In the 35th episode, I speak to Kasia Paprocki, Associate Professor in Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science on her recent book Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh published by Cornell University Press. The conversation begins by asking about the genesis of the book and the focus on Bangladesh. Then we move to understand why political economy questions should be asked when understanding climate change and its...

In the 34th episode, I speak to Aditya Balasubramanian, Lecturer in Economic History, at Australian National University on his first book Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics published by Princeton University Press. The conversation begins by enquiring about the origins of the project and why focus on Swatantra as an opposition party in post-independence India. Then we cover why this book appears to be the first ever written on economic conservatism in India. The...

In the 33rd episode, I speak to Paul Staniland, Political Scientist at the University of Chicago on his recent book Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation published by Cornell University Press. The book is a theoretically savvy, empirically rich contribution on armed politics or how governments work with armed non-state actors across South Asian countries. The conversation begins by asking Staniland how a second book differs from the first...

In the 32nd episode, I speak to Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur, editors of a new volume The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st century published by Penguin. The collection includes concise chapters from leading scholars of South Asia who write about a person or concept that exemplifies the politics of contemporary India. The conversation begins by asking how the volume began before moving to understand what is ‘new’ and ‘politics’ in their understanding of Indian politics and...

In the 31st and final episode of 2022, I speak to LSE historian Taylor Sherman on her new book Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths published by Princeton University Press in October 2022. The conversation begins by asking Sherman how the book began, what she means by myths that exist around Nehru and how the availability of new sources and archives helped revisiting and reevaluating these longstanding myths. Next, we delve into these myths - that identify Nehru as the ‘architect’ of...

In the 30th episode, I speak to Historian Mircea Raianu at the University of Maryland on his recent book Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism published by Harvard University Press in July 2021. The conversation begins by asking what sparked Raianu to write the book before he describes the materials and resources he accessed and used for the book. Next, we cover the book’s themes that makeup the book's structure and the reasoning behind picking these three themes: Tata’s...

In the 29th episode, I speak to Gowri Vijayakumar, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, on her recent book At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis published by Stanford University Press in 2021. The book shows how India’s AIDS response from the 1990s onward presented opportunities for social and political mobilisation for sexually marginalised groups, in turn, affecting the Indian government's AIDS strategy and...

In the 28th episode, I speak to Vidya Krishnan, journalist and author of The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis shaped History published by Hachette. The book’s a comprehensive and compelling social history of Tuberculosis ranging from the 19th century to its recent resurgence, especially across the developing world. The conversation begins by asking what prompted Vidya to begin working on the book and whether it began as a book on TB. Next, we cover the book’s critical framing that places and...

In the 27th episode, I speak to Andrea Wright, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary, on her recent book Between Dreams and Ghosts Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021). The book's an ethnography of Indian migration to the Gulf, focusing on workers in oil and gas projects in UW and Kuwait. Around a million Indians travel to the Gulf per year to work on such projects, largely men without formalized...

In the 26th episode, I speak to Bharat Venkat, Assistant Professor at Institute for Society and Genetics in the Department of History, UCLA, on his new book At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021). The book’s an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India that asks fundamental questions about what it means to be cured of a disease and what happens when cures don’t pan out. The conversation begins by asking Venkat what he means by cures and how we, as a society,...

In the 25th episode, I speak to Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Assistant Professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program at Georgetown University on his new book Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (OUP, 2022). The book shows how Indian bureaucrats used ‘patches’ to resolve pesky last miles problems in the implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee program (NREGA) in Andhra Pradesh. Borrowing the 'patching' concept,...

In the 24th episode, I speak to Dwai Banerjee, Associate Professor, MIT, on his recent book Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi published by Duke University Press in 2020. The book is an ethnography of cancer in urban India. It focuses on the efforts of individuals in Delhi who negotiate and manage the disease, battling inept health systems and fragile kinship and community ties. The conversation begins by asking why the book focuses on cancer and whether it began as a study...

In the 23rd episode, I speak to Ravinder Kaur, Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen on her recent book Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India published by Stanford University Press in 2020. The book examines how various publicity campaigns enabled the Indian state to transform India into an attractive global investment destination. The conversation begins by asking how Kaur became interested in...

In the 22nd episode, I speak to Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies, Drexel University and soon to be Professor and Chair of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zurich on her recent book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The conversation begins by asking Bhattacharyya about how she arrived at this topic and issue before moving to understand how historians and...

In the 21st episode, I speak to Sandeep Mertia, PhD Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University on his new edited volume Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India published by the Institute of Network Cultures (2021). The edited volume brings together chapters from fifteen interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners who provide cutting analyses on India’s current computational culture encapsulated by big data and its historical and...

In the 20th episode, I speak to Swetha S Ballakrishnen, Assistant Professor of Law, UC Irvine on their recent book Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India's Professional Elite published by Princeton University Press in January 2021. The book explores the unintentional production of seemingly feminist outcomes in India, focusing on elite law firms that offer an oasis for women in a largely hostile, predominantly male industry. Using interviews, Accidental Feminism...

In the nineteenth episode, I speak to Pratinav Anil, PhD Candidate, University of Oxford about his recently co-authored book (with Christophe Jaffrelot) India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–1977 published by Hurst in December 2020. The book examines Indira and Sanjay Gandhi's authoritarianism, Jayaprakash Narayan's muddled politics, how the RSS gained respectability, how the Indian state, business and labour adapted to the changes Indira Gandhi wrought, and the causes and end of...

In the eighteenth episode, I speak to Pradip Ninan Thomas, Associate Professor, University of Queensland, about his recent book The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and Transnational Pressures published by Oxford University Press in 2019. The book situates and locates Digital India in a global and local context by identifying the pressures, local and transnational, affecting India’s digital trajectory. The conversation begins by tracing Pradip’s journey with this book...

In the seventeenth episode, I speak to Kate Imy, a historian at the University of North Texas, about her recent book Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army, published by Stanford University Press in 2019. The book explores how the military culture, created by the British, spawned new dialogues and dynamics between soldiers and civilian communities, including Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. Colonial authorities had to respect and incorporate certain social and religious...

In the sixteenth episode, I speak to Himanshu Jha, Lecturer and Research Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University on his recent book Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The book presents an alternate narrative of India’s 2005 Right to Information (RTI) Act that transformed how the Indian state operated. Moving beyond narratives that stress the role of the social movements and political...

In the fifteenth episode, I speak to Ali Raza, Historian at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on his recent book Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The book maps and reveals the stories of individuals in Colonial India - dissidents, migrant workers, students and peasants, who through various networks tried to make the world more egalitarian during a tumultuous interwar period. Shaped by utopian...

In the fourteenth episode, I speak to Sarah Besky, cultural anthropologist at Cornell University on her recent book Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea published by the U of C Press in 2020. The book asks what the role of quality is in contemporary capitalism and how a product like a bag of tea is understood and judged for its quality. These questions are answered by zooming into different spaces where mass market black tea is made and processed in Eastern India. The conversation...

In the thirteenth episode, I speak to Joseph McQuade, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, on his recent book A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The book demonstrates how terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws in the 19th and early 20th centuries. McQuade traces the genealogies, trends, and events that influenced the...

In the thirteenth episode, I speak to Priya Atwal, British historian of empire, on her recent book Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2020. The books shines fresh light on the Sikh empire (1799-1849), transcending prevailing interpretations that focus wholly on the founding father Maharajah Ranjit Singh and not the royal family, queens and prices, who  contributed to the empire’s spectacular rise and fall. Atwal, an Oxford...