In recent years, a new trend of performing a ‘good death’ has swept Japanese society. Popular, especially among the elderly, shūkatsu (終活) refers to the phenomenon of preparing for one's own demise through various practices, in particular, the writing of an ‘ending note (エンディングノート)’. A will designates the beneficiaries of one's estate or property after one's passing, whereas an ending note not only includes financial and legal matters, it goes far beyond that. It contains provisions for the deceased-to-be's end-of-life treatments, such as hospice care, as well as explicit instructions for seemingly mundane details such as the guest list, flower arrangements, and casket for one's funeral. This trend of engaging in shūkatsu can be viewed as a part of the biopolitics of a super-ageing Japanese society in which the elderly are now expected to manage all aspects of their own lives—including the disposal of their bodily remains when they pass away. Yet, as this anthropologically informed analysis discloses, such biopolitics also gives rise to a new set of ethical dilemmas for the elderly and their families, constituting a new form of politics of life and death. Indeed, rejecting the neoliberal injunction to efficiently separate death from life, many elderly try to recover—and resituate—death within the social and ethical realm of the living.

This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ci) as a site of contention over national sovereignty and belonging. The shrine originated in Sun Yat-sen's aspiration to commemorate the anti-imperial martyrs of the 1911 Republic and in the Nationalist government's attempt to marshal political allegiance in the 1920s–1940s. Upon fleeing from the mainland to Taiwan after losing to the Communist forces in 1949, the Nationalist leadership renovated the Japanese-built National Protection Shrine in Taipei, transforming it into the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine to house the displaced spirits of the national dead. Throughout the Cold War era, the spring and autumn sacrifices performed by heads of state and visits to the shrine by foreign dignities served to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China vis-à-vis the People's Republic of China. Even though the end of martial law in 1987 opened a new era marked by the Nationalist Party's loss of political hegemony, the shrine continued to adhere to the Nationalist Party's ideology and version of history. Far from embodying a place of remembrance and mourning for war victims, the palace-style compound is a site of contested sovereignty exaggerated by China's extraordinary growth and Taiwan's transforming identity. The enshrined dead have found a new role as both an assertion of the island's autonomy and a reflection of its dynamism. The departed, albeit silent, hold power in the malleability of their memories, and each permutation of how the past is remembered hosts its own tension.

This article will examine state intervention in the lives of tigers and people living in and around Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Central India. It explores how, over a decade after a reintroduction project rebuilt the tiger population from extinction and the central government launched a new compensation scheme to relocate villagers away from the national park, relocated tigers and not-yet relocated villagers resist and challenge conservation interventions to eradicate human life in Panna Tiger Reserve and (re)construct it as a wild tiger landscape. It will show how discourses of conservation and development that motivate state intervention seek to depoliticize and obfuscate programmes of control over human and tiger lives through their separation and purported ‘care’, contiguous with colonial policies and discursive practices that have intertwined the fate of wild animals and forest-dependent villagers in this part of India. In their feral subversions against these interventions, relocated tigers and not-yet relocated villagers expose the problematic contradictions and tensions that plague animal management, wildlife conservation, and rural development in India today. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article draws on case studies and accounts from communities living around Panna Tiger Reserve to present alternatives to colonial and post-colonial discursive legitimizations of state intervention and control, revealing alternate understandings of the entanglement of humans and animals and the categories of ‘wild’ and ‘tame’.

Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitary state which incorporated a civil religion that excluded competing forms of religiosity within its domain. This model of secularism, exemplified by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, fits Aśoka's Dhamma better than the separationist model does.

This article undertakes a comparison between Safavid Iran and modern Pakistan with the aim of highlighting the similarities and differences between their respective state projects of crafting ‘Islamic’ polities. The comparison proceeds through a focus on the state-sanctioned practice of ritual cursing of Sunnis and Ahmadis in Safavid Iran and Pakistan respectively. In both cases, the states made extensive legal efforts to mark out these religious Others by vilifying them on charges of heresy and innovation. This article argues that this vilification was oriented towards creating homogeneity among political subjects of the polity, who were required by the state to curse and condemn these religious Others in order to demonstrate their submission to sovereign power. Ritual cursing thus functioned as an oath of submission that was elicited by the state to draw subjects into the project of sacralizing the polity and to discipline them into reproducing the normative order of the sovereign power. There are also significant differences between the two cases that throw light on the historical specificity of different modes of sovereignty in early modern and modern Muslim polities. While Safavid kings sacralized their realm through the diffusion of scriptural law moulded to enhance their own sovereign power, the Pakistani state is engaged in the sacralization of the national body politic through its official religious nationalist ideology.

Centred on the ‘devotion to the ineffable divine’ (nirguṇ bhakti), the sectarian community known as the Dādū Panth (lit. ‘Dādū's path) had a class of sant-intellectuals who conceived their tradition on high literary and philosophical grounds. Succeeding on the local level, but aspiring to imperial ties, the intellectuals of the Dādū Panth not only built their community identity in relation to the Mughal-Rajput imperial milieu but also to the overlapping ideals of emerging sulh-i kull (universal peace) and Vedānta paradigms. Such expertise on the part of the Dādū Panthīs made their ties with the Marwar royal polity strong and long-lasting, as demonstrated in their hagiographical accounts which are corroborated by land grants by the kingdom. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the imperial order was waning, the Dādū Panthīs expanded their networks in the Rajput courts of not only Rajasthan, but also Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The sants of the bhakti movement(s) are normally thought to have had a lower-caste base—and thus a subaltern voice—but the example of the Dādū Panth presented in this article demonstrates that sants’ social base was broad and that the interrelation of sant-bhakti with the courtly order was strong; sant-bhakti therefore needs to be rethought in the study of bhakti traditions.

This article examines how the divine epithet ‘Rahman’ was invoked in public inscriptions and oaths in pre-Islamic Yemen. Between the first and the sixth centuries ce, with the spread of Christianity across the Roman empire and Abyssinia, and the subsequent rise of Jewish and Christian kingdoms in southern Arabia, the use of ‘Rahman’ was gradually biblicized. By tracing this history, this article opens a window into the use of this theonym in the Quran and the controversy surrounding its use in the first formal treaty in Islam, the Peace Treaty (Sulh) of Hudaybiyya.

This article examines the practices and discourses surrounding the ikrar oaths by which some Alevis in Turkey and the Turkish diaspora are initiated into their spiritual path. I examine a contemporary revival of this Alevi oath complex, which is a historical product of the same messianic trends in post-Mongol Sufism that shaped the Mughal imperial idea of sulh-i kull, or ‘Peace with All’ religions. I argue that the ikrar oaths are paradigmatic examples of ‘post-Islam’ or Islam after the messianic suspension of its scriptural law. I show how Alevis seek to maintain their suspension of monotheism through ritual practices of animal sacrifice and music as well as the replacement of standard monotheistic oaths with post-Islamic oaths. Focusing on a recent liturgical reform movement led by the shrine of Hacı Bektaş in central Turkey, I demonstrate how the shrine works to maintain Alevis’ suspension of monotheism within the constraints of modern secularism, in part by reinterpreting secular constraints in terms of post-Islamic Alevi values, thereby highlighting elective affinities between post-Islam and secularism.

This article argues that the Mongol empire's famous religious tolerance cannot be explained solely through its adoption of Inner Asian imperial political traditions of ruling over ethnically and religiously diverse subjects. Instead, this pluralism can be ascribed to a wider religious pattern of the Mongols. The first part argues that the analytical category of immanentist religions explains not only the inter-cultic transparency exhibited by the Mongol courts, but also the few explicit instances where the Chinggisid rulers reacted with ‘religious’ violence. The article further explores the strategies employed by the religious vectors, mainly Buddhists and Muslims, to address, accommodate, and subvert the Chinggisids’ patterns of religiosity and primarily their pluralism, and the Mongols’ deified mode of sacralizing kingship. Focusing on the Mongol-Ilkhanid court in Iran, the article examines how religious representatives used conceptual affinities and equivalences between the Mongol traditions and certain principles of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favour, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to the new religious affiliation. Employing this assimilative approach, they manoeuvred within the religious, immanentist paradigm of their nomadic patrons while moulding and manipulating it to their own religious, transcendentalist ends. The article further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Chinggisid patterns became an arena of Buddhist–Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization.

This article introduces this special volume on the Mughal policy of sulh-i kull by situating the collection of articles in relation to broader developments across Eurasia.

This article argues that ṣulḥ-i kull (peace for all) as a specific term was introduced in the 1590s by a small group of avant-garde Neoplatonists who worked at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. It was only in the following century that ṣulḥ-i kull developed into the ethos that became the ideological mainstay of Mughal rule both internally, for its administrative elites, and externally, vis-à-vis their main rivals: the Uzbeks in Central Asia and the Safavids in Iran. The early stages in the making of this ideology can be followed in some detail by studying Akbar's neglected millennial history, the Tarikh-i Alfi. In fact, this vast Mughal world history demonstrates that apart from Neoplatonic akhlāq, there was another important building block that so far has been missing altogether in the making of ṣulḥ-i kull, that is, the practical model of the Pax Mongolica, as established under Chinggis Khan, the most famous of Mughal ancestors. Most crucially, it is in the Tarikh-i Alfi that we find the legacies of Persianate akhlāq and Mongol yasa (law) married to each other. In fact, it was through akhlāq that the peace of the Mongols became the Mughal peace for all.

This article presents a new interpretation of the reign of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) as refracted through the twin historical lenses of Mughal South Asia and the Renaissance Mediterranean. On the one hand, it argues that Mehmed, despite his current reputation as a conquering hero of Islam, in fact aspired to a model of sovereignty analogous to Akbar's Sulh-i Kull, and with a common point of origin in the conceptual worlds of post-Mongol Iran and Timurid central Asia. On the other hand, it also draws from the historiography of the Italian Renaissance to interpret Mehmed's cultural politics as being simultaneously inspired by a particular thread of Renaissance philosophy, the Prisca Theologia, which in many ways served as the Ottoman equivalent of Akbar's Sulh-i Kull.

The mystical method of taḥqīq (‘realization’ or ‘verification’ of divine truth), as promoted by the Andalusian thinker Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), was central to the project of managing religious difference in the Mughal empire. The key architect of deploying taḥqīq for imperial purposes was emperor Akbar's senior minister, ideologue, and spiritual devotee, Abu al-Fazl. Specifically, I analyse how the concept of taḥqīq appears in Abu al-Fazl's 1587 preface to the Razmnāma (‘Book of War’), the first translation into Persian of the Sanskrit religious epic Mahābhārata. The Mughal Razmnāma was a monumental achievement, the foremost product of Akbar's push to translate non-Islamic religious works into Persian. In its elaborate preface, Abu al-Fazl clearly outlines that this translation was an exercise in taḥqīq, made possible by a sovereign who had achieved spiritual perfection, and he calls the Mughal empire a ‘Caliphate of Taḥqīq’. As such, this study bridges two scholarly conversations which have been previously distinct. One is the renewed focus in Islamic studies on Ibn ‘Arabi's ideas, specifically on taḥqīq in the late medieval and early modern periods across the Islamic world. The other is the recent interest in Mughal historiography on ṣulḥ-i kull (Total Peace). This article positions Ibn ‘Arabi's taḥqīq within an elite Persianate intellectual milieu that carried the concept to Mughal South Asia, and it demonstrates, through an analysis of the Razmnāma's preface, that taḥqīq was politicized by Abu al-Fazl and Akbar to develop the imperial policy of managing religious difference, which came to be known as ṣulḥ-i kull.

This article focuses on Chosŏn's informal diplomacy with the Qing dynasty that guided Chosŏn Korea's diplomatic engagement with Japan in the 1870s. The Chosŏn–Qing literary correspondence in Kang Wi's (姜瑋, 1820–1884) brush talk records has been viewed as historical evidence of Chosŏn's intelligence-gathering activities which formed the basis of a new diplomatic enterprise for dealing with modern imperial powers. What has received less attention, however, is the implementation and implications of the informal diplomacy reflected in Kang's diplomatic activities and his discursive practice. Based on a personal and unofficial account by an intellectual on the margins of the established social and international order, this study revisits the political and intelligence-gathering processes that led up to the 1876 peace agreement, which was the culmination of the Qing and Chosŏn dynasties’ concerted efforts as they transitioned to a changing world order in East Asia. In addition, this article further illuminates Kang's agency, despite his secondary social status, in Chosŏn's changing attitude towards Westerners and Westernized Japan. I argue that as both interviewer and transcriber, and from his position on the periphery of the Confucian ruling elites in the late Chosŏn period, Kang provided a new framework through which to formulate policies by reconfiguring his brush talk records to implement his own agenda as a member of the chungin (middle people) literary elite.

In the early eighteenth century, a husband and co-wife trio undertook a household project in Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. These migrants from the Western Deccan jointly authored a set of Sanskrit commentaries invested in the idea of ‘Maharashtrianness’. The unusual authoring of a Sanskrit commentary by these women alongside their husband exemplifies broader changes that were taking place in Sanskrit intellectual circles in early modern South India. Tracing new formulations of regional identity, changing ideologies of gender, and shifts in the very labour of Sanskrit intellectual production, I demonstrate how new avenues of access to Sanskrit emerged for women in early modern South India. These new avenues of access were facilitated by the growing importance of the household as a site of cultural production and the rise of new regional courts in the Karnatak and Coromandel Coast regions.

Writing in the Malay-language press from the late 1910s to the 1930s, literate women in colonial Java and Sumatra engaged deeply with understandings of modernity mediated through concepts of healthfulness and hygiene. Piecing together the views of writers who participated in conversations about health, child-rearing, child-feeding, and socio-political progress, and situating them against the backdrop of both imperial policies of hygienic modernity and systems of indigenous knowledge, this article argues that these women deployed their own agency and negotiation efforts to articulate a singular paradigm of progress. The article focuses on practices of infant-feeding, showing that these literate colonized women's conscious manipulation of the colonial discourse on scientific modernity was grounded in their awareness of the racial project of control of their own bodies. The promotion of ‘traditional’ breastfeeding was a way to affirm a path to progress that shared the underlying conditions for, but not the modalities of, Western modernity. Examining the processes of negotiation and subversion that emerged in these women's writings provides a productive space to question and reframe scholarly understandings of ‘modernity’ as a category of analysis.

In 1890, the Maldivian judge and poet Sheikh Muhammad Jamaluddin connected poetry with linguistic description in two ways. First, when he described features of the Dhivehi language with the aid of Arabic linguistic theory, he used Dhivehi poetry as linguistic evidence for correct usage. Second, he authored Dhivehi-language poetry about Arabic linguistic theory. Cosmopolis scholarship relates a narrative of how the wide circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian fostered a vast network of writers who authored texts in major vernacular languages like Bengali, Burmese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. This scholarship suggests that authors living within a particular cosmopolis wrote in divergent vernacular languages yet were, in some sense, connected because they translated and responded creatively to the same widely circulated source texts written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian. Yet in cosmopolis scholarship's effort to reveal understudied connections, various degrees of disconnection among writers of vernacular languages within a cosmopolis tend to be missed. One problem of overlooking disconnection among writers of vernacular languages is that readers could mistakenly conflate superculture-subculture interaction with intercultural interaction. In this article, I argue that Dhivehi-language poetry and linguistic description was inside the Arabic cosmopolis but simultaneously outside, because in circa 1890 non-Maldivians in the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia could not even read the Thaana script of the Dhivehi language.

This article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

This article examines the recent political history of the Devendrakula Vellalars (henceforth, Devendras). Officially recognized by the state and union governments in 2020 and 2021, this novel consolidated caste formation includes a broad range of formerly endogamous ‘Untouchable’ communities spread throughout Tamil Nadu but most highly concentrated in its southern half. I argue that the communities constituting the Devendras have been socio-economically diverse for at least the past century and thus do not necessarily share the same political priorities. They have, nonetheless, attempted to unite in opposition to the politically powerful Thevars (Other Backward Class or OBC) who are themselves a consolidated caste formation that grew out of colonial domination. The Devendras's economic diversity has, however, troubled their oppositional political consolidation, compelling the production of revisionist mythico-histories that appeal to widely held desires for authority and honour. Disavowing the Dalit past and recasting the Devendras as the descendants of heroes, such mythico-histories produce a collective identity characterized by the ideals of righteous self-sacrifice, valour, and agrarian civility. Devendras's identarian claims are, however, reliant on the acceptance of internal and external audiences, some of which violently oppose their assertions. They nevertheless seek recognition, and in so doing empower themselves by gathering strength in numbers.