New Books in South Asian Studies

Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led to a normalization of daily violence? These are the key questions that inform the analyses in this volume by lawyers, academics and activists. Divided into four broad sections, it begins by looking at the origins of the modern police force in the 1860s and demonstrates their role in maintaining socio-cultural, economic and political hierarchies even in post-Independence India. The second section explores how the law and legal infrastructure, as well as the bureaucracy in India, work to effectively facilitate police violence and to further marginalize and criminalize certain groups, like lower castes and Muslims. The penultimate section complicates this picture, examining how police violence is shaped by historical ambivalence towards democracy, the personal and systemic dynamics between police personnel and the accused, and the fraught identity of police in conflict zones like Kashmir, where authority is both granted and withheld by the state. The final section contains interviews of and reflections by prominent critics of police violence, including former Haryana DGP V.N. Rai and Abdul Wahid Shaikh, falsely accused of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai blasts. Questioning its foundational purpose and envisioning pathways to accountability and reform, Policing and Violence in India ignites a long-overdue conversation about the nature of policing in India. Deana Heath is Professor of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool. She has written widely on issues relating to policing and violence in colonial India, particularly on torture and sexual violence. Her latest book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, New Jersey. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press and Orient Blackswan, and Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India, published by New York University Press in 2011 and Orient Blackswan in 2012. Shailza Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global 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

Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization shifts in the Hindi film industry in India. The book investigates Bollywood as a media system that has moved away from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s to an industry contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and the ascendency of the material-affective redressals offered by religious ethnonationalism. The monograph examines 19 Hindi-language films released post-2010 to study contemporary India’s precarious public sphere which has been characterized by a pervasive sense of professional-personal insecurity experienced by the vast majority. This is a book about the role of cinema, or cultural texts more generally, in a period marked by incredible insecurity, violence, and the absence of collective political alternatives. Screening Precarity is an intervention in the politics of representation, particularly, of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened in precarious times. It is also a cultural analysis of how the biggest film industry in the world is embedded in global media networks, and marshals state power and star power, national histories and transnational fantasies, structural impossibilities and individual agency. Megha Anwer is a theorist of literature and visual culture. Her research areas include contemporary postcolonial literature, global cinema, Victorian literature and visual culture. Anupama Arora is a professor of English and Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Dr 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. So far, her articles have 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 NewBooksNetwork 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 www.priyamsinha.com and you can follow her on https://x.com/PriyamSinha 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 Kannada language boasts an ongoing literary tradition spanning more than a millennium, with a rich array of social positions and roles, religious traditions, and poetic styles that developed over the dramatic history of the region. Yet translations from premodern Kannada to English have been inconsistent, with only a handful of works that have endured. Stories of Shiva's Saints is the first English translation of selected stories from a thirteenth-century text by Hampeya Harihara that sheds light on the rapid spread of Shiva devotion in the region through edified biographies of figures who lived a few decades earlier, and the stories' historical significance is matched by their gripping plots and emotional expressivity. 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 Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic ‘India experts,’ Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state published by the Oxford University Press. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used by these individuals for a number of German organisations to fulfil the demands of Nazi politics. This monograph also inspects the links between the knowledge providers and embodiments of National Socialist politics like the Nazi party and its affiliates. In this study, Baijayanti Roy aims to ascertain whether such political engagements were actually more rewarding for the scholars than their 'practical services' to the state in the form of strategic deployment of their knowledge of India. The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism offers case studies of four organisations which incorporated such complicated entanglements of knowledge and power: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie in Munich, the Special Department India of the German Foreign Ministry, the Seminar for Oriental languages and its successor institutions at the University of Berlin, and the Indian Legion of the German Army. The knowledge networks underlying these organisations were dominated by German Indologists, but non-specialist knowledge providers, both German and Indian were also included. The Nazi regime expected all scholars and intellectuals to engage in Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), which entailed propagating the glories of the 'Reich' and its supreme leader as well as collecting 'politically valuable' knowledge within and outside Germany. For the four organizations concerned, this meant conducting pro-German and from around 1938, anti-British propaganda aimed at Indians. Loosely following an analogy provided by Herbert Mehrtens in the context of natural sciences, this monograph posits that there were ‘patterns of collaboration’ between the knowledge providers and the representatives of the Nazi regime. At the core of these 'patterns' was, to borrow Mitchell Ash’s theory, an exchange of resources and capital in which scholars and experts offered their knowledge of Indian languages, history and culture to authorities like the Foreign Ministry, the SS and the Army. In return, they received increased professional opportunities, financial remuneration or in some cases, increased power and influence. Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany. 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

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. 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

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics..Alastair McClure is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. .Saumya Dadoo is a Ph.D 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

Caste has been a huge topic of conversation in modern India. Yet debates and activism around caste discrimination have spread beyond South Asia. Caste activists looked to African-American literature and leaders to connect their fight with the battle against racism in the U.S. And as Indians moved around the world–to America, to elsewhere in Asia, and to the Middle East–they way they thought about caste changed. Suraj Milind Yengde tackles this global angle in his latest book: Caste: A Global Story (Hurst, 2025) Suraj is Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies and a Ford Foundation Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His prior appointments were W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Fellow and postdoc at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and a founding member of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He is also the author of Caste Matters (Penguin Random House India: 2019) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Caste. 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

"Engaging Hindu Narratives and Practices in the Contemporary World"Special Issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies: Volume 29, Issue 2 (August 2025) 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

Seeing Through Religion is a cutting-edge textbook that gives students the tools to learn this valuable subject theoretically, McGovern argues that religion isn't a thing out there in the world; it's the glasses on your face through which you see the world, shaped by Western history and, in particular, Christianity. 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

PURANA Media is an annual, peer-reviewed, open access journal focused on modes of cultural production encompassed by the term purāṇa (a Sanskrit word designating things 'ancient’ or 'primordial'). Populated by deities, sages, and a host of other more-than-human agents, the purāṇic past has been disseminated through a wide range of media and forms of embodied knowledge. As an authoritative discourse, purāṇa has been integral to the shaping of history and cultural memory in early South and Southeast Asia. In the contemporary world this discourse continues to (re)create the past as a social, political, and affective force. The journal approaches purāṇa as a way of worldmaking that uses memories of a distant past to meaningfully anchor the relative present and envision a future possible. PURANA Media adopts a broad methodological and regional scope. The journal integrates scholarship on primary historical sources (textual, visual, and material) and their contexts, critical reflections on heritage-making and museum studies, as well as contributions in art, design, photography, and other media. Open Access: 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

Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection Food, Culture and Society in India: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives (Berghahn Books, 2025) brings together empirically grounded research across diverse regions and contexts. Organised into four sections – Food, Culture and Identity; Food, Memory and Migration; Food, Livelihood and Nutrition; and Food, Consumption and Media – it highlights the complex role food plays in shaping identity, mobility, labour and representation. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the volume contributes to broader conversations in sociology, social anthropology, international development, geography, cultural studies and food studies, offering a textured account of contemporary foodways and their significance in everyday Indian life. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan, researches indigenous religion and Christianity among the Nagas, Buddhism in Bhutan, and Generative AI in education. 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 pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire . . . In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Māori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics and people’s social destiny. Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire (Bridget Williams Books, 2025) by Professor Charlotte Macdonald explores the lives of soldiers, sailors and their families stationed in Aotearoa New Zealand and across the British empire in the nineteenth century. Spanning the decades from 1840 to 1870, this major new history from Charlotte Macdonald places the New Zealand Wars within the wider framework of imperial power. It shows how conflict and resistance throughout the empire, from rebellion in India to the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, were connected to the colonial project in New Zealand. At the centre of this history are the thousands who served in the British military – from rank-and-file soldiers and bluejackets drawn from working-class Britain and Ireland, to officers from elite backgrounds who purchased their commissions. Their presence in New Zealand was vital to the imposition of imperial control, both during times of war and in the intervening years when the garrison underpinned a fragile settler economy and society. Through rich archival detail and personal accounts, Garrison World traces the structures, experiences and legacies of military occupation. Acknowledging the impact on Māori communities and whenua, the book offers a critical and unflinching account of how imperial authority was imposed – and often violently asserted. This is a compelling and significant contribution to understanding the reordering of power that shaped Aotearoa in the nineteenth century. 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

Originating in the Nineteenth Century, the European idea of development was shaped around the premise that the West possessed progressive characteristics that the East lacked. As a result of this perspective, many alternative development discourses originating in the East were often overlooked and forgotten. Indian Economics is but one example. By recovering thought from the margins, Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists (Cambridge UP, 2024) exposes useful new ways of viewing development. It looks at how an Indian tradition in economic thought emerged from a group of Indian economists in the late Nineteenth Century who questioned dominant European economic ideas on development and agricultural economics. This book shows how the first generation of modern Indian economists pushed at the boundaries of existing theories to produce reformulations that better fit their subcontinent and opens up discursive space to find new ways of thinking about regress, progress, and development. Soumyadeep Guha is a fourth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Eastern India. 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

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has. Robert Macfarlane's best-selling books include Is a River Alive? and Underland. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has won many prizes around the world. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Darius Cuplinskas is director at The Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundations. He is based in London. 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

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas of governance and a new kind of morality, his afterlife is a jumble of stories and representations within various Buddhist imaginings. By remembering Ashoka selectively, Lahiri argues, ancient kings and chroniclers created an artifice, constantly appropriating and then remolding history to suit their own social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes. Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Her previous books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered; Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories; and Ashoka in Ancient India, which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2016. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. 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 Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention from Indologists. Ithamar Theodor's bold and revisionist monograph The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita (Cambridge UP, 2025) aspires to further develop their scholarship by treating the Gita as a discrete philosophy and by offering a systematic survey of its main topics and doctrines, in so doing emphasising their philosophical potential. A major innovation here is the articulation of the Gita's structure extracted from Vedantic and Yogic pattens of thought, presented in a modern fashion. This centres on the Gita's Vedantic concept of hierarchical reality and its Yogic concept of a ladder. Beyond its overarching philosophical and holistic approach to the Bhagavad Gita, the book addresses major themes such as dharma, rebirth, Yoga and Sankhya, bhakti, the Upanishadic nature of the text, and concepts of divinity. 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 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 India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still. Fahad Ahmad Bishara talks about this specific 1924 journey in his book Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (U California Press, 2025). As the Crooked travels the waters of the Indian Ocean, Fahad covers topics like international law, the importance of debt, piracy, how information spread from port to port, and the Arab diaspora (among many other topics) Fahad is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Monsoon Voyagers. 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 Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship between the Indian State, forest-dwelling communities, and forest conservation regimes. The book builds on years of fieldwork across the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha, and Karnataka with forest-dwelling communities, Adivasi and Dalit activists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, to tell a turbulent story of battling for environmental justice. Kodiveri traces the continuing rhetorics of conservation and sovereignty in the forest practices of the colonial and the postcolonial Indian State, the entanglements between the climate crisis, resource extractivism, and eco-casteism, and credits the forest-dwelling communities for finding courageous and creative ways of securing their access and stewardship of forest resources. Governing Forests hopes for the possibility of “healing of historical antagonisms” between conservationists and forest dwellers through a co-productive model Kodiveri calls “negotiated sovereignty”, a governance paradigm rooted in a jurisprudence of care and repair. Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:rv13@soas.ac.uk 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 textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition. Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition (Columbia UP, 2025)draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writings. This unique choice of source material provides an engaging approach to language learning, immersing the student in one of the major strands of South Asian spirituality and culture while highlighting Buddhism’s connection to other religious and literary traditions. 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

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many-and is still  seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. Despite Patna's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant intellectual culture that linked it with cities and towns across northern India and beyond. Urdu literary gatherings and other Islamicate traditions inherited from Mughal times helped animate the networks sustaining institutions like scholarly libraries and satirical newspapers. Meanwhile, English-educated lawyers sought to bring new prominence to their city and region by making Patna the capital of a new province. They succeeded, but as Patna's political influence grew, its distinctive character was diminished. Ultimately, Provincial Metropolis shows, Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it. * David Boyk is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film, and history more broadly. My scholarly interests are focused on South Asia and include urban and regional history, film, food studies,and the history of language and literature. You can learn more about him on his website.  * Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the history of law, policing, and punishment in colonial Allahabad.  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