In Bangladesh, many secularists pursue their political goals through cultural activism. While committed to achieving a secular, progressive, and non-communal society, they often refrain from explicitly articulating their politics due to the sensitivity of their goals. Instead, cultural performances allow them to instantiate and embody a secular ethos with transformative potential, expressed through distinct cultural genres that become recognized as secular aesthetics. While activists consider culture to be a morally superior and ‘purer’ way to promote their political aims than party politics, which they perceive as ‘dirty’ and corrupt, cultural traditions are hardly neutral ground from which to enact secular aspirations. This article explores the ethical struggles that emerge from this position to illuminate what it means to act politically while trying to avoid politics, and why people might choose comparatively elusive forms of political engagement despite their strong commitment to a cause. Attending to less tangible forms of politics encourages us to rethink the role of political messages and visibility in social movements by highlighting the significant role, as well as contradictory implications, of aesthetics, embodiment, and gestures in political action. Conversely, the elusive politics of cultural activism underlines the need to go beyond analysing national discourses to understand the contested nature of secularism in Bangladesh.

This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

How are infrastructures socially appropriated? This article uses my fortuitous presence in a rural locality in eastern India as its residents discussed proposals for its complete electrification, allowing me to reflect on social negotiations around infrastructure prior to its installation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of electrification in a West Bengal village, I illustrate the nuanced ways in which people inflect infrastructural projects with their collective ideas of what is right and good. As far as they can see, such projects are neither the unalloyed benefit that proponents celebrate nor the unmitigated evil that opponents lament. Rather, they are evaluated in relation to people’s imagination of the collective good, to which such infrastructures may or may not be central. Drawing on the insights offered by my interlocutors as well as recent advances in the literature on the politics of infrastructures, this article interrogates the perspective that infrastructures advance governmental rationalities. Building on well-established insights that technological infrastructures are not socially neutral and that infrastructures are socially appropriated, disputed, and negotiated, this article demonstrates that people’s engagement with infrastructures politicizes, rather than governmentalizes, them.

Throughout Shanghai’s treaty-port era, divergent understandings of the extraterritorial regime and the conflicts between the foreign community’s ‘natural and lawful’ pursuit of additional space and the Chinese rights recovery movement prevented clear demarcations between the city’s foreign settlements and the Chinese sphere. Instead, these controversies produced an expansive boundary zone in the form of extra-settlement roads (ESR), a contested and negotiated space where the projection of foreign power, the exercise of extraterritorial privileges, and the fabric of local Chinese lives were all conditioned by an array of quotidian elements such as public utilities, police protection, tax duties, and urban spatial characteristics. By the 1930s, developments in local, national, and imperial politics—such as the advent of the Guomindang regime, British accommodation of Chinese nationalism, and the dwindling authority of the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC)—prompted discussions of formal joint Sino-foreign administration of ESR areas. However, this reconfiguration met with vehement resistance from the local Japanese community, which distrusted the British-controlled SMC yet relied on the treaty port’s existing administrative framework as a shield against Chinese threats. The ascendance of mass politics in the 1930s, via Chinese public outcries against imperial encroachment and Japanese settlers’ defence of their treaty rights, challenged the traditional paradigm of boundary-making and made ESR negotiations devolve into secret diplomacy that eventually reached a dead end. Examining ESR dynamics sheds new light on the intricate interplay of national sovereignty, colonial settlement, and imperial domination, while offering a fresh perspective on the shifting power landscapes in treaty-port Shanghai.

While many commentators have noted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s more recent attempts at appropriating Gandhian imagery and symbolism, few have diverted their attention towards earlier attempts by Hindu Nationalists to do so. M. S. Golwalkar is the most prominent example of Hindu Nationalists who attempted to incorporate Gandhi into the pantheon of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). This article argues that Golwalkar reproduced Gandhian ideas as part of Hindu Nationalist thought, alongside carefully and consciously portraying himself as an ascetic politician, much like Gandhi, in the post-colonial leg of his career. He crafted a mode of Hindutva politics whereby his image as an extraordinarily able-bodied yogi became an archetype that was touted as a model for every swayamsevak to follow. Furthermore, the ideological shifts that are visible in Golwalkar’s later publications created greater room in Hindutva thought to incorporate Gandhi’s ideas and legacy into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) ideological fold. Doing so allowed Golwalkar to tackle the challenges the RSS faced after Gandhi’s assassination. This article locates Golwalkar and the RSS in the shadow of the Mahatma to not only broaden the understanding of Gandhi’s legacy in post-colonial India but also to prompt a reappraisal of the nature of Hindutva itself. By exploring the Sangh’s deep appropriation of Gandhi’s ideas and legacy, one can begin to understand the malleable and flexible nature of the otherwise narrow majoritarian Hindu Nationalist project.

This article explores the spatial dynamics of imperial administration in colonial Burma through the lens of gender, bureaucracy, and frontier. Focusing on the story of Hugh Ernest McColl, a British administrative officer in Burma who struggled for promotion as a result of his marriage to a Burmese woman, the article sheds light on the spatial dynamics regarding loyalty, competence, and political priorities in the imperial administration of frontiers. Such spatial dynamics were most clearly manifested in the diverging attitudes between central authorities and local governments towards McColl’s case. Drawing on archival sources and secondary literature that contextualize McColl’s case within the broader textures of colonial governance, this article argues that McColl’s case reveals the internal contradiction of the imperial administration, which saw a constant tension between the ideological imperatives of control and the practical demands of how to control. McColl’s story is therefore a story of broader significance—of the inherent structural contradiction of colonial rule and its inability to overcome it.

The last 15–20 years have seen the emergence of a new trajectory of ‘Muslim feminism’ in India which has grounded Muslim women’s rights discourse both in the direct interpretation of Islamic scriptures and also in principles derived from the Indian Constitution. Examining two prominent Muslim women’s organizations—the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan—this article examines how this form of Muslim feminism has become a central repository of Islamic modernist thought in India in light of its perceived failure in some other sections of Muslim public life. Based on writings and educational materials produced by these organizations, this article discusses their methods of harnessing the teachings of the Quran, their application of ‘Islamic feminist’ methodology to interpret Islamic family laws, their identification of equivalence between Islamic and constitutional values, and their attempts to engage the state in their efforts to promote the modernization of Muslim Personal Law.

This article asks why the victims of the 1944–45 famine in Indonesia’s main island of Java are largely missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography. It surveys relevant studies, to conclude that there is no consensus on the human toll of the famine. The article then traces the origins of an initial estimate of four million mentioned by Indonesia’s authorities to data on mortality and births uncovered in late 1945. It discusses the outcomes of a recent study that analysed these data to re-estimate excess deaths of, respectively, 0.7 and 1.2 million during 1944 and 1945. The difference with the initial estimate is that it also included unborn children and an unsubstantiated approximation of victims in 1946. The article analyses the likely reasons why the millions of victims of the famine went missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography during the 1950s and 1960s.

This article studies some major shifts in the relationship between law and Sufism in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It does so by focusing on Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) to examine, first, how these two key facets of Islam interact with each other in his thought and, second, how some influential Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have understood and positioned themselves in relation to this aspect of his thought. Though one would be hard pressed to know this from the sanitized modern image of Wali Allah as a scholar of the Quran and hadith, and of a Sufi piety uncompromisingly anchored in them, his Sufism reveals a wide and, from many a modern Muslim perspective, unwieldly range of ideas and practices. Yet it was precisely in that unwieldy breadth and depth that it was generative of some of his key insights into matters of the law. Even as many people have continued to insist on the imbrication of law and Sufism, a sanitization of Wali Allah’s Sufi image serves to highlight wider processes whereby an earlier era’s generative relationship between the two has come to be increasingly attenuated since the late nineteenth century.

Modern historians have repeatedly cast Sri Lanka’s historical female monarchs as ‘queens’, without critically reflecting on the conceptual limits and nuances of that term. Through a close examination of sources from the early second millennium, and their reception by scholars from the colonial period onwards, I demonstrate that Sri Lanka’s female monarchs—particularly Līlāvatī of Poḷonnaruva (r. 1197–1200, 1209, and 1210)—engaged in a more creative and subversive performance of gender than modern ‘queenship’ allows. In particular, I argue, a discourse of kingship’s inherent masculinity, advanced in literary and didactic texts written primarily by male monastics, was too-willingly accepted by colonial-period scholars. Closer attention to the material evidence of Līlāvatī’s reign, however, challenges this discourse and further suggests a politics of gender beyond the binary.

This article uses techniques of microhistory to explore how Janbai, the third wife of Sir Tharia Topan, exerted economic, religious, and social influence in Indian Ocean networks. An Ismaili woman from a Gujarati trading family who lived in East Africa, Janbai lies outside of the social worlds that have dominated studies of Muslim modernity in South Asia, which centre on Sunni male professionals from North India. Janbai was illiterate and largely disconnected from textual debates about modernity. In fact, she was just the sort of woman that reformers castigated for their supposed attachment to religious superstitions and customary practices. In contrast, studying Janbai through an alternative frame of ‘material modernity’ reveals the complex biography of a women who neither conformed to the idealized ‘new’ woman, nor simply reproduced inherited practices. Instead, she navigated rapid social mobility, shifting geographies, and new technologies and institutions, particularly colonial law courts, in ways that echoed and departed from how women had long exercised agency. The article argues that scholars, by foregrounding textual archives and discursive analysis, have tended to reproduce the marginalization of women like Janbai. In contrast, looking to sources such as jewellery and photographs, and reading textual archives with greater attention to gendered patterns of consumption and investment, brings Janbai from the margins to the centre of our understanding of modernity. In addition to enriching our understanding of the lives of women, increased attention to materiality and visuality opens up critical new avenues for writing a more variegated history of Muslim modernity.

The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan. This article uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909) and used it to engage in a practice of nihilist democracy. In using a transwar frame to examine the content, audiences, and contemporary reports of his performances, this article concludes that Miyazaki Tōten created ‘new’ naniwabushi to deliberately link the techniques and rhetoric of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement from the 1880s to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). He used naniwabushi to articulate his concepts of autonomous freedom, nihilism, and anarchist communitarianism in a time usually characterized by the heavy suppression of dissent. It counters the impression of the wholesale embrace of nationalism and support for Japanese imperialism and shows how Japan’s urban poor engaged in political discourse through popular entertainment that was critical of Japanese imperialism.

This article discusses the continuity between cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism from 1932–1941 by exploring the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and its international staff. The CMCS managed China’s international trade and directed the custom houses in northern China before 1937, and in occupied China and free China from 1937–1941. The customs revenues generated by this international trade were pledged to service China’s international obligations. This article argues that both Chinese and Japanese staff members’ activities to maintain the status quo could be considered as wartime collaborationism from the perspectives of Japan, Manchukuo, and the Collaborationist and Chongqing governments, but all parties tolerated their activities until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The reason for this was that all parties benefitted from the CMCS’s management of international trade and its implementation of international obligations which had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. This article situates wartime collaborationism within the long-existing institutional network that was welcomed as cosmopolitan collaboration in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, rather than treating it as a unique wartime setup and ideology. Such a view also illuminates the postwar exchange of personnel and cooperation among former enemies, which grew out of prewar collaboration and wartime collaborationism.

This article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom’s long-standing cult of the ‘Father-King’, the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people’s democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today’s youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of ‘equal friendship’ and ‘hierarchical siblinghood’ substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of ‘filial insubordination’ to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, ‘friendship-based’ polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand’s Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter’s ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances.

This article examines Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) and the memory of his ‘collaboration’ with Japan during the Second World War. A Taiwanese-born writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years, his drifting identity was full of ambiguities. Although he was one of the key intellectuals behind Taiwan’s New-Old Literatures Debate and responsible for introducing many May Fourth ideas to Taiwan, he also played an important role in bringing Japanese literature and thought into Chinese discourse during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During the war, he continued to teach in Beijing and travelled to Japan to attend the Greater East Asia Writers’ conferences. Some of his works from this period call for the Chinese people to support the empire and eradicate Western culture and literature from Asia, but many of his writings also indicate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism.

This article considers the memories of Zhang, his various intellectual contributions, and his oeuvre, arguing that his collaboration must be understood and contextualized within his intellectual landscape through a research methodology that examines continuities and change across decades of his life and work.

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.

To explore the importance of death and the dead to the study of religious conversion, this article adopts an ethnographic and comparative approach to the lives and deaths of two male Muslim converts in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. Paying attention to the treatment of their dead bodies, which were donated and cremated, contrary to their wishes for an Islamic funeral, and the problematization of their proper names, it is argued that death is the point at which selves are made/remade. Death provides the opportunity for the dead, their kin, friends, and state institutions to make claims about religious identities and familial relations. I conclude that these multiple and often contradictory stances converted the dead into religiously indeterminate figures, though their belonging to their kin was successfully established.

Histories of conservation suggest that from the nineteenth century onwards, the custodianship and conservation of colonial antiquities enabled European powers to legitimize imperial claims. This article complicates this view by focusing on a series of visits made by British royals to the Caves of Elephanta, near Bombay, as part of their tours of India. Of particular interest are the visits in 1870 and 1875, which were essentially picnics, including fireworks and feasting, with little showcasing of ongoing conservation efforts. The article argues that these early visits also sought to advance a narrative of imperial legitimization through the British heirs’ presence at an Indian monument. Rather than acts of rational governance, such as conservation measures, these picnics were transactions within the ceremonial economy that privileged consumption as a means of legitimizing empire. They present a register of imperial engagement with an Indian monument that is neither ‘plunder’ nor ‘preservation’. Instead, they are posited as predecessors of the durbars (courts/assemblies) produced by the British administration from 1877 onwards. As acts of imperial political communication, the Elephanta visits drew upon the popularity of the picnic as a form of leisure, and consumption, and the long-standing aesthetic resonances of the site, such as the island’s picturesque framing and the Caves’ Romanticist associations. These enduring aesthetic frameworks made the acts of consumption legible as imperial political communication. The picnics at Elephanta demonstrate that colonial antiquities featured in imperial narratives of legitimization based on political pageantry, exceeding conservation and rational governance.