This article explores the politicization of ethnicity in Nepal since 1990. In particular it looks at how ideas of indigeneity have become increasingly powerful, leading to Nepal becoming the first and—to date—only Asian country to have signed International Labour Organization Convention number 169 (hereafter ILO 169). The rise of ethnic politics, and in particular the reactive rise of a new kind of ethnicity on the part of the ‘dominant’ groups—Bahuns (Brahmans) and Chhetris (Kshatriyas)—is the key to understanding why the first Constituent Assembly in Nepal ran out of time and collapsed at the end of May 2012. This collapse occurred after four years and four extensions of time, despite historic and unprecedentedly inclusive elections in April 2008 and a successful peace process that put an end to a ten-year civil war.

This article explores how marriage practices and intimate relations are being refashioned in reform-era China in the context of increasingly entangled intersections between private negotiations and public dialogues in law, state policy, science, and the media. Based on long-term field research in impoverished rural areas, the article focuses on the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and large-scale projects of social engineering aimed at turning ordinary ‘peasants’ into ‘modern civilized citizens’. The article draws particular attention to the important role played by the Birth Planning Policy in shaping local reproductive practices and intimate structures, but the approach developed here to make sense of the impact of globalized neo-Malthusian state interventions on local realities considers also the perspective and the agency of ordinary individuals and communities. Instead of assuming that changes in local practices follow primarily from the impact of external forces such as state policies and technologies of birth planning, the article suggests that local practices and global forces co-produce each other through ‘frictions’ of various kinds. This focus on the micro-macro intersections of what I call here the ‘techno-politics of intimacy’ joins recent efforts in the humanities and social sciences to move beyond conventional top-down approaches to global intimate transformations.

The Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the pressing challenge of ‘reconstructing’ China's industrial economy when it came to power in 1949. Drawing on recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry archives, this article argues that the Party met this challenge by drawing on the expertise of Japanese technicians left behind in Northeast China at the end of the Second World War. Between 1949 and 1953, when they were eventually repatriated, thousands of Japanese technicians were used by the Chinese Communist Party to develop new technology and industrial techniques, train less skilled Chinese workers, and rebuild factories, mines, railways, and other industrial sites in the Northeast. These first four years of the People's Republic of China represent an important moment of both continuity and change in China's history. Like the Chinese Nationalist government before them, the Chinese Communist Party continued to draw on the technological and industrial legacy of the Japanese empire in Asia to rebuild China's war-torn economy. But this four-year period was also a moment of profound change. As the Cold War erupted in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party began a long-term reconceptualization of how national power was intimately connected to technology and industrial capability, and viewed Japanese technicians as a vital element in the transformation of China into a modern and powerful nation.

Govardhanram Tripathi wrote the four-volume novel Saraswatichandra as an ‘instruction manual’ for a people facing fundamental social and political change during colonial rule. This article examines a shift in the conception of instruction as the text progressed through its instalments—from a notion of learning as a process of deliberation about, and experimentation with, imitable actions, to the idea of education through the representation of action—a transformation that is made conspicuous by the discordance between the widely debated and highly influential initial volumes and the largely ignored final volume. It situates this shift in broader changes in the idea of instruction in Indian society, and investigates it in order to better understand the strains involved in attempting to codify or theorize certain types of domains.

This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation.

Between the late 1950s and the 1960s, a significant community of Indians appeared in Seria, an oil town in Brunei. Most of these Indians were recruited from India by the British Malayan Petroleum Company to staff its company offices in the wake of the rehabilitation of the Seria oilfields after the end of the Japanese occupation of Borneo. However, in official hagiographies of the Sultanate and historical accounts of Brunei, the Indians of Seria are invisible. Juxtaposed against this silence in the historical record, I pose the narrative agency of these Indians in asserting their place in the emergence of the modern state of Brunei and in historicizing their presence in a frontier oil town in Borneo. This article is based on extensive fieldwork in India, where most of these Indians retired to after decades of expatriate life in Brunei. Recalling their work and youth in Seria, they collectively claim an ‘origin’ in Seria while improvising a Brunei-Indian diaspora in India through their shared memories. In the absence of an archival record for the Indians in Seria, this article seeks to affirm the historical value of story-telling and diasporic remembering in recording a partisan genealogy of migration and settlement.

This is a review article of two recent books. The first is D. Venkat Rao's Cultures of Memory in South Asia: Orality, Literacy and the Problem of Inheritance; the second, Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee's The Nay Science: A History of German Indology. Rao's conviction is that Indology has failed in its mandate. He claims that Indology so far has produced only European representations of India and not what should have been the choicest self-images of India's past. If Rao begins with a hostile tone towards Indology and expresses his intention to do something with India's texts without either relying on or having recourse to anything that belongs to the Indologist's ragbag, Adluri and Bagchee set out to expose what they refer to as Indology's ‘pretension’ to scientific method and objectivity in their The Nay Science, an unprecedented polemical history of German Indology. I divide this review into two parts: a critical examination of The Nay Science’s critique of German Indology and its commitment to a methodological reform, and a distilled critical account of Cultures of Memory’s approach to Indian textual traditions and the problems of such an approach. Finally, after examining the important challenges facing Indology, I'll make a case for how the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre may help our understanding of the nature, dynamics, and the relevance of tradition in South Asia.

In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic.

This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.

This article deals with the relationships Japan has built in the Asia-Pacific region in the aftermath of decolonization. In post-war historic studies, the emphasis has been on issues such as paying reparations and providing economic assistance as Japan's means of rising to become a world power, at least from an economic point of view. The article explores, from a historical perspective, Japan's efforts with regard to development aid, but focuses on its transition to taking a more active role in Asia. This became more evident from the mid-1970s, when some crucial events related to the Cold War altered the the balance of power in the world. Hence, it investigates how Japan faced and took advantage of the situation in this area, and how it modified its approach to providing foreign assistance to Southeast Asia. Finally, it meditates upon the meaning of the Fukuda Doctrine as an enhancement of Tokyo's regional policy.

This article explores the acceptance of Marxism by a non-Marxist Chinese philosopher, Feng Youlan, before and after 1949. Previous studies have largely focused on establishment intellectuals in the study of Marxism and intellectuals in China, and this article seeks to fill the lacuna on the intellectual potential Marxism offered to non-Communist intellectuals in China. This article finds that for Feng Youlan, a non-Marxist Chinese intellectual, Marxism was able to provide meaningful venues for his attempt to modernize Chinese knowledge and transform Chinese culture. A Marxist emphasis on universal rules governing all human societies on the same stage of development, Marxist presentist approaches to history, and most of all, a Marxist emphasis on praxis, aided Chinese intellectuals like Feng in constructing new approaches to learning the Chinese past. The Marxist emphasis on praxis helped deepen the discussion of experience, a concept central to a reconstruction of Confucian learning in modern China, after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Eventually the state monopoly of the definition of Marxist praxis stifled the spontaneous search for a new understanding of experience in Communist China. Nonetheless, Marxism had a transformative and lasting impact on modern Chinese scholarship, as seen from the example of Feng Youlan.

The anthropology of caste was a pivotal part of colonial knowledge in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denzil Ibbetson and Herbert Risley, then the two leading official anthropologists, both made major contributions to the study of caste, which this article discusses. Ibbetson and Risley assumed high office in the imperial government in 1902 and played important roles in policy making during the partition of Bengal (1903–5) and the Morley-Minto legislative councils reforms (1906–9); Ibbetson was also influential in deciding Punjab land policy in the 1890s. Contemporary policy documents, which this article examines, show that the two men's anthropological knowledge had limited influence on their deliberations. Moreover, caste was irrelevant to their thinking about agrarian policy, the promotion of Muslim interests, and the urban, educated middle class, whose growing nationalism was challenging British rule. No ethnographic information was collected about this class, because the scope of anthropology was restricted to ‘traditional’ rural society. At the turn of the twentieth century, colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, had little value for the imperial government confronting Indian nationalism, and was less critical in constituting the Indian colonial state than it previously had been.

Smell is deeply meaningful to human beings. Often considered elusive, ephemeral, and volatile, it has long been excluded from scholarly accounts on culture and history. This article explores this ‘lower’ sense and the roles it played in the historical process of modernization in China. Through a close look at the efforts made by the Western colonial administration to deodorize Shanghai as well as diverse Chinese reactions, this article argues that smell constituted a hidden site where the dynamics of power relations were played out. Smell also opened up a window to showcase modernity's power and ambivalence. The first part of this article looks at how China smelled to the Western nose, against the historical background of the rising consciousness of smell, sanitation, and civility in Europe which began in the eighteenth century. The second part examines the ways in which the British administration applied the olfactory norms of the modern West to the end of taming Chinese stench. The final part provides a case study of ordure treatment in order to show how ambivalence arose in this modern smellscape and why.

Exploring how the history of the Fifteen-year War was dealt with in pre-1982 mainland China is an essential step towards understanding the currently explosive Sino-Japanese History Problem; furthermore, this might shed light on various issues in the post-war history of China and Sino-Japanese relations. However, available research on the pre-1982 period is scarce and problematic. Earlier political scientists argue that the history of the war was ruthlessly manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party regime, while some recent studies believe that the war was conveniently ‘forgotten’ as Sino-Japanese friendship was vital for the government of the People's Republic of China. This article aims at providing an accurate and thorough picture of how the history of the Fifteen-year War was positioned in the diplomatic practice of the Chinese Communist Party regime in relation to Japan during the period.