Podcast
New Books in Indian Religions
Hosted by Marshall Poe · EN
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
16episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Christian Environmentalism in a Hindu Majoritarian Context
3d agoTap to summarizeWhy has the Catholic Church in India become so engaged in environmental initiatives? And what does the wider Indian political context defined by an assertive Hindu nationalism mean for the ability of church actors to pursue environmental agendas? In this episode, we are joined by Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Nihar Gokhale who have examined these questions in the Indian state of Goa, focusing on church activities and outreach in the domain of sustainable agriculture and agroecology. You can read more about their research on the relationship between Christian environmentalism, agroecology and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in the edited volume Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia, published by Leiden University Press. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a Social Anthropologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. Nihar Gokhale is a DPhil student in International Development at the Oxford Department of International Development. Mette Halskov Hansen, your host, is a Professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Carola E. Lorea, "Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal" (Wesleyan UP, 2026)
4d ago00:35:54Tap to summarizeCommunities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) brings together insights from religion, anthropology, sound, and migration studies to explore the sonic traces of untouchability and forced migration across the Bay of Bengal. Based on an immersive, multi-sited ethnography with Matua devotees—a low-caste, Bengali-speaking Dalit religious community fragmented by Partition, war, and postcolonial displacement—the book explores how sound sustains identity across fractured geographies. Using richly detailed descriptions, the book follows traveling archives of song, story, and ritual performance through West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andaman Islands. These sonic practices—congregational singing, drumming, and itinerant storytelling—forge belonging beyond nation-states, connecting the Matua's fifty million members across borders and seas. In a world dominated by visual culture, Communities of Sound centers listening as a mode of knowledge and care, revealing how sound shapes our sense of self and cosmos. More than scriptures or doctrine, it is sound—entangled with authority and power—that binds this transregional Dalit movement and animates its collective action. The book is generously illustrated and references an online companion with video and audio examples. Author bio: Carola E. Lorea is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Tübingen, at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. She is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016), and editor with Rosalind Hackett of Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Hamsa Stainton and Anna Lee White, "Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras" (Routledge, 2026)
4d ago00:39:43Tap to summarizeSanskrit hymns of praise (stotra/stuti/stava) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotras continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress in recent decades as scholars have paid increasing attention to such compositions. A valuable pedagogical resource for educators teaching about Asian religions and literature, especially in comparative contexts, Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras (Routledge, 2026) also establishes the foundation for future research and scholarship on a genre of religious poetry popular across South Asian religious traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, "Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India" (Oxford UP, 2026)
3w ago00:38:52Tap to summarizeSurrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācārya, and Vedāntadeśika. Drawing on theories of language politics and translation, Manasicha Akepiyapornchai proposes a new theoretical framework of "language sphere" to better capture the linguistic and intellectual interaction from a micro perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →The Diasporic Hindu Right with Savera
3w ago01:15:45Tap to summarizeThis episode features a conversation with Prachi and Ram, organizers with Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans and partners standing together in the fight against the rise of the transnational far right. After laying out Hindu supremacy as an ideology, we considered the different phases of consolidation of the Hindu right in the United States from its late 20th century orientation around homeland politics to its 21st century effort to forge a Hindu American identity, first through an alignment with U.S. civil rights organizations and then through a realignment with white supremacist forces. We delved more deeply into the role of caste within this formation, in particular the longstanding efforts of the Hindu right in both India and the U.S. to forge Hindu unity by opposing anticaste politics. This took us to a discussion of the Hindu right’s embrace of the pro-Israel lobby’s tactics, especially its weaponization of Hinduphobia as an echo of the weaponization of antisemitism, to battle criticisms of the Modi government in India, and the need to distinguish this from the real rise in both anti-Hindu and antisemitic sentiment. We ended with Savera’s efforts to forge a broad-based antiracist, left majority as a counterweight to the multiracial far right. Read the transcript Guests Prachi Patankar is a writer and activist based in New York. Her speaking and organizing is grounded in feminist, anti-caste, and solidarity commitments. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, Indian Express, Al Jazeera, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Jacobin. She has been interviewed in media including Democracy Now, Jewish Currents, and National Public Radio. Ram Vishwanathan is an organizer with the Savera coalition based in New York City. References Savera, “The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence,” January 2024. Savera, “Cut From the Same Cloth: the VHP-A’s Ties To Its Indian Counterpart,” April 2024. Savera and Political Research Associates, “HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights,” October 2024. Jyotiba Phule: an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Satyashodhak Sangh: a social reform society founded by Jyotiba Phule in Pune, Maharashtra in 1873 that addressed caste and gender injustices. Golwalkar: M.S. Golwalkar was the second supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary organization that advanced the ideology of Hindu supremacy and mobilized around the transformation of India into a Hindu nation. Pracharak: refers to a full-time organizer of the RSS. Houston 2019: “Howdy Modi” was an event organized by the Texas India Forum to welcome Narendra Modi to Houston and featured a joint address by Modi and Donald Trump. Ahmedabad 2020: designed as a reciprocal counterpart to Howdy Modi, “Namaste Trump” was an event organized to celebrate Donald Trump’s official state visit to India and hosted by Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Article 370: article of the Indian Constitution that granted a special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This status was abrogated by the Modi government in 2019. CAA/NRC: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are policies introduced by the Modi government. The 2019 CAA fast-tracks the naturalization of populations identified as victims of persecution by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and explicitly excludes the eligibility of Muslims. The 2019 NRC aims to create an official record of legal citizens of India. Critics and human rights organizations argue that the policies together discriminate against Muslims. If a nationwide NRC is implemented, individuals who lack the required documentation to prove their citizenship could be excluded from the final registry. Because the CAA allows non-Muslims to claim citizenship if they fall through the cracks, Muslims left off the NRC list would face disproportionate risks of statelessness, detention, or deportation. Edward Blum: a conservative legal strategist and the president of the American Alliance for Equal Rights and Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization that fought to overturn affirmative action on the grounds that it constitutes "reverse discrimination" against white and Asian applicants. Dan HoSang: professor of American Studies at Yale University. “Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism,” Recall this Book/New Books Network, Episodes 118, 119, 120, 143, 144, 145. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)
4w ago00:56:35Tap to summarizeAmrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Patrick S. D. McCartney, "Sanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development" (Routledge, 2026)
May 2800:36:47Tap to summarizeSanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development (Routledge, 2026) is a recollection of the McCartney's journey across 'Sanskritland, ' which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within which the 'Language of the Gods' is thought to be spoken. There are three destinations on the author's journey. This study sheds light on how, why, and where Sanskrit is spoken in the twenty-first century, the complex and dynamic historical and contemporary that have allowed this, and how both yoga and Sanskrit are instruments for development and soft-power projects. This book is an essential read for scholars and students of linguistic anthropology, Indology, and sustainable development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Kanika Singh, "The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
May 2700:39:38Tap to summarizeThe Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2025, is a pioneering study on Sikh museums, a unique phenomenon of contemporary India—for their sheer numbers, distinctive display, malleability and presence in multiple cultural spheres and their political significance. This case study of Bhai Mati Das Museum at Gurdwara Sisganj, Delhi, examines the process of creation of Sikh heritage through history, paintings, and museums, unearths networks of patronage, and analyses the ways in which specific versions of the Sikh past are used to make present-day claims. It is based on interviews with artists and patrons, material from personal and institutional archives, a visual analysis of Sikh popular art and a critical examination of the museum's narrative. This book brings together Sikh history, popular art, politics and museums to discuss some of the most important current debates (of nation, identity and heritage) and reveals new ways in which we may understand museums, especially in a non-Western context. Kanika Singh is a historian, founder of Delhi Heritage Walks and Director at Centre for Writing & Communication at Ashoka University. Harleen Kaur is a historian and urban studies scholar who recently completed her Joint PhD from National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Shyam Ranganathan, "Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
May 2100:53:28Tap to summarizeWhy have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), Shyam Ranganathan tells the story of moral philosophy and colonialism and reveals the benefits of drawing from a colonized tradition to a create a rigorous logic-based ethics. This is a timely exploration of the the ways in which Western colonialism has structured moral theorizing to insulate itself from criticism. In his account of the domination of the European tradition and the suppression of questions of its colonialism, Ranganathan covers the evolution of metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics in ancient European, Chinese, and Indian traditions of philosophy. We see the presence of white supremacy in the writings of J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, and the importance placed on autonomy and sovereignty in Hobbes and Kant. The European influence of interpretation on our peer review of historical philosophy is evident throughout. Using South Asia as an example Ranganathan examines how colonizers are able to erase moral philosophical history and redefine cultures as religions, judged in terms of their conformity to, or deviation from, the Western tradition, which is treated as secular. His acknowledgment of Yoga as a basic ethical theory introduces us to thinking that recognizes persons as a diverse group, traversing sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, and species. Through this analysis of colonized traditions and ethics, Ranganathan is able to de-colonize moral philosophy by looking outside the colonizing tradition. If we want sophisticated and inclusive ways of thinking about how to live we must turn towards indigenous thought. Shyam Ranganathan is a member of the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research at York University, Toronto, Canada, and founder of the Yoga Philosophy Institute. Dr. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Indian mythology and seasoned online educator. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom where he delivers original courses applying Indian wisdom teachings to modern life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →Kenneth G. Zysk, "South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology" (Brill, 2025)
May 1400:40:48Tap to summarizeSouth Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology (Brill, 2025) examines the history and practice of animal omen divination in South Asia, comparing it to similar traditions in Mesopotamia and classical antiquity. It provides critical editions and translations of relevant texts, focusing on the interpretation of bird calls and behaviour. The study incorporates ornithological and natural historical information to enhance the understanding of the omens and their regional origins. Furthermore, it explores the evolution of omen literature and the transmission of knowledge across cultures and time periods, highlighting the enduring significance of sound and direction in divination practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Transcribe →