New Treasures of India

I’m constantly dazzled by the number and variety of new publications in Indo-Islamic Studies. Announcements of new books flood my inbox every week and each looks more interesting than the last. While I’m in the midst of conjuring up time to read them all (a magic trick that still needs practice), the New Books Network – which offers interviews with authors about their books – is a great way to get a taste of what they’re about. 

For example, I can’t recommend this New Books in Islam interview with Shankar Nair highly enough. In it, he discusses his recent publication, Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2020), which deals with translation, Muslim-Hindu relations in early modern India, metaphysics, and, of course, Persian. If you check out the interview, be sure to listen to the last portion of it, where Nair talks about how the early modern Muslim and Hindu translators whose works he illumines are “doing” religious studies, and what they have to say to contemporary religious studies scholars about the field. Two big points: metaphysics is central to what the translators do, and they also tend to engage in an “imaginative mode, a literary mode, a poetic mode” when engaging with “the other.” That is, even though they’re heavily invested in philosophical arguments, they turn to poetry to talk to people of other religions. Nair asks: “What would it mean to take that kind of mode seriously, if we’re trying to learn from these translators?” A question well worth pondering.

I have a vivid memory of listening to this excellent New Books interview with Lisa Balabanlilar about her book, The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kinship in Mughal India (I.B. Tauris, 2020). It was close to the beginning of lockdown in Greensboro, and I was waiting to have a takeout order from my favorite restaurant placed in the trunk of my car. Everything about the scene seems odd to me now: sitting enclosed in my vehicle, unable to get out for fear of infection (a fear that was, in my case, unfortunately to become a reality a few months later), and yet soaring on the wings of Balabinlilar’s voice to Mughal India, to be introduced to a much misunderstood emperor, one who was “often frank in his assessment of his own failings.” You don’t need to be in the midst of a pandemic to appreciate the interview (or, no doubt, the book), but in my case, the restricted circumstances made it all the more savory.

Finally, as of this writing an interview with Blain Auer about his new book, In the Mirror of Persian Kings: The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was not yet available, but I’m eagerly awaiting one. 

Anyone else a fan of the New Books interviews?