Yogis, Bhaktas & Sufis: Religious Traditions in Medieval North India, c. 1000-1450, Subin Sabu (Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House, June 2025)

Yoga has become highly popular worldwide and is generally received with enthusiasm in the western world. But it is mysterious in nature as, several interpretations have been offered by scholars from antiquity to recent times. Earlier, Yoga was practiced in the spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical sense in Indic traditions. In the medieval period, it was transformed by Hathayoga where physical exertions were applied to achieve the path of Samadhi. Also, it influenced two mainstream traditions prevalent in north India, Hinduism and Islam, in creating their respective mystical movements.

Fagen: An African American Renegade in the Philippine-American War, Michael Morey (University of Wisconsin Press, paperback edition, July 2025)

In 1898, during an era of racial terror at home and imperial conquest abroad, the United States sent troops to suppress the Filipino struggle for independence. The deployment included three regiments of the famed African American “Buffalo Soldiers.” Among them was David Fagen, a twenty-year-old private in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, who achieved notoriety after deserting to join the Filipino guerrillas.

China’s Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival, Paul P Mariani (Harvard University Press, July 2025)

An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.

Siva Choy: The Life of a Singaporean Legend, John Halliwell (March 2025)

Best known in Singapore as the writer and performer of the smash-hit comedy album “Why U So like dat?’, Siva Choy was a multi-talented musician, journalist, stand-up comedian, movie actor and teacher. An intimate and revealing new book paints an affectionate portrait of a life filled with pioneering artistic endeavour.

Eke: Poems, Wahidah Tambee (Gaudy Boy, July 2025)

A visual enactment of attempts at articulating, Eke is the at-tempt-ation towards meaning. What does the feeling of holding your words and thoughts back—stuck and struck in a state of percolation, a plasma state of signification—feel like? What does it look like for ambivalence and divergence to converge during the moment of articulation, when all word-opportunities collide at once, like wildly unspooling threads, like heavy raindrops on a glass surface racing from one fork to the next?

Power, Resistance, Ideology and the State: Charles Tripp and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East, Toby Dodge, Daniel Neep, Ali M Ansari (eds) (Gingko, May 2025)

The work of Charles Tripp—professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for over three decades—has shaped a distinct approach to the study of Middle East politics: an analytical sensibility that is empirically rich, theoretically insightful, and historically sensitive.

Living Outside the Village, Ma Thanegi (ThingsAsian Press, March 2025)

Ma Thanegi’s roots are deeply planted in Myanmar. She’s the great-niece of a noble scoundrel who once ornamented the court of King Thibaw, her country’s last king, and the great-granddaughter of one of the last queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The daughter of a sophisticated, mercurial intellectual and the brilliant, tempestuous beauty who was his wife, Ma Thanegi has spent her life in Myanmar with the ambition of revealing its beauties and virtues to the rest of the world. She’s achieved her goal through her writing, with six books written in English and published internationally, but until now her own story has been told only in fragments.

The Malay Experiment: The Colonial Origins and Homegrown Heroics of The Malay Regiment, Stuart Lloyd (CatMatDog Storytelling, March 2025)

It started as a British experiment in 1933: Could the Malays form an effective modern fighting force? From an experimental company of 25 raw recruits, within 10 years the regiment created legendary heroes in their gallant last stand against the Japanese in Singapore, February 1942.