New Books in Indian Religions
Interviews with Scholars of Indian Religions with their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every 5 days
- Average duration
- 51 minutes
- Episodes
- 571
- Years Active
- 2011 - 2025
Gil Ben-Herut, "Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford UP, 2018)
Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions a…
01:11:24 |
Tue 19 Feb 2019
Caleb Simmons, "Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia" (SUNY Press, 2018)
Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2018), edited by Caleb Simmons, Moumita Sen, and Hillary Peter Rodrigues, is a diverse collection of cutting-edge interdi…
00:42:11 |
Wed 13 Feb 2019
B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition" (Verso, 2016)
Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedaka…
01:07:37 |
Tue 05 Feb 2019
Mani Rao, "Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners? Mani Rao takes us on a journey to three sacred sites across India’s Andhra-Telangana region. The practitioners she engages at these sit…
01:04:06 |
Fri 01 Feb 2019
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-F…
01:04:01 |
Thu 06 Dec 2018
Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties…
00:58:07 |
Wed 28 Nov 2018
Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017)
People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of…
00:54:42 |
Wed 28 Nov 2018
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard University Press, 2016-)
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcar…
01:04:27 |
Fri 02 Nov 2018
Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi”
Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice…
00:55:50 |
Wed 31 Oct 2018
Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation” (Routledge, 2018)
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such a…
00:52:33 |
Mon 20 Aug 2018
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of o…
01:03:53 |
Wed 15 Aug 2018
Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014)
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideolo…
00:37:57 |
Thu 02 Aug 2018
Lavanya Vemsani, “Modern Hinduism in Text and Context” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic,…
00:37:48 |
Mon 02 Jul 2018
Elaine Fisher, “Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia” (U California Press, 2017)
Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in pre…
00:36:22 |
Mon 21 May 2018
Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia” (Columbia UP, 2016)
For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of re…
01:12:10 |
Wed 02 May 2018
Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement” (U. Cal Press, 2016)
Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfaction…
00:44:04 |
Mon 09 Oct 2017
Michael J. Altman, “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synth…
00:54:59 |
Tue 12 Sep 2017
William Elison, et.al. “Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation” (Harvard UP, 2016)
Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deepe…
01:13:37 |
Tue 20 Jun 2017
Rupa Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India” (Columbia UP, 2014)
The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation o…
00:35:23 |
Wed 02 Nov 2016
Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Roman Sieler’s
Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a So…
01:17:10 |
Fri 28 Oct 2016
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