As a regular host at New Books Network, a podcast channel that values public scholarship, I interview scholars on their recently published academic books. My questions range from what prompted them to study South Asia by explicitly focusing on media industries, cultures, gender, politics, literature, cinema, affect, and memory.
Although I cover a broad range of disciplines, I aim to foreground the journeys, processes and challenges of researching South Asia, South Asianness and South Asians. In such ways, I hope to expand the limits of academic conversations and make them accessible to all.
You could click on the link below each book to access the interview.
2025
1. 16th January: Javaria Farooqi’s Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan. Bloomsbury.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK4457370519
2024
2. 29th December: Oishik Sircar’s Ways of Remembering. Cambridge University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK1399312039
3. 7th October: Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray’s Resistance in Indian Documentary Film. Edinburgh University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK6718868977
4. 14th September: Salma Siddique’s Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940 – 1960. Cambridge University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK4328189948
5. 7th July: Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India. University of California Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK6521765833
6. 29th June: Swapnil Rai’s Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema. Cambridge University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK6160635595
7. 26th June: Ishita Tiwary’s Video Culture in India: The Analog Era. Oxford University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK2041184659
8. 17th June: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Sound In Indian Film and Audiovisual Media. Edinburgh University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK5578754861
9. 10th April: Bishnupriya Ghosh’s The Virus Touch. Duke University Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK9314544758
10. 14th February: Kartik Nair’s Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror. University of California Press.
https://megaphone.link/NBNK8239814498
2023
11. 15th October: Smith Mehta’s The New Screen Ecology in India. Bloomsbury, British Film Institute.