New Books in South Asian Studies

What role did Gen Z play in the popular uprising that led to the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime in the summer of 2024? And what marks have the uprising left on democratic politics in Bangladesh? We discuss these questions with Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan, and Ishrat Hossain whose work on the 2024 July Revolution appeared in a special issue of Journal of Bangladesh Studies in early 2026. We also discuss what the Gen Z Revolution can tell us more generally about processes of autocratization, resistance and mass protests in the contemporary world, and about the conditions under which popular mobilization can succeed in dislodging autocratic governments. Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway Mubashar Hasan is Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Australia Ishrat Hossain is an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge, 2025) illuminates individual and collective imaginings of postcolonial Bangladesh. It explores the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation from a variety of perspectives. The author studies the impact of Muslim nationalism on the subaltern life-worlds of East Bengal during the Partition, religious minorities and their insecurity in East Pakistan, East Pakistan’s political insurgencies, the victims of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the Indian stake in the 1971 War, and the cosmopolitan interpretations of the war. The literary and cultural texts that inform this project include contemporary Bengali novels, South Asian Anglophone literature, as well as selected visual media and digital sources. The project’s reading of these texts in conjunction with politics and history has interdisciplinary relevance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This episode features a conversation with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute about how caste structures IT workspaces and communication infrastructures. We began with their reflections on how they came to scholarship and advocacy on caste. The rest of our discussion covered a range of topics including, the ideology of tech as immaterial and disembodied, the role of tech within racial and caste supremacist projects, how and why large language models systematically favor dominant caste norms, the internal and external pressures required for tech companies to advance social equity, the necessity and limits of law in advancing protections against caste hate speech and other forms of identity-based violence and discrimination, and the need to balance visibility and secrecy as two dimensions of the anticaste struggle. Guest bios: Murali Shanmugavelan: Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute and Senior Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Sareeta Amrute: Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design, Affiliate Faculty of Anthropology at the New School, and Principal Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute. References: Karve: Dhondo Keshav Karve set up a home and school for widows in the city of Pune in Maharashtra in 1896. The institution, which is now called Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha, runs 60 sites for women's education. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Western Ghats: a mountain range that stretches along the western coast of the Indian peninsula. Sriram Krishnan: tech executive and Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in the second Trump administration. Bruno Latour: French philosopher known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Maha Shivarathri: annual festival to celebrate the deity, Shiva. Mimi Onuoha: Nigerian American visual artist and academic whose work examines the effect of data collection and technology on society. Thenmozhi Soundararajan: founder of the Dalit feminist organization Equality Labs and author The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. The Hindu Code Bills aimed to codify and modernize Hindu personal laws, promoting gender equality in marriage, inheritance, and adoption. Gail Omvedt: sociologist and anticaste activist whose work on Dalit epistemology and politics was path-defining. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Veins of Influence: Colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in early Photographs and Collections by Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra (Neptune Publications, 2023) is a pioneering monograph that brings a rich array of early images (specifically of Sri Lanka (Ceylon)) into the global discourse of photography, pairing a striking lens of visual appreciation with distinctly humanizing perspectives. In the context of colonial photography, “veins of influence” delineates the circulatory pathways through which images operate, tracing not only their material production and dissemination, but also the curatorial, creative, cultural, epistemic narratives they generate across time. The over 450 images featured are from the: Royal Collection Trust; Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Royal Commonwealth Society, Cambridge University; Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Rothschild Archives and, also by the famed Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. (A little known fact is that Cameron spent the last 4 years of life in Ceylon and died there.) In addition to these UK collections, this publication includes early photographs from important local family collections and period publications. The collections are mainly those of influencers and the writing considers images by both studio photographers and hobbyists, for commercial and non-commercial purposes. This seminal publication is for general audiences and specialists. Ganendra’s unusual analysis of these collections adds another layer of understanding of the viewing and imaging of Ceylon specifically, importantly also offering another approach to the understanding of colonial images generally. Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra’s impact on cultural development has been defined by nearly three decades of cultural programming including exhibition and scholarship, with notable focus on Sri Lanka. Ganendra is Sri Lankan born and lives in Malaysia. She read law at Cambridge University (1987) and qualified as a Barrister and New York Attorney. She was the first Sri Lankan specialist to be appointed to the Tate Gallery (UK) Acquisitions Committee (SAAC) and has served on numerous judging panels including for the Commonwealth Arts Award and as a nominator for the Sovereign Art Prize and Aga Khan Architecture Awards. She was most recently a Chevening Fellow at Oxford and has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, including at: the History of Art Department, St. Catherine s College and the Pitt Rivers Museum. She was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (Vatican) in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India (Cambridge UP, 2025) offers a compelling cultural and social history of ayahs (nannies/maids), by exploring domestic intimacy and exploitation in colonial South Asia. Working for British imperial families from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s, South Asian ayahs, as Chakraborty shows, not only provided domestic labor, but also provided important moral labor for the British Empire. The desexualized racialized ayah archetype upheld British imperial whiteness and sexual purity, and later Indian elite 'upper' caste domestic modernity. Chakraborty argues that the pervasive cultural sentimentalization of the ayah morally legitimized British colonialism, while obscuring the vulnerabilities of caregivers in real-life. Using an archive of petitions and letters from ayahs, fairytales they told to British children, court cases, and vernacular sources, Chakraborty foregrounds the precarious lives, voices, and perspectives of these women. By placing care labor at the center of colonial history, the book decolonizes the history of South Asia and the British Empire.Satya Shikha Chakraborty is an Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey.Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Through A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras (Context, 2026) Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the ‘utterly ordinary’ life of a ‘woman of no consequence’ (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary. The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents. In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters—restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 origins of media technologies, seek lost or marginalised cultural objects, and examine how artefacts are connected to earlier modes of production and consumption. What is lost in both is the idea that media and technologies have an independent existence, with their own lives, histories, and afterlives. Inhabiting Technologies/Modernities: Media and Cultural Practices in South Asia (Orient BlackSwan, 2025) fills this gap, showing how media and technologies create the human condition even as they are created by it. The authors highlight this through everyday artefacts like the book, newspaper, radio, photograph, film, television and activism on digital media. P. Thirumal is Professor of Communication Studies at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. Carmel Christy K. J. is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University and is affiliated with the South Asian Studies program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 personal experiences as a student and professor in liberal institutions led him to write the book, the performativity and insularity of upper castes, the importance of endogamy to caste social reproduction, and how to understand the recent shift from claims to castelessness to overt assertions of caste pride. Guest Ravikant Kisana, Dean, School of Liberal Education and Languages, Galgotias University, India References: B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Babasaheb: an honorific for B.R. Ambedkar meaning “respected father.” IIMs: Indian Institutes of Management Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister of India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party. BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities. OBC parties: see above Veds/Vedas: ancient Sanskrit scriptures Kayasth: scribal and administrative caste originating in Maharashtra, Bengal, and Odisha. Marwari: mercantile caste originating in the Marwar region of Rajasthan. Baniya: mercantile caste originating in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Baniya and Marwari are overlapping categories. Jat: agricultural caste originating in the regions of Sindh and Punjab. Noida: a city in the National Capital Region that falls within the state of Uttar Pradesh Congress: Indian National Congress, one of India’s main national political parties founded in 1885. MGNREGA: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 is an Indian labor law guaranteeing at least 100 days of paid, unskilled manual work per financial year to rural households. Read the transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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 perspective of the people, the different communities who lived through these upheavals--the communal violence of Independence and Partition, the push for a linguistic re-imagination of the state and its bifurcation, the long-drawn-out struggle for statehood--and those who were forced to adapt to a rapidly changing India. For the first time, Daneesh Majid brings their stories to light. Drawing from generational interviews, oral histories, literature in Urdu and English and his own personal experiences, he drafts a modern history of Hyderabad in The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day (Harper Collins, 2025). A work of this scale and size has never been attempted before and The Hyderabadis promises to open new doors to the former kingdom's past and future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era. Using company records, Dr. Armstrong-Price shows how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers' writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements. The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

What do political democracy and social hierarchy do to each other? For too long Nepal's Dalits have been marginalized, not just socially, economically, and politically, but from academic accounts of Nepalese society as well. This volume forms part of a welcome new trend, the emergence of Dalit Studies in Nepal, led by a new generation of Dalit scholars.  Nepal's Dalits in Transition (Vajra Books, 2024) covers a wide range of issues concerning Nepal's Dalits and offers a snapshot of the advances that they have made--in education, in politics, in the bureaucracy, economically, and in everyday relations. At the same time the book documents the continuing material disadvantage, inequality, discrimination, both direct and indirect, and consequent mental suffering that Dalits have to face. It also touches on the struggles, hopes, and dilemmas of Dalit activists as they seek to bring about a new social order and a relatively more egalitarian society.  David Gellner is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

How do the inhabitants of the Indian city of Mumbai navigate political signs and representations? What is the significance of crowds and mass mobilization to popular politics, and what lessons does the politics of Mumbai hold for Indian democracy at the current conjuncture? These questions are at the heart of Lisa Björkman’s Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), that analyses questions of representation, populism, and political communication and organizing. In this episode, Björkman joins Kenneth Bo Nielsen for a discussion of the book, and on the intricate ways in which Mumbaikars from all walks of life assess political performances and real-life politicians, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of words and images, cash and crowds, flyers and flowers. Lisa Björkman is an anthropologist working at the University of Louisville, and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also directs the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Supreme Refuge: Durgā's Transformation Into the Hindu Great Goddess (SUNY Press, 2025) provides the first comprehensive examination of the Hindu Great Goddess Durgā, one of the most significant deities in the Hindu pantheon, who is celebrated annually during the Navarātra festival, a widely observed event across the Hindu world. Drawing on textual, inscriptional, and iconographic evidence, the study traces Durgā's evolution from a minor goddess to her identification as the Mahādevī, or Great Goddess. It presents an alternative chronology for hymnic materials, aligning them more closely with early iconographic depictions and offering new insights into misidentified attributes of the goddess. The work incorporates evidence from beyond South Asia to contextualize external influences on Durgā's persona and her central myths, particularly her defeat of the buffalo demon Mahiṣa. A detailed analysis of the myths in the influential Devī Māhātmya against earlier Purāṇic accounts highlights the text's sophisticated theological approach. Its strategy places Durgā in a transcendent role while asserting her as the supreme deity and ultimate refuge, accessible to both kings and commoners in dire need of her support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a journalist in India and the U.S. has revealed about the differences in the operations of caste in the two contexts. Finally, we ended with her coverage of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, both its promises and its failure to address the caste question head-on. Guest: Yashica Dutt is a journalist and author whose writings can be found on her Substack, Featuring Dalits and in New Lines magazine. Mentioned in the episode: Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit Rohith Vemula: an Indian PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad whose suicide drew attention to widespread institutional casteism. Kumari Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister in India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party. BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities. Origin: 2023 film written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson. ST/SC Act: Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is a landmark Indian law designed to protect marginalized communities from atrocities, hate crimes, and discrimination. Cargenie Institute study: 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. DRUM Beats: organization that mobilizes working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities. Yashica Dutt, “I reported on the Zohran Mamdani Campaign for six months and documented South Asians' rise to power in New York City” Yashica Dutt, “What Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Says About the Quiet Erasure of Caste in US Politics” Yashica Dutt, “If South Asians are prominent in the New York Mayoral Election, then where is caste?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Textiles, embroidered with religious imagery, express lay piety in public and private shrinesThis beautifully illustrated volume highlights Jain devotional textiles (choḍs) from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection at UCLA's Fowler Museum. Fashioned in the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, these works of velvet and sateen cloth, lavishly embroidered with gold and silver gilt thread, depict Jain mythology, influential spiritual teachers, sacred sites, and ritual traditions. Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings (U Washington Press, 2025) delves into the innovative material approaches taken by the creators of choḍs, the captivating religious stories they convey, and the social lives of these objects in Jain communities. They offer a mode of devotional patronage to lay people, who frequently commission them as gifts for places of worship in recognition of deceased relatives or upon completion of important rituals, such as monastic initiation or a lengthy fast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (Columbia UP, 2025) presents a set of keywords and concepts embedded in the languages of South Asia and its vast cultural landscape. It reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing, which are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences in the region. The words, concepts, ideas and attitudes in the volume explore the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments. The volume also attempts to work out if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigor to reinvent social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond. Individual essays, which are creative, imaginative, ethnographic and historical, explore the possibility of South Asian intellectual worlds and words to create a broader crossregional and global social science and humanities. The volume argues that it is important to move away from the intellectual shackles inherited from colonial and neo-colonial experiences while also not succumbing to the traps of local reductionist nativisms and cultural nationalisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Today, Afghanistan–if it ever reaches global headlines–is portrayed as an unstable land, known more for the wars great powers fight (and often lose) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right. In his new book, Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest (Reaktion Books, 2025), archaeologist Warwick Ball argues that this land was a center where the worlds of Iran, India, Central Asia, and even the Mediterranean met and mingled. Ball takes readers from the Bronze Age Oxus and Helmand civilizations through Greek Bactria, the Kushan Empire, the spread of Buddhism, and the rise of powerful Islamic dynasties. Warwick Ball is an archaeologist and author who spent over twenty years carrying out excavations, architectural studies and monumental restoration throughout the Middle East. He is the author of many books on the history and archaeology of the region including The Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

'In the five years that I tacked incessantly between Delhi, Venice and Istanbul, two questions plagued me: How do we lose what we lose? Why do we love whom we love?' In this collection of essays written over 25 years, Ananya Vajpeyi recounts her experience of 13 cities across India and the world, engaging with them as layered spaces where history, memory and meaning converge. Through elegantly crafted narratives, interwoven with cultural insight, political reflection and personal meditation, she evokes the emotional and intellectual contours of each place, offering readers her immersive, intimate encounters with cities she love. Ananya Vajpeyi is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies