What is ‘early modern’ about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic ‘Other’ that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the ‘Sacred Games of Śiva’ as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India.

This article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium-distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens, and knowledge from China. The colonial state's experimental tea plantations were directly connected to the devastation of the opium trade. The multiple uses of Jardine Matheson's drug-distribution networks and skilled employees becomes evident upon examination of their role in facilitating Chinese migration. The recruitment of tea cultivators from China in the 1830s also impacted on colonial concepts of racial hierarchy and the perceived contrast between savagery and civilization. Ultimately, Jardine Matheson's extraction of skilled labour from the China coast informs our understanding of the evolving private networks that became crucial to British imperialism in Asia, and through which labour, capital, people, information, and ideas could be exchanged.

Why should we care about giving in modern South Asia, and why now? These are among the questions at the forefront of this special issue whose contributors explore charitable practices and philanthropic transformations in diverse historical and cultural contexts across the colonial/post-colonial divide at a time when trade liberalization, the transformation of state welfare-ism, and the consolidation of a global economy has led to a deepening of neo-liberal regimes across the region as well as political and religious fundamentalisms. We also write at a time when non-governmental organizations have proliferated across the region, as has the discourse regarding humanitarian aid for a diverse range of development projects. This special issue, then, seeks to throw light on what is new and different, and what persists in the context of the region's long and well-established traditions of giving. Who gives and toward what purposes and with what stated intentions? How have acts of giving changed over time and across cultural, religious, and regional complexes? What are the institutional frameworks within which specifically local, national and regional mechanisms and instruments of giving intersect with global practices? How do the economic and financial incentives interact with ethical and affective imperatives to give?

One of the central questions driving my research as a political scientist is understanding why ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic states revolves around one identity rather than another. Why, for example, do some regions of a diverse polity like India experience recurrent religious conflict whereas other regions experience severe caste conflict? In my book, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, I argue that these patterns of conflict are shaped by the legacies of British rule, especially the enduring divide between directly ruled provinces and indirectly ruled princely states. I contend that British administrators, in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion that they interpreted as a religious (Muslim) uprising, began to emphasize caste and tribal identities in their provincial governments, creating policies of ethnic stratification that led to increased caste and tribal conflict over the long run. Princely rulers, on the other hand, did the opposite: they implemented ethnic policies on the basis of religion, thereby creating legacies of communal violence. I defend this argument using archival research and interviews carried out in four comparative case studies (comparing two sets of contiguous provinces and princely states in Rajasthan and Kerala), one additional case study, and a statistical analysis of ethnic violence across 589 Indian districts.

This article investigates anarchist theory and practice in 1920s and 1930s imperial Japan. It deliberately focuses on concepts and interventions by a rather unknown group—the Nōson Seinen Sha—to highlight a global consciousness even among those anarchists in imperial Japan who did not become famous for their cosmopolitan adventures. Their trans-imperial anarchism emerged from a modern critique of the present and engagement with cooperatist communalist ideas and experiences in Asia, Russia, and Western Europe. Anarchists theorized and implemented new forms of living that challenged the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and increasing militarism. In doing so, they simultaneously positioned themselves against established conservative and fascist agrarianism as well as Marxist dogmatism in the socialist movement. Despite their repression by the imperial state, they offered a radical, universalist, yet pragmatic way of being in autarkic farming village communes that corresponded with similar ideas and movements worldwide.

The article focuses on how low and lower-middle class youth employed in new private sector jobs in the booming service economy in Indian cities engage with the material environment of their workplace, and how, through their ‘aesthetic scrutiny’ of its materiality, come to ‘consume’ work. The setting is the store floor of a fast-expanding organized retail company, called Spexy, that sells budget eyewear products. Through ethnographic elaboration, the article follows how the Spexy staff deride the ‘un-branded’ products, ‘un-technical’ equipment, and ‘un-professional’ uniforms at their workplace. The company, as constituted of these ‘poor’ materials, is mocked for failing in its ‘company-ness’ and branded ‘fake’. The material environment of the workplace provides a platform for the articulation of larger configurations of ‘feelings’ the youth seek to give and get through formal employment in a private company. These articulations, in turn, reveal larger sociocultural valuations regarding ideas of social mobility and visibility in contemporary India where there is a strong interest in brand regimes and brand value hierarchies, fixation with technological education and expertise, and attraction towards a corporate work culture in the private sector, and, concomitantly, a strong desire amongst the store staff to craft branded, technical, and professional work identities. By putting the scholarship on work and consumption in dialogue, the article demonstrates how bottom-rung urban workers look expectantly to the material environment of company work to fulfil these desires.

Through an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947–present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract ‘diverse space’ to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, ‘below the radar’, and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi ‘riots’ of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.

This article identifies a moment of conceptual innovation—the 1830s to the 1850s—in which everyday artists and writers in Siam were tasked with creating comparative representations of the peoples of the world. Although their compositions took a variety of formats, they departed from earlier representations of alterity by devoting equal attention to each ‘type’, including the Thai themselves. This approach is best exemplified in three mid-nineteenth-century works: (1) a set of archetypal portraits of about 20 peoples painted on the shutters of a major Buddhist monastery, (2) sculptures of 32 peoples at the same monastery with a short poem describing each one, and (3) entries defining terms for peoples in an early Thai–Thai dictionary. The systematic formatting of these works drew on similar compositions circulating across the nineteenth-century globe. Yet, despite the presence in Bangkok of foreign interlocutors and imported books and prints, the mid-nineteenth-century compositions preserve ethnic tropes and practices of expression specific to Siam. In addition, the agents of intellectual innovation were not restricted to the usual princely or missionary protagonists. It was a motley cast of anonymous artists, local scholars, and middling officials who tapped traditional genres of composition and local markers of differentiation to render the peoples of the world as comparable, generic, and fixed.

The decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.

In this article, by studying the candidate-nomination process of the two major political parties, I show how power is distributed within the political party in Bangladesh. I show that the general acceptance by scholars that political power lies in the hands of the innermost circle of the political-party leadership in Bangladesh is too simplistic. A more nuanced observation of power and influence within the party structure shows that, in the context of Bangladesh's clientelistic political system, which is based on reciprocity between patrons and clients and relies on the ability of middlemen to organize and mobilize (in order to disrupt through hartals and strikes), power is often in the hands of those mid-level leaders who are in charge of mobilizing because their demands cannot be ignored by the topmost leadership. Through studying the candidate-nomination process of the major political parties and using the Narayanganj mayoral election of 2011 as a case study, I answer questions such as whose interests political parties are representing, what channels of influence are being used, and why these channels exist.

This paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.

This paper discusses the political opportunity structures which facilitated the creation of sites of interaction and protest against the Asian Development Bank during the Bank's Annual General Meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2000. The factors which facilitated the coming together of Thai social movements and their regional and international counterparts are mainly their shared critique of the neo-liberal paradigm and its adverse effects on their respective countries. The strategies they used to highlight these effects enhanced their sites of engagement and confrontation with the Bank and included dialogue with Bank officials, demonstrations, and the use of the media to highlight their concerns. Importance was also placed on the manner in which they were able to mobilize resources for the anti-Asian Development Bank campaigns and the process by which they framed their issues to gain the sympathy and support of the public. The 1997 Asian financial crisis, which highlighted the shortcomings of the Bank's development paradigm, as well as the ongoing democratization process in Thailand during that period, provided the impetus in fostering the anti-globalization alliances of local and transnational social movements in a common venue.

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang (‘Great Northern Wilderness’) in the country’s northeast. The term ‘Beidahuang’ refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation’s borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China’s northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership’s turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia.

My thanks for help in writing this paper go to the Jesuit priests whose letters and diaries I have used; to Fathers Rosario Renaud and Jacques Langlais, the historians of the Quebec Mission in China; to Madame Isabelle Content, archivist of the Jesuit Order in St. Jerome, Quebec; and to my mother, M.M.E. Lainson, who helped me to understand the religious life of Roman Catholics in the 1930s.

China's foreign relations during the Second World War underwent a radical metamorphosis. The Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) earned new international respect by mounting a tenacious resistance against the Japanese enemy. By allying itself with powerful countries in the West for the first time in modern history, China emerged from its involuntary diplomatic isolation. The new Grand Alliance facilitated China's diplomatic initiatives seeking to eradicate the legal stigma of its semi-colonial status through the abrogation of the unequal treaties. In the process China also leaped to the rank of the ‘Big Four’. At a time when the Western colonialism was receding, the Japanese Empire was collapsing and national independence movements were on the rise in many Asian countries, China seemed positioned to achieve a new prominent leadership role in Asian and world affairs.