South Asian Studies

Mahatma Gandhi was an anticolonial activist, lawyer, and politician. Less famously, but no less importantly, he was also a back-to-the-land farmer, a founder of communes, and a seeker of utopia. Living with Gandhi: Experiments in Utopia …

Uses the everyday histories of Brahmin clans, communities, and families in a prominent small town in the Indian Himalaya to challenge the assumption that only grand metanarratives such as colonialism and nationalism matter. This everyday …

God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya (Lever Press, 2026) follows the tectonic shift from traditional religious pilgrimage in the early twentieth-century to contemporary pilgrim …

South Asia Before Religion: Reflections on an Anachronistic Concept (Knowledge Commons Works, 2026) critically examines the applicability of the concept of religion to premodern South Asian culture. The book argues that premodern South …

A conversation featuring the editors of the new Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing series Pathika - Studies of South Asian Texts and Traditions (HAS, 2026) Pathika – Sanskrit for "traveler" or "one who follows a path" – is a new series …

With the plurality of Hinduism in mind, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hindu Ethics focuses on the human, sociological and situational ethical framework underpinning Hindu ethics. Chapters go beyond the traditional classical sources-such as …

Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotra/stuti/stava) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, …

Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed …

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by …

Sanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development (Routledge, 2026) is a recollection of the McCartney's journey across 'Sanskritland, ' which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within …