This series brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialisation.
A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as is often the case. There will be a conscious attempt to publish regional studies and bring together scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other parts of South Asia.
This series will consciously initiate synergy between research from within academia and that from outside the formal academy. A focus will be to bring into the mainstream more recently developed disciplines in South Asian studies which have till date remained in the nature of specialised fields: for instance, research on film, media, photography, sport, medicine, environment, to mention a few. The series will address this gap and generate more comprehensive knowledge fields.
By Priyanka Basu
October 23, 2023
This book explores the ‘folk’ performance genre of Kobigaan, a dialogic song-theatre form in which performers verse-duel in contemporary West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. The book shows how the genre, thought to be a nearly extinct form, is still prevalent in the region. The author shows how, ...
By Manisha Sethi
January 20, 2016
The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive ...
Edited
By Panchali Ray
July 25, 2019
Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try ...
Edited
By Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi, Rohit K. Dasgupta
December 08, 2017
An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. ...
Edited
By Virinder S. Kalra, Shalini Sharma
December 08, 2017
This volume looks at the interface between ideology, religion and culture in Punjab in the 20th century, spanning from colonial to post-colonial times. Through a rereading of the history of Punjab and of Punjabi migrant networks the world over, it interrogates the term ‘radicalism’ and its ...
Edited
By Neilesh Bose
March 29, 2017
This book explores the myriad diversities of South Asian Islam from a historical perspective attuned to the lived practices of Muslims in various portions of South Asia, outside of Urdu, Persian, or Arabic language perspectives. These perspectives are, in some cases taken both from literal regions ...
Edited
By Chandrima Chakraborty
May 31, 2017
This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, ...
By Swagato Ganguly
August 25, 2017
This book explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry. It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which ...
By Kenneth McPherson
January 20, 2016
This book traces the social and political history of the Muslims of south India from the later nineteenth century to Independence in 1947, and the contours that followed. It describes a community in search of political survival amidst an ever-changing climate, and the fluctuating fortunes it had in...
By Brian Stoddart
January 20, 2016
This book explains how access to and use of land, water and language helped shape Andhra politics in India from 1850 down to the present day. After independence, the debate over land reform and policies on irrigation has shaped the fortunes of various governments, while the debate over the make-up ...
By Madelaine Healey
December 18, 2015
Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both ...
By Jayanta Kumar Ray
November 06, 2015
This book analyses India’s relations with its neighbours (China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and other world powers (USA, UK, and Russia) over a span of 60 years. It traces the roots of independent India’s foreign policy from the Partition and its fallout, its nascent years under Nehru, and ...