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Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

A Secular Need

Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India

By Jeffrey A. Redding

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States...

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Eating with the World in Mind

By Nico Slate

Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the actual number of snow leopards in the wild...

Making the Modern Slum

The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay

By Sheetal Chhabria

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay,...

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

By Sumit Guha

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting...

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion

Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850

By Sugata Ray

In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray...

Resisting Disappearance

Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir

By Ather Zia

In Kashmir’s frigid winter a woman leaves her door cracked open, waiting for the return of her only son. Every month in a public park in Srinagar, a child remembers her father as she joins...

Unruly Figures

Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala

By Navaneetha Mokkil

The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of...

Holy Science

The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism

By Banu Subramaniam

Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each...

Bhakti and Power

Debating India's Religion of the Heart

By John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, Swapna Sharma

Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as “personal devotion,” bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is...

Living with Oil and Coal

Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian...

Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains

Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas

By Nachiket Chanchani

From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a...

Marrying for a Future

Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War

By Sidharthan Maunaguru

The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants, which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental Europe. In Marrying...

Sensitive Space

Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

By Jason Cons

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging,...

Caring for Glaciers

Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas

By Karine Gagné. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led...

Creating the Universe

Depictions of the Cosmos in Himalayan Buddhism

By Eric Huntington

Winner, 2018 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities

Buddhist representations of the cosmos across nearly two thousand years of history in Tibet, Nepal, and India show that cosmology is a rich language for...

The Gender of Caste

Representing Dalits in Print

By Charu Gupta

Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many...

The Afterlife of Sai Baba

Competing Visions of a Global Saint

By Karline McLain

Nearly a century after his death, the image of Sai Baba, the serene old man with the white beard from Shirdi village in Maharashtra, India, is instantly recognizable to most South Asians (and many Westerners)...

Privileged Minorities

Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India

By Sonja Thomas

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian...