New Books in Indian Religions

In this interview we discuss The Unraveling Heart: Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi (Columbia UP, 2025). Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic world. Abdülmecid II—who had been elected to the position by the Republic of Turkey just two years before—decamped for Europe. What followed was a bold plan by Indian Muslims and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world’s richest men at the time, to potentially revive the caliphate, as told in Imran Mulla’s book The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince (Hurst, 2025) Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Indian Caliphate. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Jain tradition, with roots in ancient India but now spread across the globe, is anything but static and monolithic. In Engaged Jainism, an interdisciplinary cohort of academics and practitioners explore the manifold ways in which Jains and Jain ideas become engaged in social worlds—historically, philosophically, philologically, and anthropologically. Following the legacy of Engaged Buddhism, the groundbreaking volume edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, this volume shows how Jain traditions become engaged in everyday life, puts Jain ideas in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, and examines the ways in which Jains have maintained Jain identity in their engagement with other religious traditions and cultural influences in the past and present. Across all of these disciplinary approaches, Jainism emerges as a dynamic, protean, and diverse tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Kannada language boasts an ongoing literary tradition spanning more than a millennium, with a rich array of social positions and roles, religious traditions, and poetic styles that developed over the dramatic history of the region. Yet translations from premodern Kannada to English have been inconsistent, with only a handful of works that have endured. Stories of Shiva's Saints is the first English translation of selected stories from a thirteenth-century text by Hampeya Harihara that sheds light on the rapid spread of Shiva devotion in the region through edified biographies of figures who lived a few decades earlier, and the stories' historical significance is matched by their gripping plots and emotional expressivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions