Shows / New Books in the Indian Ocean World
New Books in the Indian Ocean World
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/…
Episodes
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India with Pankhuri Agarwal (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge UP, 2026) emerges from the fact of anti-trafficking interventions having…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire with Gunja SenGupta (U California Press, 2023)
In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
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…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Muslims and the Minority Question across the Indian Ocean: A Conversation With Roy Bar Sadeh
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)
In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Alex Boodrookas, "Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf" (Stanford UP, 2026)
In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. Their efforts…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Shyam Ranganathan, "Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
Why have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Robert Rouphail, "Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius" (Ohio UP, 2026)
In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
T. V. Paul, "The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi" (Oxford UP, 2024)
From a Distinguished International Relations Scholar comes The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford UP, 2024), an…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Julia Stephens, "Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Indology in Canada Conference: A Conversation with Dagmar Wujastyk
Introducing a new conference to showcase the breadth and vitality of Canadian research on premodern India. We discuss the vision behind the conference and what…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)
In The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (Duke UP, 2025), Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Osamu Kitayama and Jhuma Basak, "Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India" (Routledge, 2025)
In this episode of the New Books Network, I sat down with the contributors of Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Daneesh Majid, "The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day" (Harper Collins, 2025)
From the annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948 to the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 and the eventual creation of Telangana in…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
David S. Powers and Eric Tagliacozzo, "Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
The essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Lisa Björkman, "Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
In Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Lisa Björkman invites our attention to political form and how they allow…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)
Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
P. C. Saidalavi, "Seeking Allah's Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
Why Muslims in South India observe hierarchical intra-communal relationships despite the egalitarianism of their religionIn Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Namit Arora and Romila Thapar, "Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present" (India Allen Lane, 2025)
What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so politicized? In…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Ishita Dey, "Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal" (Routledge, 2025)
Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (Routledge, 2025) by Ishita Dey is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long fieldwork of a single food…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Imran Mulla, "The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince" (Hurst, 2025)
In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Nile Green, "Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean" (U Texas Press, 2026)
Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. For over a…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Rituparna Patgiri and Gurpinder Singh Lalli eds., "Food, Culture and Society in India: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives" (Berghahn Books, 2025)
Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection Food, Culture and Society in India: Social…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Isabelle Guérin et. al., "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism" (Stanford UP, 2023)
In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Hindutva and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy. M. Sudhir…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta André, "The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy" (HarperCollins India, 2025)
Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Ghazala Wahab, "The Hindi Heartland: A Study" (Aleph Book Company, 2025)
The Hindi heartland, comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, covers nearly 38 per cent of India's…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Rehan Abeyratne, "Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Democratic backsliding, culture wars and partisan politics in the past two decades has seen the regression of human rights protections in the courts and across…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2018)
About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)
Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Erin M.B. O'Halloran, "East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Subah Dayal, "Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India" (U California Press, 2024)
Dr. Subah Dayal recently joined the New Books Network to discuss her new work Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Rosinka Chaudhuri, "India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire" (India Viking, 2025)
In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcutta. These…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025)
Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In An…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Rose Casey, "Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style" (Fordham UP, 2025)
Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India" (Oxford UP, 2025)
This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Laura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt" (Columbia Global Reports, 2021)
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are enslaved…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019)
In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace" (U California Press, 2025)
A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Audrey Truschke, "India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent" (Princeton UP, 2025)
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (Liverpool UP, 2024)
Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Anne M. Blackburn, "Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries new kingdoms emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Sovereignty in these new kingdoms was expressed…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Ankur Barua, "The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes" (Lexington, 2022)
In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Surindar Nath Pandita, "डान् क्विक्षोटः Don Quixote" (Pune, 2024)
The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this book the…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of Burden-Sharing: A Conversation with Brian Blankenship
Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Titas Chakraborty, "Empire of Labor: How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work" (U California Press, 2025)
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Andrea Wright, "Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford UP, 2024) by Andrea Wright offers a critical and nuanced examination of the labor regimes that…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead…
- New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding…