New Books in South Asian Studies New Books Network

What types of coalitions can deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives? And how can we avoid reproducing unjust distributions of risk and responsibility in urban sustainability efforts? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Arve Hansen, and Manisha Anantharaman discuss these questions by engaging with Anantharaman’s new book Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability (MIT Press, 2024), a unique ethnographic exploration that links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labour of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. The focus is on Bangalore in India, but the arguments and findings have much wider resonances.

Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor at the Center for the Sociology of Organisations at Sciences Po in Paris.

Arve Hansen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, and co-leader of the Norwegian Network of Asian Studies.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.


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The contributions to Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023) deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Visnu-Narayana. This conception of God evolved in various traditions in India, especially in South India, during the first millennium CE. The history of this development is reconstructed here by various means, including philological exegesis, the history of ideas, and iconographic evidence. In their respective discussions, the contributors examine a range of textual material in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Manipravala, including the early Cankam literature of the 3rd to 6th century CE; the Vaisnava text corpus, in particular the Nalayiradivviyapirabandham (6th-9th century CE); Puranic literature, especially the Visnupurana (5th-6th century CE); Pancaratra literature; and the later (10th-14th century CE) literature of the philosophical and theological tradition of theistic Visistadvaita Vedanta, in which Visnu-Narayana plays a central role. Also examined is how Visnu-Narayana came to be seen as a solitary supreme God, with a reconstruction of the theological arguments supporting this monotheism.
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Amrita Ghosh's book Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts (Lexington Books, 2023) is an interdisciplinary book that studies literary texts, film, photography, and art to understand the different forms of violence represented in the cultural productions from and on Kashmir. The author argues that selected texts present how the long conflict in the postcolonial nation-state transforms the Kashmiri body, the space, setting, the relationship between the subject and its natural world under different forms of violence. Each chapter showcases a form of representational and textual violence that emphasizes the shifts from biopolitical to necropolitical violence and also includes specific forms of violence such as epicolonialism, horrorism, and hauntings in Kashmir’s landscape. The book also delves into how the concepts of agency, resistance, and resilience in these different texts necessitate new poetics of looking at Kashmir. The conflicted space of Kashmir has always been located within the politics of representation and this book investigates a problem in taxonomy within postcolonial discourses to articulate unique forms of violence in such a conflicted space.
Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.
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Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Sohini Pillai's Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford UP, 2024) is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or "devotion" focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. 
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Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi Press's Saritā--and the first paperbacks in Hindi--Hind Pocket Books--North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices--particularly those of women--Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.
Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.
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Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (U Minnesota Press, 2022) examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.
Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital's targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women's aspirations for the "good life" not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.
Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women's wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.
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