New Books in South Asian Studies

The Diasporic Hindu Right with Savera

This episode features a conversation with Prachi and Ram, organizers with Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans and partners standing together in the fight against the rise of the transnational far right. After laying out Hindu supremacy as an ideology, we considered the different phases of consolidation of the Hindu right in the United States from its late 20th century orientation around homeland politics to its 21st century effort to forge a Hindu American identity, first through an alignment with U.S. civil rights organizations and then through a realignment with white supremacist forces. We delved more deeply into the role of caste within this formation, in particular the longstanding efforts of the Hindu right in both India and the U.S. to forge Hindu unity by opposing anticaste politics. This took us to a discussion of the Hindu right’s embrace of the pro-Israel lobby’s tactics, especially its weaponization of Hinduphobia as an echo of the weaponization of antisemitism, to battle criticisms of the Modi government in India, and the need to distinguish this from the real rise in both anti-Hindu and antisemitic sentiment. We ended with Savera’s efforts to forge a broad-based antiracist, left majority as a counterweight to the multiracial far right. Read the transcript [https://cdn.craft.cloud/44c3b6c3-3307-4a13-a091-f99416660f91/assets/TCP-Episode-10-transcript.docx#asset:458781@1:url] Guests Prachi Patankar is a writer and activist based in New York. Her speaking and organizing is grounded in feminist, anti-caste, and solidarity commitments. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, Indian Express, Al Jazeera, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Jacobin. She has been interviewed in media including Democracy Now, Jewish Currents, and National Public Radio. Ram is an organizer with the Savera coalition. References Savera, “The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence [https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/],” January 2024. Savera, “Cut From the Same Cloth: the VHP-A’s Ties To Its Indian Counterpart [https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/],” April 2024. Savera and Political Research Associates, “HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights [https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/],” October 2024. Jyotiba Phule: an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Satyashodhak Sangh: a social reform society founded by Jyotiba Phule in Pune, Maharashtra in 1873 that addressed caste and gender injustices. Golwalkar: M.S. Golwalkar was the second supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary organization that advanced the ideology of Hindu supremacy and mobilized around the transformation of India into a Hindu nation. Pracharak: refers to a full-time organizer of the RSS. Houston 2019: “Howdy Modi” was an event organized by the Texas India Forum to welcome Narendra Modi to Houston and featured a joint address by Modi and Donald Trump. Ahmedabad 2020: designed as a reciprocal counterpart to Howdy Modi, “Namaste Trump” was an event organized to celebrate Donald Trump’s official state visit to India and hosted by Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Article 370: article of the Indian Constitution that granted a special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This status was abrogated by the Modi government in 2019. CAA/NRC: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are policies introduced by the Modi government. The 2019 CAA fast-tracks the naturalization of populations identified as victims of persecution by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and explicitly excludes the eligibility of Muslims. The 2019 NRC aims to create an official record of legal citizens of India. Critics and human rights organizations argue that the policies together discriminate against Muslims. If a nationwide NRC is implemented, individuals who lack the required documentation to prove their citizenship could be excluded from the final registry. Because the CAA allows non-Muslims to claim citizenship if they fall through the cracks, Muslims left off the NRC list would face disproportionate risks of statelessness, detention, or deportation. Edward Blum: a conservative legal strategist and the president of the American Alliance for Equal Rights and Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization that fought to overturn affirmative action on the grounds that it constitutes "reverse discrimination" against white and Asian applicants. Dan HoSang [https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/daniel-hosang]: professor of American Studies at Yale University. “Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism,” Recall this Book/New Books Network, Episodes 118 [https://recallthisbook.org/2023/12/07/118-violent-majorities-indian-and-israeli-ethnonationalism-episode-1-balmurli-natrajan-with-lori-allen-and-ajantha-subramanian/], 119 [https://recallthisbook.org/2023/12/14/119-violent-majorities-indian-and-israeli-ethnonationalism-episode-2-natasha-roth-rowland-with-lori-ajantha/], 120 [https://recallthisbook.org/2024/01/04/120-violent-majorities-roundup-ajantha-lori-jp/], 143 [https://recallthisbook.org/2025/02/06/143-violent-majorities-2-1-peter-beinart-on-long-distance-israeli-ethnonationalism-la-as/], 144 [https://recallthisbook.org/2025/02/20/144-violent-majorities-2-2-subir-sinha-on-hindutva-as-long-distance-ethnonationalism/], 145 [https://recallthisbook.org/2025/03/06/145-violent-majorities-2-3-long-distance-ethnonationalism-roundup-la-as-jp/]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies]

Ashok Malhotra, "Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969" (UCL Press, 2026)

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 [https://bookshop.org/p/books/imperial-science-the-organic-movement-and-the-path-to-shangri-la-1900-1969/5c03a3e17aceefd4?ean=9781806550555&next=t] (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US. Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British India, from soil protection initiatives to studies of diet and healthy living. It also discusses how a selective interpretation of this research, which focused on the supposed vigor of one community, the Hunzas, influenced the organic and lifestyles movements that later emerged in Britain and the US from the 1940s to the 1960s. Ashok Malhotra is a senior lecturer in British imperial history at Queen's University Belfast. Crawford Gribben [https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/crawford-gribben(9c12859e-6933-4880-b397-d8e6382b0052).html] is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies]

Bruno Shirley, "Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215" (ARC Humanities Press, 2026)

Dr. Shirley's monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215 [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781802703092] (ARC Humanities Press, 2026), is now available open access, thanks to the generous support of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. This book offers a radical reconsideration of the Poḷon-naruva period, long understood to be a turning point in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Histories of this period have been overwhelmingly based on a series of literary accounts written long after the fact. But by drawing on textual, inscriptional, numismatic, and material evidence from within the period itself, the book reveals how the intellectual and social histories of Buddhism, politics, and gender were inextricably intertwined in Poḷon-naruva. In particular, it argues that debates over what it meant to be a “good Buddhist king” were intrinsically debates about Buddhist masculinity and about the proper relationship of gender to power. Link to purchase/download the book here [https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781802703092/religion-gender-and-politics-in-medieval-sri-lanka/]. Bruno M. Shirley is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. He completed his MA in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New York, USA. Dr. Shirley is a historian of religion, gender, and politics in early second-millennium Sri Lanka and beyond. As an academic, he is interested in what it meant to understand oneself as “Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. His research explores a wider range of evidence—from royal inscriptions, to monastic disciplinary codes, to elaborate poems—in order to expose the cracks and fissures between competing visions of Buddhism. Resources referred to in the interview:  * Alastair Gornall, Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 [https://uclpress.co.uk/book/rewriting-buddhism/]. University College London Press, 2020. * Day, Tony. “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2943364].” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 384–409. * Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka [https://archive.org/details/robeploughmonast0000guna]. University of Arizona Press, 1979. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies]

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies]

Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026)

Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti  ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780262552714] (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of aspirational goals.  Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and logistics of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, critical discourse analysis and participant observation, the book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategies—required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of "Digital India." Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV & New Media and graduate chair in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of the monograph Radiant Infrastructures, and his work has been published in Critical Inquiry, SM+S, New Media & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. He has co-edited a special issue on "Media Power in Digital Asia" for Media, Culture & Society journal.   Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body, and her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at the New Books Network and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website [http://www.priyamsinha.com] and you can follow her on X [https://x.com/PriyamSinha]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies]