policy and institutional shifts, the core strength of the volume lies in highlighting the resourcefulness and claim-making capacities of workers fighting for justice. Assembling these regional perspectives provides a critical blueprint for rethinking state-society relations, labor rights, and collective action in post-pandemic South Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Niharika Pandit, "Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2026) 25.08.2026 55p

  Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-operationalize Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy. The core of our reflection centered on how one theorizes through such an intense archive. The book avoids abstract distance, relying instead on a rigorous post-2019 archive built from ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in interdisciplinary feminist studies. It demonstrates that theorizing is not a passive intellectual exercise, instead, it is an active, grounded practice of mapping power where it is felt most directly. Through intersectional analyses of space, home, time, and storytelling, the text reveals how militarized control operates via spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Reflecting on this book serves as a vital reminder that critical theorizing must remain tethered to the grounded realities of resistance. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Vivek Neelakantan, "The Emergence of International Health Policy in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, 1937–1978" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) 22.08.2026 1ó

  Examining the emergence of international public health policy between the 1930s and 80s, The Emergence of International Health Policy in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, 1937–1978 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan sheds light on the role that rural community health initiatives in South and Southeast Asia played in the movement towards ‘primary health care’ and ‘health for all,’ articulated ultimately at the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The author argues that the movement was not directed exclusively from the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, but also by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division in rural Southeast Asia, and through local community initiatives including the Bandung Plan for Health in Indonesia. The book illustrates how an exclusive association of global health with the emergence of the WHO in the 1950s fails to account for the local, national, or regional contexts that shaped the evolution of primary health care in South and Southeast Asia. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Sandip Roy, "Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal" (Seagull Books, 2026) 20.08.2026 40p

  Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage. He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tells the story of Chapal Rani’s life, from stardom to obscurity and later rediscovery; how Chapal Rani would transform himself every night onstage; and how jatra changes how we talk about gender and performance. Sandip Roy is a writer, columnist, and podcaster currently living in Kolkata. He is a columnist for Mint Lounge, The Hindu, and the host of the Sandip Roy Show on Indian Express. His work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Huffington Post, Conde Nast Traveller, among other publications. For over a decade, Roy was editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on LGBTQ+ South Asian issues. He is the author of the novel Don’t Let Him Know. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India" (U California Press, 2026) 19.08.2026 55p

  Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent. Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India (University of California Press, 2026) is an open-access book that follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits among people. Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and "drug-ness" of cannabis, Dr. Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  Mithi Mukherjee, "Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India's Road to Freedom" (U California Press, 2026) 16.08.2026 1ó 4p

  Offering a new global perspective on modern Indian history, Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India's Road to Freedom (University of California Press, 2026) by Mithi Mukherjee identifies the rise of Asianism in the early twentieth century as the origin and primary driving force of resistance movements that brought down the British Empire. Mithi Mukherjee ties together into a single sweeping narrative two contrasting, conflicting forms of anticolonialism: the emergence of the nonviolent resistance movement under Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and the militant movement culminating in the war on British India by the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose in alliance with the Japanese army. Asia emerges in this breakthrough retelling not as an inert geographical category, but instead as a singular agent of change in modern world history. Mithi Mukherjee is a Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She specializes in the legal, political, and cultural history of modern India. Shatrunjay Mall is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His work in modern Japanese history, South Asian history, and transnational Asian history explores ideas of Pan-Asianism and its legacies, as well as intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities between colonial India and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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  James Lochtefeld, "God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya" (Lever Press, 2026) 13.08.2026 44p

  God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya (Lever Press, 2026) follows the tectonic shift from traditional religious pilgrimage in the early twentieth-century to contemporary pilgrim tourism, in which ever-burgeoning visitor numbers have brought both benefits and challenges to the Garhwal region of India—the source of Hindu India’s sacred river, the Ganges. Despite Hinduism’s regional and sectarian variation, India’s Garhwal Himalaya region is one the most sacred places to Hindus, drawing pilgrims across sectarian lines from throughout the subcontinent and the world. This sacred land—dev bhumi or “land of the gods”—appears in foundational Hindu stories describing the presence and activity of gods, goddesses, saints, and cultural heroes.This study from James G. Lochtefeld draws out Hindu convictions regarding the Garhwal’s eternal and continuing sanctity as a holy region, based on the premise of an “imagined landscape.” This region is strongly associated with divine activity and yet this landscape is also a real place with a real history inhabited by real people, who have historically been poor because of the challenges created by the region’s geography. Juxtaposing the history of the region with its construction in the Hindu imaginary, this multidisciplinary study unpacks the nuanced image of the region, its religious significance, and the impacts of pilgrimages on the community through textual, historical, and ethnographic methods. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies