Set in the eastern state of Odisha in a district known as the “Somalia of India,” Everyday State and Politics in India: Government in the Backyard in Kalahandi (Routledge 2018) studies a development project in a region iconic for development failure. Drawing on rich fieldwork with a watershed development project in district Kalahandi, anthropologist Sailen R ... Show More
Aug 28
Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of vic ... Show More
56m 54s
Aug 27
Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden eds., "Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia" (Helsinki UP, 2026)
In our recent conversation about Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia, the editors Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden reflect on the need to move beyond treating the pandemic as a singular, isolated shock. Our discussion reflected on the deeper mechanics of ... Show More
55m 19s
Aug 25
Niharika Pandit, "Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday pol ... Show More
59m 28s
Dec 2024
Mukulika Banerjee, "Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in ... Show More
1h 4m
Apr 2023
Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Reform in India" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers the first ethnographically grounded perspective on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), which was promulgated as a wel ... Show More
1h 7m
Feb 2012
Marcus Franke, “War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas” (Routledge, 2011)
North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India (or even South Asia) proper.’ A densely wooded, sparsely populated tract of hills ( ... Show More
1h 8m
Dec 2023
Sahana Ghosh, "A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands" (U California Press, 2023)
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (U California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national bord ... Show More
1h 10m
Mar 2023
Uddipana Goswami, "Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency" (Routledge, 2022)
Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency (Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally.
In ... Show More
56m 43s
Mar 2024
Noah L. Nathan, "The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions where the state is otherwise scarce can have outsize, long-lasting effects on society. The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Po ... Show More
52m 9s
Dec 2024
Azad Essa, "Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel" (Pluto Press, 2023)
Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi's India and the governments from which it has drawn ... Show More
1h 14m
Mar 2019
Sayaka Chatani, "Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2018)
Sayaka Chatani’s Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018) tackles the fraught question of how and why young men in marginalized and rural areas of Japan and its colonies became emotionally invested in the proj ... Show More
37m 44s