New Books in South Asian Studies

New Books in South Asian Studies

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Latest Episode

Kalpana Karunakaran, "A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras" (Context, 2026)

In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by t ...  Show more

All Episodes

Kalpana Karunakaran, "A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras" (Context, 2026)

In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by t ...  Show more

P. Thirumal and K. A. Nuaiman eds., "Inhabiting Technologies/Modernities: Media and Cultural Practices in South Asia" (Orient BlackSwan, 2025)

Studies of forms of media have focused on either political or cultural histories of media. Political histories study media growth and literacy, and the emergence of liberal democratic institutions in Western and postcolonial societies. Cultural histories study the multiple origin ...  Show more

Upper Caste Liberalism with Ravikant Kisana

This episode features a conversation with Ravikant Kisana, Dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Galgotias University in India, about his book Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything. We discussed the term “savarna” and how his p ...  Show more

Margherita Trento et al., "For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai" (UnionPress, 2025)

For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pe ...  Show more

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 2014--these broad brushstrokes of Hyderabad's history are well-documented. What has long been missing, however, is the per ...  Show more