This article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by regular famines and scarcities in India, and famine public works were one of the chief ways for the colonial state to provide relief. Famine public works involved labourers, including a large number of women, working in the construction of railways, roads, canals, and tanks in return for a subsistence wage. The present article contextualizes the practices of famine public works, especially the segregation of famine public works into large departmental and village works, within the intersecting processes of labour, caste, and gender. Drawing on evidence from North Western Provinces and Punjab, the article makes two arguments. First, it shows that segregation in famine works was driven by a shared understanding of the dominant castes and colonial state regarding labour, property, and caste which ensured that village works were reserved for dominant castes. A relational definition of labour was central to the construction of caste respectability on famine works. Second, by comparing the sex ratio of labourers in the two kinds of famine works, the article argues that women's labour was not merely a marker of caste, but constitutive of it.

This article argues that the genealogy of modern anti-caste critique is incomplete without a contextualized and close reading of Jatibhed Viveksar, a nineteenth-century Marathi-language text written under the pseudonym Ek Hindu (‘One Hindu’ or ‘A Hindu’). One of the first lower-caste commentaries in the Marathi print-world, the treatise clearly departed from the earlier iterations of non-Brahman caste politics in western India and laid the groundwork for what later came to be known as the ‘anti-caste movement’. I demonstrate how Jatibhed Viveksar engaged with preceding expressions of caste politics in western India by disputing two commonly deployed concepts in early modern caste controversies: first, the received proscriptions against varna sankara (or the intermixing of castes) and, second, the idea that the Shudras were the progeny of the ‘moral failure’ of varna sankara. Ek Hindu argued that not just the Shudras, but the Brahmans too have mixed-caste ancestors and thus cannot claim purity of lineage. Moreover, the author wrested the Shudras from a constellation of negative meanings by deploying the ‘Aryan invasion narrative’; he represented them as indigenous heroes who were vanquished by the Aryan-Brahmans. The conceptual innovations, intellectual sources, and frames of thought mobilized by Jatibhed Viveksar have significantly shaped the common sense of the ensuing articulations of anti-caste politics.

Since the 1990s, Indonesia has been confronted with the growing influence of a radical Islamist movement that challenges the state doctrine (Pancasila), which was adopted in 1945, and demands a greater place for Islam, which is the religion of nearly 90 per cent of the population. The hardline groups wish to call into question the Indonesian state’s pluralistic and inclusive religious identity, which they see as a conspiracy hatched by the Christian minority to deprive the Muslim majority of its ostensible rights. The Society of Jesus, which has been present in Java since the nineteenth century, is considered by Islamist critics as the main architect of this alleged plot. Furthermore, one of its members, Father Josephus Beek, is presented by Islamist radicals as one of the founders of the New Order (1966–1998), the regime led by General Suharto which was very hostile to political Islam in its early days. This article analyses how the Society of Jesus was able to integrate Catholicism into the Javanese spiritual landscape and explores the subsequent roles played by Jesuit leaders in the genesis and defence of Pancasila. It also sheds light on how Josephus Beek’s very real manoeuvres have provided fodder for militant Islamist circles seeking to delegitimate Indonesia’s secular status quo.

The article explores the ethnocultural aspects and ideological implications of a hagiographical collection from the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī (1613), a book on the general history of the Pashtuns compiled in the Indo-Afghan diaspora. This article primarily focuses on the stories that either presumably originate from or directly relate in content to Pashtun tribal areas to the west of the Indus. Being foremost a supplement to the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s genealogical section, the hagiographical anthology was included in this book to highlight and illustrate the idea of the Pashtuns’ continuous adherence to Islam throughout many centuries. However, its narratives suggest that Islamic traditions in the Pashtuns’ collective memory can be traced back as far as the turn of the thirteenth century. While the genealogies maintained the principle of patrilineal descent as the basic attribute of Pashtun identity, the hagiographies affirmed the profession of Islamic faith as another integral component of this identity and also brought to light its linguistic criterion. One of the article’s sections offers a survey of the cases where the Pashto language as well as Pashto lexemes and phrases are mentioned in the Persian text of the hagiographies. The article also attempts to locate the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s hagiographical collection among similar works in Indo-Persian literature; it also considers such still-understudied issues as the emergence of spiritual lineages in Pashtun tribes and the entwining of folklore and conventional Islamic elements in the stories about Pashtun religious leaders.

This article examines the durable, yet largely overlooked, claims of Bahu Begam (1727–1815) to dynastic wealth and authority in the Awadh nawabi (1722–1856), a North Indian Mughal ‘successor state’ and an important client of the East India Company. Chief consort (khass mahal) to Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula (r. 1754–75) and mother to his successor Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), Bahu Begam played a well-documented role in the regime’s tumultuous politics, particularly during Warren Hastings’s tenure as the Company’s governor-general (1773–85) and his later parliamentary impeachment. But despite her prominent political influence, little attention has been paid to the substance of her persistent claims to proprietorship over revenue rights and the immense fortune in her custody, as well as her broader assertions of authority over Awadh’s male rulers. Taking those claims seriously, this article contends that the begam rooted her arguments in notions of natural deference to maternal authority and generational seniority, evolving dynastic traditions of co-sharing sovereignty and fiscal resources, and her particular history as a principal financier of the Awadh regime. In so doing, the article argues that the begam’s claims reflect the shifting conceptual language of late-Mughal Persianate political discourse and the ambivalent position of elite women as dynastic financiers and state-builders in early colonial South Asia.

The modern Japanese nation-state that was established from 1868 onwards was marked by a strong tendency towards the separation of state and religion: religions were protected as a private matter, but the public sphere was resolutely kept free of them. This was mainly done so that competing religions would not get in the way of state-sanctioned emperor worship. The latter, although imbued with elements from Shinto, was carefully defined as non-religious, so that emperor worship could be prescribed without harm to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. This secularist approach to policing religions was broadly shared among Japanese elites—but it did not remain unopposed.

From around the turn of the twentieth century, dissatisfaction with the separation of the religious and the secular spheres began to be voiced, especially by pan-Asianist activists, who sought to combine the spiritual unity of Asia with the political liberation of Asian countries from Western colonialism and imperialism. Although Japanese pan-Asianism has conventionally been seen as a purely political movement, one cannot explain it fully without taking into account its spiritual dimension, which up to the 1920s drew its primary inspiration from India. This article will show how pan-Asianist activists in Japan opposed mainstream secularism and discuss what their vision for a unified Asia was. In doing so, it will focus on the Japanese reception of the Frenchman Paul Richard, an important political activist-cum-spiritual seeker who was a central node in the network of Indian and Japanese pan-Asianists in the early twentieth century.

Kerala is a well-recognized ‘model’ of human development in the world. In this article, I look at a crucial aspect of this development, which is often approached in a positivist fashion of statistical aggregation alone: consumption. Instead, there is a need to study the meanings that surround it. I delineate the many forces, particularly the new material infrastructure, that have driven consumption in the last three decades, especially the last one. With increasing integration into global market forces through migration and investment, and cultural imaginations, I show that there is a tectonic change in consciousness about consumption, marked by fantasies, desires, and, contrarily, feelings of excess and ambivalence. I argue that the non-market sector has also played an important role in consumption. There is an increasing generalization of certain ideas about consumption as well as disenchantments across classes. But critically, I contend, there are caste, class, and gender disparities in consumption as well as differences in the meanings attributed to it. Thus, consumption is a socially meaningful, but discrepant, space. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in a town in central Kerala, supplemented with quantitative data.

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.

The political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist nationalists, on the one hand, and proponents of greater secularization, on the other. In the 2019 general election, political entrepreneurs ‘particized’ these religio-political differences, which has far-reaching implications for majority-minority relations, to an extent that appears unprecedented in recent Thai political history. This argument is developed through an analysis of the platforms, policies, and rhetoric put forward by political parties contesting the election, which concluded an almost five-year period of direct military rule. This analysis suggests we need to pay greater attention to the role of political parties and electoral competition in maintaining and contesting the secular settlement in Thailand.

This article seeks to address a thematic thread that remains relatively unexplored in historical disaster research—victimhood—through an analysis of publications by disaster relief funds and their supporters in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar in northern India. By examining the representations of victimhood, I aim to explore the historical significance of perceptions and constructions of victimhood in the late colonial period. Based on photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of suffering in images and texts, the article suggests that constructions of victimhood effectively relied on imagery that contained, on the one hand, an absence of bodies and, on the other, a feminized anthropomorphization of suffering. The narratives underlying such depictions of earthquake victims are based on a constitution of victimhood that relied on contemporary historical and culturally founded imageries. The analysis of images and texts focuses on how representations of disaster victims were effective in communicating suffering to audiences. I tentatively argue that historically and culturally founded tropes of what constituted a victim formed along two narratives of victimhood that appealed to a colonial and a nationalist readership respectively. These conceptualizations of victimhood formed the basis for collecting aid for relief and reconstruction, rather than the loss of life, dispossession, social marginalization, and displacement suffered by victims of the earthquake.

This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration’, but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While there is burgeoning scholarship on the transnational lives of Nepali Gurkhas and their families, research on their migration history and lived experiences in Asian contexts is few and far between. Building upon Vron Ware’s concept of Gurkha families as ‘military migrants’ and using an inter-Asia approach as a framework, this article foregrounds the interconnections between military service and migrant pathways during the period of decolonization, particularly in Southeast Asia, and in so doing, offers a gendered perspective on labour migration. Drawing on multi-sited archival and ethnographic research, it seeks to argue that from 1948 to 1971, the Asian region(s) were a dominant feature in the global migration process of Gurkha families who circulated within the arc of a declining British empire. The article further advances that their gendered mobility patterns problematizes the ‘migration–left behind’ nexus as binary opposites as Gurkha wives and children engaged with mobility and mediated their transnational lives in complex ways. It also expands upon the notion of dukha—meaning ‘sadness’ or ‘suffering’ in Nepali—as an analytical theme to yield further insights into their lived experiences and to revisit colonial historiography about Gurkha society.