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Interviews with scholars of South Asia about their new books.
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he…
Manu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Mini…
In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new a…
Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did …
The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by…
Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and relig…
Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion…
There are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of th…
In Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-ol…
How can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Bas…
Razak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identi…
In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge…
Why did khadi become so central to India’s freedom struggle? How did it evolve into an international trademark – and what does khadi signify in India …
In Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie…
In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against…
In An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamin…
Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of H…
Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, …
1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie …
India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow …