In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart–and fled.

The Japanese, of course, did not invade in 1942. But between the attack on Pearl Harbor and, say, mid-1942 when the Allies held back the Japanese advance, both the Indian colonial establishment and pro-independence activists thought carefully about the possibility of invasion—and how to respond to it, if it happened.

Mukund Padmanabhan writes about this panic in his first bookThe Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024). In this interview, Mukund and I talk about the fierce debates in India about how to respond to the threat of a Japanese invasion.

Mukund Padmanabhan is the former Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers. He was appointed to the post in 2016, after having been Editor of the business daily, Hindu BusinessLine. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, near Chennai.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Flap of 1942. 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.

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Contemplative Studies and Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration (Routledge, 2023) is one of the first wide-ranging academic surveys of the major types and categories of Jain praxis. It covers a breadth of scholarly viewpoints that reflect both the variegation in terms of spiritual practices within the Jain traditions as well as the Jain hermeneutical perspectives, which are employed in understanding its rich diversity.

The volume illustrates a complex and nuanced understanding of the multifaceted category of Jain religious thought and practice. It offers a rare intrareligious dialogue within Jain traditions and at the same time, significantly broadens and enriches the field of Contemplative Studies to include an ancient, ascetic, non-theistic tradition. Meditation, yoga, ritual, prayer are common to all Indic spiritual traditions. By investigating these diverse, yet overlapping, categories one might obtain a sophisticated understanding of religious traditions that originally emerged in South Asia. Essays in this book demonstrate how these forms of praxis in Jainism, and the philosophies that anchor those practices, are interrelated, and when brought into dialogue, help to foster new tools for understanding a complex and variegated tradition such as Jain Dharma.

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In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu bankers in the daily affairs of Islamic, Hindu, and early colonial forms of Indian government.

Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge UP, 2024) features brazen emperors, sickly princes, irate governors, and quick-witted matriarchs who commanded banking networks across cities. It explores unlikely rivalries, flaky friendships, and daring tycoons who gambled vast sums as a way to hedge against political uncertainty.

Sheth employs unconventional sources to tap into the thrilling lives of moneyed persons. Excerpts from Persian diaries, Gujarati poems, French trading manuals, Marathi letters, Sanskrit hymns, and Dutch shipping records tell new tales and are presented in English translation for the very first time.

Spanning several political dynasties and still thriving today as a billion-dollar family firm in its fourteenth generation, the entrepreneurs featured in this book help us see state power and social change through fresh eyes. How did capitalists outsmart politicians, and what insights can we gain for our own times?

You can get 20% off the price of this book with code BRE2023 at Cambridge University Press.

Brittany Puller is a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines caste, kinship, and community in the making of Sikh misls in eighteenth-century Punjab.

gupta.html">Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh.

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The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates the boundaries of this community. 

Khan theorizes the various modalities of relationality that mark this movement from its sonic and ritual dimensions, especially as it relates to dawat or preaching, to its kinship and ethical ones. Dawat is an analytical tool to map some of the ways in which piety and morality are cultivated in public, private, and domestic spheres by the men of the Tablighi movement. In the end, Tablighi’s ethical worldviews unsettle liberal sensibilities and approaches to Islam (religion) and secularism (non-religion), modernity, sovereignty and much more. This book will be of interest to those think about South Asia, piety movements, anthropology of Islam, Islamic reformism, secularism, and politics and much more.

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The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled with thrilling battles, flying monkeys, and ten-headed demons, the work, composed almost 3,000 years ago, recounts Prince Rama’s exile and his odyssey to recover his abducted wife, Sita, and establish a utopian kingdom. Now, the definitive English translation of the critical edition of this classic is available in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation (Princeton UP, 2022).

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What does the Miss Tibet beauty pageant tell us about what it means to be Tibetan in a globalized world? And what understandings of Tibetan culture does it convey? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pema Choedon about representations of Tibet and Tibetan culture on the global stage from the vantage point of the Miss Tibet beauty pageant. While such pageants are often thought of as an example of “low-brow culture” and a site of women’s objectification by the male gaze, Choedon shows how one can also see them as arenas where cultural meanings are produced, consumed, and rejected, and where local and global, and ethnic and national cultural forms are engaged and showcased.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

Pema Choedon holds a PhD degree from the University of Tartu in Estonia, with a thesis on the construction of Tibet in the diaspora.

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A candid conversation with renowned Sanskritist and online teacher Antonia Ruppel on her love of the language, teaching philosophy, views on academia, and online programs, here and here.

Antonia Ruppel is a researcher on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax. She did her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently the Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages at Cornell University. Her research interests include comparative philology, syntax, compounding, the history of linguistics, and language pedagogy.

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Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, the story of Rāma was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Rāmopākhyāna, which comprises chapters 258--275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahābhārata. Peter Scharf's  Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata (Routledge, 2023) is suitable for students who have completed an introductory Sanskrit course to continue reading Sanskrit on their own, but it may also be used in a second-year Sanskrit course, or by beginning Sanskrit students. 

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Professor Gavin Flood of Oxford University discusses new insights on tantra to be released in an upcoming publication stemming from his Continuing Studies teaching at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Flood's online Tantra course is here. 

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The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, Robertson argues instead that, in these texts, personhood and the “world” (loka) are interrelated concepts. He investigates how persons were understood to expand to the fill the horizons of their world, attending to ritual-political, aesthetic, yogic, and medicinal techniques deployed for this purpose.

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