While international focus has been on armed violence and Rohingya refugee flows from Rakhine state, this article pays attention to the myriad forms of ‘everyday discrimination’ that Muslim Rohingya people have experienced over a prolonged time. These forms of discrimination were observed by the author and reported by Rohingya informants in three areas of Rakhine state during research conducted in 2015. The article argues that systemic discrimination against Rohingya people can be understood as the violent enactment of bordering processes by both state and non-state actors at multiple scales, thus contributing to border governance. Bordering processes can be observed at the national level through the construction of citizenship in law and documentation; at the sub-national level through the restriction of travel and mobility at the township and village levels in Rakhine state; at the household level through household registrations and the control of births, marriages, and family relationships; as well as at the individual level through arrests, detention, and acts of violence. The border is enacted through such processes, with Rohingya people treated as an embodiment of both a political boundary between Myanmar and Bangladesh, and a social boundary constructing the Muslims as ‘fearsome and disgusting others’ by the country's non-Rohingya groups, particularly by the majority Bamar Buddhist population.

Love has many meanings. The papers published in this issue and first presented at an interdisciplinary workshop in Cambridge were based on this simple premiss; yet if one starts exploring it, one encounters a host of methodological, historical and generic questions that considerably complicate matters. What relationship do concepts of love have to their own societies? What happens when concepts live on in different socio-historical contexts? Do concepts overlap (śrngāra, ίshq, ‘love’), or do they occupy different areas of meaning? What happens when authors play with a voice of the opposite sex? And when the gender of the author or performer changes, do, for example, female voices reproduce male discourse or introduce elements of heterogeneity? What happens when contexts change, when commercial entertainment and print replace the court or an exclusive circle of connoisseurs? Have pre-modern concepts and tensions survived in modern society, or have new ones arisen? How do modern authors and individuals, female and male, react to and use traditional idioms? Has the modern state and its promise of individual rights made ‘love’ easier or more difficult? What are the actual possible spaces for love in contemporary South Asian society?

From the lens of two Macanese publics, this study rethinks cosmopolitanism as a diverse identity and pursuit that can vary from one individual to another. It complicates what we know about polyglot Asian publics often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions. I argue that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to shifting global contexts, generational differences, and personal experience. On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework. My first subject, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques, saw Hong Kong as a liberal ground to disseminate Darwinism across southern China's Lusophone public sphere during the 1880s, whereas Hong Kong-born José Pedro Braga worked to preach an internationalist vision of racial equality through a wider Anglophone public sphere and an emerging transnational associational culture in the early twentieth century. This study also aims to further our understanding regarding Hong Kong as a vibrant port city and explore the diversity of cosmopolitan publics in the context of transitioning internal and external worlds.

This article charts several historical paths, hitherto underexplored, through the Hindi or ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire. Focusing on the ‘long eighteenth century (circa 1695–1808)’, it tracks their remarkable ascendance as an institutional network for mobile and migrant Indian Sufi pilgrims. From Istanbul to the provinces, the article demonstrates how Naqshbandis and Qadiris on the Hajj circuit drew on local channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and inter-state linkages to forge unique identities as ‘trans-imperial subjects’ in an age of decentralization in the Ottoman world. I argue that central to their social success was the creation of new corporate regimes of itinerant piety. But first, I place the little-known lodges at the heart of a specific shift in early modern attitudes to identity, as the story behind ‘Hindi’ beckons wider inquiry into emergent differences among Sufi pilgrims in the Ottoman empire.

The paper discusses the effective operation of money and credit among Europeans in Calcutta around 1800, arguing for the importance of informal processes and ties of friendship that facilitated, regulated, and enforced agreements, helping both to tide over individuals in times of economic stress and to underwrite the provision and transfer of capital. The argument is advanced by a detailed case-study of debts owed by one resident—Aaron Upjohn—to another, the diarist, Richard Blechynden, amid a web of acquaintance, officialdom, and law that variously ensured that the debts were honoured. It is defined as a support system among acquaintances, necessitated in part by shortage of money and abundance of risk.

This article examines the ways in which rural elite collaborators mobilized recruits for the British Army during the First World War. It thus not only increases knowledge of Punjab's military history, but adds to the understanding of collaboration as a process involving competitive groups in which elites manipulated the process for their own ends. The case study material drawn from the Shahpur district of the colonial Punjab argues that while there may have been a degree of indoctrination into the colonial state's values, it was mainly the desire to use its patronage to bolster family influence or to transform local hierarchies that was the key factor in securing willing collaborators. The competition for local power and influence provided a local dynamic to the collaborative process. The state could of course take advantage of this competition to serve its interests, just as the Punjabi tribal chiefs could utilize state patronage to beat off rivals to their power. Collaboration was thus a dynamic two-way process, rather than, as it is often portrayed, a top-down, one-way relationship.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and self-contained political entities. Premodern and early modern west and south Asia is most productively approached and analyzed as an interactive continuum.

In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’, travelled widely across India to record encounters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān's universalist project reflects a widely held theory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse populations was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article provides a close reading of the Dabistān's shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expressions of ‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān's project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revelation as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the ‘religio duplex phenomenon’ in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period.

The free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance—
Those shackled by seeking liberation are not truly free.
For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?—
There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād).
—‘Mūbad’ Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s ah/1650s ce)1

This article explores how local civil servants produce the conditions of possibility for bureaucratic authority in Nepal's contested political environment of war and post-war ‘transition’. Specifically, it examines the everyday practices of local civil servants as they attempt to influence the distribution of such public resources as agricultural inputs and local government budgets. The article asks: how do local civil servants produce the authority necessary to get things done in the face of changing local government structures and rival authority claims from both wartime Maoist People's Governments and resurgent patronage politics in the post-war period? In a context characterized as ‘ordinary extraordinary’, the article suggests that local civil servants employ a form of practice that has been termed ‘tactical government’ and proposes three distinct forms of this practice. However, the article also argues that tactical practice tells only part of the story and that it can be insightful to enrich our understanding of tactical government with an analysis of more general life projects. Bureaucratic practices are also motivated by factors such as the significance of the contested resource and paternal ideas of ‘the common good’. Such a suggestion is in line with recent work on everyday lives in situations of protracted violent conflict and insecurity, and on the role of culture in producing civil servants/services. Looking at these two forms of practice together, in particular their interconnections, gives us a fuller account of how authority is produced. Furthermore, it allows more nuanced and detailed perspectives into the complex process of state-making.

How do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making work. In this review, I explore the powerful analytics developed in three recent books in urban studies: Anindita Ghosh's historical work on colonial Calcutta, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860–1920 (2016); Asher Ghertner's geographical analysis of neoliberal Delhi, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (2015); and Nikhil Anand's ethnographic account of restive publics and citizenship in Mumbai, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (2017). This recent scholarship on urbanization has moved away from earlier rubrics of segregation, biopolitical disciplining, and resistance to offer rich accounts of the frictions that make and unmake political societies, critical tools to study the life of law in post-colonial cities, infrastructures as sites for the production of citizenship, and new financial and legal assemblages of risk-management, building lobbies, and syndicates around which urban politics is swirling. These accounts also deepen our understanding of the long genealogy of the contemporary moment, including populism, electoral politics, and post-colonial state-making. Indeed, the future of urban studies in a rapidly urbanizing world should be one that helps us to understand the nature of politics, contestations around legalities, environmental crises, and new financial geographies of power and dispossession.

This article argues that China's New Culture Movement was not a movement, but a buzzword. It was coined by little-known intellectuals in the summer of 1919 and then used by them to sell their own, long-standing agendas. Even though they declared famous intellectuals such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu to be the movement's ‘centre’ and inspiration, some of them were as, if not more, important in shaping the discourses surrounding the expression ‘New Culture Movement’. Drawing upon newspapers, journals, and conference reports, this article shows this using the example of two case studies, both of which marketed their agendas as ‘New Culture Movement’: the Jiangsu Educational Association, which was a political-educational group in Jiangsu; and Chinese Christian intellectuals around the Apologetic Group in Beijing.

Regarding the New Culture Movement as a buzzword addresses some puzzles about it. It explains why it has proven difficult to agree on a starting and endpoint for the New Culture Movement. It also illustrates why such a huge variety of ideas, whose complexity has become ever more evident in recent scholarship, was subsumed under the one headline of ‘New Culture Movement’.

INDIAN hill stations have often been portrayed as islands of European settlement, providing colonists with a retreat, both from the heat and the native culture of the plains.British planners meant them to be English enclaves, but the image owes not a little to the innumerable references available in accounts written by the British in India. Hill stations, with their thickly wooded hills and swirling mist, afforded colonists an opportunity to build around themselves a replica of English life. The presence of European women in large numbers at hill stations enhanced the image. They, more than their men, tended to withdraw within the closed circle of European society. It was an endless succession of balls, archery, fetes, picnics and amateur theatre. Their diaries, letters and novels covering almost a century, hardly ever went beyond an account of the rounds of social engagements. The view has been perpetuated by fiction. Simla had its Rudyard Kipling, and that hill station was peopled by larger-than-life images created by the writer in the 1880s. But so vivid was the evocation that British visitors seemed to search for them in Simla even a quarter of a century later.

This article offers a critical reappraisal of the Maoist state's response to the 1954 Yangzi floods. It uses a variety of sources, including previously classified government reports and oral history testimony, to challenge the official narrative. It argues that, far from being a remarkable victory for the new government, the flood was a humanitarian catastrophe that caused almost 150,000 deaths. Government hydraulic policies were partly to blame, as the vast majority of disaster victims were located in rural areas that were flooded deliberately in order to protect cities. In addition to revealing the true scale of the flood, this article uses the disaster as a prism to examine the early Maoist state. The government's combative environmental policies turned disaster governance into a war on water. This approach had certain benefits, particularly in terms of organizing an effective urban relief campaign. Unfortunately, campaign politics fostered an atmosphere of distrust, which encouraged many citizens to resist disaster-prevention policies. The example of the 1954 flood reveals the profound impact that a political context can have upon the outcome of a supposedly natural disaster.

The short history of the Taiwanese Communist Party (Taiwan gongchandang 台 灣 共 產 黨) (1928–1931) offers a window into the negotiative polity of international communism during the Third Period (1928–1934). The Party was established during the time when the Comintern intensified its operations in colonies and promoted the organization of communist parties there. Its demise was the result of government suppression that occurred as a reaction to their increased public activity in 1931, allegedly at the direction of the Comintern. This paper examines the Comintern's role in the Taiwanese communist movement and shows that the Taiwanese communists were active agents (rather than passive tools) in their relationship with the Comintern.

The decade preceding the First World War, with the Younghusband expedition, the Chinese forward movement in Tibet of 1909–11, and the Simla Conference of 1913–14, is naturally the period of Anglo-Tibetan relations that has been most thoroughly covered by historians. It could indeed be argued that, on the surface at least, the relationship forged between British India and Tibet by the conclusion of the Simla Conference remained unchanged and largely unchallenged until the transfer of power to an independent Indian Government. This seeming stability, however, masks a debate over Tibetan policy within the British and Indian Governments that was particularly intense during the years 1919–21, and which reflected Britain's nervousness over the political instability of north Asia as a whole during and after the First World War. Before the First World War, the ‘problem’ of Tibet was largely a parochial issue for the British Indian Government, but at the conclusion of the First World War this ‘problem’ had become an important ingredient of a much wider debate on the overall direction of post-war British policy in Asia.

The nature of British interests in the Far East in the 1930s meant that both the Treasury and the Board of Trade were necessarily closely involved with the making of foreign policy. While Foreign Office officials resented this intrusion into their domain, they were themselves disdainful of so-called ‘technical’ considerations connected with tariffs or currency reform, and were willing to leave them to the specialists. Under the dynamic impetus of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Warren Fisher, the Treasury, encouraged by the apparent abnegation of the Foreign Office, made a bold and aggressive foray between 1933 and 1936 into realms of foreign policy-making hitherto regarded as the exclusive sphere of the professional diplomat.

Mayama Seika was born in Sendai in 1878 and came to Tokyo, after an unsuccessful start to a medical career, to try his hand at writing in 1903. A young writer needed a patron and literary mentor, if he was to have any hope of rising in the bundan, and Mayama set about finding one. He was rebuffed by Tokutomi Kenjirō, attached himself to Satō Kōroku for about one year and finally became a monkasei of Oguri Fūyō in 1905. Under Fūyō's tutelage, although the small difference in their ages and Mayama's strong character precluded a normal sensei/deshi relationship, Mayama Seika became a Naturalist writer of some note at the time. In six years, between 1905 and 1911, he published nearly one hundred short stories, most in prestigious literary magazines. Frank description of life in the raw was a requirement of Naturalist authors and many of Mayama's works were strong in this quality. In particular his accounts of life in poverty-stricken agricultural communities of the Tōhoku area, observed with a doctor's eye, and his accurate reproduction of the dialects of that region have been singled out as distinctive contributions to this genre of literature.

The history of India's trade has attracted the attention of researchers for several decades now. But in the seventies and eighties our knowledge of the history of India's trading world has been especially enriched by a spate of literature on the subject. Among the issues that have received special attention from historians, the relationship between merchants and politics must be singled out as a theme that has recurred in the investigations and analyses of scholars. This issue of the connection between merchants and politics has yielded different conclusions depending on the regional and chronological dimensions of each study, as well as on the specific circumstances that molded the history of the regions that have figured in studies of Indian trade history.

The peasant farmers of Taishan County in southern China's Guangdong Province have created a pattern of village settlement which, using very limited resources, has produced an agricultural landscape and village environment that is a model of ecological integration. The pattern serves both the social and functional needs of the inhabitants by taking advantage of simple microclimatic modifications and the efficient use and recycling of resources. The result is a pattern of small dense villages set in a landscape that is highly evolved both aesthetically and ecologically.