BASAS is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2026 BASAS Book Prize. From a very strong field, the following books have been shortlisted by the judging panel. The shortlisted books will now be carefully considered by the judges. A decision on the winner will be announced at the 2026 BASAS Annual Lecture (date and time to be confirmed).

The Shortlisted Books

Timothy Cooper, Moral atmospheres: Islam and media in a Pakistani marketplace (Columbia University Press)

This is an anthropological study of a well-known commercial street off the bustling Mall Road in Lahore, home to traders specializing in the sale of electronics of all kinds. The author’s participant-led study offers rich insights into how a media atmosphere and its thresholds absorb the ambivalence of ethics and morality in Pakistan. Particularly novel is the use of the everyday Urdu word mahaul to define what could be called a cultural environment.

Md Azmeary Ferdoush, Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge University Press)

This is an account of the erstwhile enclaves, one of the oddest political legacies of Empire. It explores what happened as their residents became full citizens when India and Bangladesh swapped their tiny islands of marooned citizens. The enclaves are fascinating anomalies in an era of nation-states, and this book uses their example to explore what it means to be a citizen whose state has only just owned you.

David Jackman, Syndicates and societies: Criminal politics in Dhaka (Cambridge University Press)

A study of criminal politics in Dhaka, this book combines the detail of lives lived on the lawless streets with the broader yet hidden structures of organized crime or syndicates. It enables us to make a remarkable shift from seeing organized crime as a failure of political order to recognizing that it can be fundamental to how it is organized.

Arsalan Khan, The Promise of Piety: Islam and the politics of moral order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press)

There was a great and compelling clarity and focus about this book, an ethnography of the Tablighi Jamaat Islamic movement in Pakistan and its method of ‘dawat’ – a form of preaching by example. The book felt like it achieved something rare: an insight into how some men are seeking solutions to the world’s ‘moral chaos’ that manages to demystify yet also complicate the lives and worldviews and realities of the people studied.

Farhana Afrin Rahman, After the Exodus: Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Rohingya Refugee Camps (Cambridge University Press)

How refugees fleeing genocide in Myanmar remake and retell their lives in the Bangladesh camps is the focus of this brief but powerful book. Through its feminist lens, it offers an account of lives rarely glimpsed and little understood, while also challenging developmentalist and humanitarian understandings about the agency even these most unfortunate and vulnerable women manage to exert.

Anuradha Sajjanhar, The New Experts (Cambridge University Press)

This readable and well paced book sheds new light on how the BJP manages to stay in power by building new social coalitions, with the help of a new crop of experts. It argues that the BJP should not be understood purely as an ideological project by examining the party’s ability to effectively harness intellectual and technocratic resources (through think tanks, IT cells, and consultancies) that has allowed it to consolidate its electoral power. An important contribution to the understanding of the workings of populism.

Sudev Sheth, Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press)

A striking contribution to the economic history of India and globally, that traces in close detail the story of one financier family from Gujarat that provided the funding in the latter part of the Mughal Empire. The book suggests a novel thesis for the collapse of the Mughals: that their troubled relations with their bankers, at a time of imperial adventures that saw them greatly overextended, also affected their ability to manage the political crises that emerged.