Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Pioneering Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Episode 139
Manu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Min…
2 years, 7 months ago
Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
Episode 116
In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new …
2 years, 7 months ago
Eva De Clercq, ed. and trans., "The Life of Padma" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Episode 221
The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written b…
2 years, 7 months ago
SherAli Tareen, "Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Episode 325
Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did…
2 years, 7 months ago
Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long, "Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Episode 320
Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and reli…
2 years, 7 months ago
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)
Episode 159
Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religio…
2 years, 7 months ago
Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
Episode 220
There are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of t…
2 years, 7 months ago
Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 212
In Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-o…
2 years, 7 months ago
Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Episode 219
Razak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and ident…
2 years, 7 months ago
Priyanka Basu, "The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 440
How can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Ba…
2 years, 7 months ago