During the later years of the War of Resistance to Japan (1937–1945), United States (US) propaganda activities intensified in both Japanese military-occupied and ‘free’ regions of China. One of the most important organizations behind these activities was the Office of War Information (OWI). This paper examines the OWI, and particularly its Overseas Office, as key institutional actors within a broader US total war effort which touched the lives of civilian populations in East Asia as well as combatants, arguing that:

• • US propaganda institutions and propagandists played demonstrable roles in representing and shaping the experience of war in China;

• • these institutions, which included Asians and individuals of Asian descent, simultaneously acted to advance US goals in the wartime ‘Far East’;

• • while cooperation between US and Chinese governments was sporadic in the area of psychological warfare, conflicts over control often undermined or limited operations;

• • despite these shortcomings, US propaganda institutions (which included both the OWI and offices within the Department of State) had developed comparatively wide-ranging capabilities by the end of the war, and continued operations into the Civil War of 1945–1949.

By 1945 propaganda had become an activity which regularly targeted allied populations as well as enemies. This process was facilitated by the early twentieth-century communications revolution, but was planned and controlled by the new engineers of the post-war order.

This paper examines female education, marriage and honour among upwardly mobile Dalits. Using data collected during fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2004–2005) in a Dalit community in rural Andhra Pradesh, I describe how families who constitute the upper strata of Dalits are educating their daughters in order to marry them ‘upwards’ within their caste to a groom with prospects of employment. Education allows these Dalit girls to become housewives, escaping a life of demeaning agricultural labour, colloquially: ‘hard work in the hot sun’. But as educated wives they must have middle-class virtues to match. Unlike their labouring counterparts, their language, dress, movement and manners must convey shame and modesty. As their responsibility for maintaining family honour increases, they are progressively more scrutinised and controlled. I explore this heightened emphasis on honour among traditionally egalitarian Dalits and suggest reasons for the increasing concern about female sexuality. Education for girls is seen as a particularly risky business: on the one hand it provides opportunities for sexual encounters, but on the other hand it holds the promise of hypergamy. Given their already precarious circumstances, many Dalits choose to cut short the education of their daughters, rather than take the risk.

According to Prasenjit Duara, the sacredness of the nation hinges on its ‘regimes of authenticity’ where timelessness and the politics of embodiment are key to an authentic national identity. This paper looks at three different cultural impulses that have attempted to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are: the Malay literary movement Angkatan Sasterawan 50 prior to independence; the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and the romanticization of the working-class ‘heartlander’ through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization. In doing so, this paper articulates the difference between the regimes of authenticity of state elites and non-state cultural producers, as well as their ‘national imaginaries’. It concludes that the regime of authenticity, that operationalizes the representations of the working class as a diametric opposite to the logic and force of globalization, offers the most popular symbols of national identity in Singapore.

The consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

This paper examines the growth of the British commercial communities in the Straits Settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes how they emerged as a coherent commercial and political interest group, separate from the Indian empire, with their own network of allies and commercial partners in Britain. As such, the Straits merchants emerged as a significant political lobby in their own right. It contends that in the process, they revived earlier notions of Southeast Asia as a discrete geographical region, in which political and ethnic diversity was bridged by the flourishing of maritime commercial networks.

The wartime period between 1937 and 1945 provided an exceptional opportunity for the Guomindang state to experiment with a wide array of schemes that sought to further its nation-state project in the borderland regions of China. Under the rubric of ‘frontier reconstruction’ (bianjiang jianshe) it devised a series of plans that encompassed both the economic and cultural transformations of these regions. This paper discusses a particular scheme devised by Chinese anthropologist, Li Anzhai (1900–1985), during his stay at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Labrang where he sought to transform borderland societies into a modern Chinese citizenry. A key aspect to his strategy was the mobilization of youth where trained cadres and students performed what became known as ‘frontier service’ (bianjiang fuwu) establishing a dialogue with the community's own particular demands by means of building schools, hospitals and agricultural projects. This paper argues that the notion of ‘frontier service’ and the ‘cultural reconstruction’ project propounded by Li not only sought to modernize and unify China around a distinct multicultural identity, it was also an important mobilizing force amongst sectors of wartime youth which arguably introduced young Han Chinese to a region which they had hitherto only imagined in the pre-war period.

Whilst the history of the Indian diaspora after independence has been the subject of much scholarly attention, very little is known about non-Indian migrants in India. This paper traces the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other Muslim migrants after the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948. Because these non-Indian Muslims were doubly marked as outsiders by virtue of their foreign birth and their religious affiliation, the government of India wished to deport these men and their families. But the attempt to repatriate these people floundered on both political and legal shoals. In the process, many were left legally stateless. Nonetheless, migrants were able to creatively change the way they self-identified both to circumvent immigration controls and to secure greater privileges within India.

This paper takes a critical look at a recent attempt by the Pakistani state to manage religious thought and practice, under the broad banner of ‘Enlightened Moderation’. One of the key Islamic thinkers associated in popular imagination with this project is Javed Ahmed Ghamidi. In contextualizing the work and role of Ghamidi, it is tempting to work backwards from his opinions on Islamic truth to situate him as a reformer whose interventions are primarily oriented to the task of reconciling Islam to conditions of liberal modernity. Against such a tendency it is argued here that such an exercise of classification and categorization needs to be undertaken with greater care as against a critique of the imperialist typology of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islams, a project of delineating authentic from inauthentic Islams has also more recently been activated.

This paper examines how an ethnic Miao uprising in West Hunan in 1937 became the site for the interaction of a broad range of competing local, provincial, and national interests. The target of the uprising was a tuntian system formed from confiscated Miao lands in the early nineteenth century to support a military system defending against Miao disturbances. Surviving anachronistically into the twentieth century, the military land rents of this system formed a base for warlord power on Hunan's western frontier. The uprising arose opportunistically in the context of a struggle over the resources of this system between the warlord of West Hunan and a provincial governor whose provincial state-building project sought to end the region's long political autonomy. The uprising consequently drew the attention of Nationalist Party factions who saw it as an opportunity to use the uprising to undermine the provincial governor in the interest of their own centralizing state-building project. Finally, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War allowed uprising leaders to recast the uprising as a patriotic movement, seeking equality for the Miao of West Hunan by the abolition of the tuntian system and offering the mobilization of uprising forces for service at the front once this goal was achieved. In the end, the uprising functioned as a palimpsest upon which the multiple motivations and desires of its participants, in their broad social, political and personal contexts, were written and overwritten.

In this paper, historical analysis and qualitative fieldwork are combined to question the belief that recent efforts in Kerala to induct women into local governance and mobilize poor women into self-help groups implies continuity with the earlier history of women's mobility into the spaces of paid work and politics. For a longer view, the histories of gender-coding of spaces and of women's mobility into paid work and politics are examined. In the twentieth century, while the subversive potential of paid work was contained through casting it within ‘feminine terms’, politics was unquestionably ‘unfeminine space’. However, recent efforts have not advanced women's mobility in any simple sense. The subversive potential of women's mobility towards work in self-help groups is still limited. In local governance, unlike the experience of an earlier generation of women, the ability to conform to norms of elite femininity now appears to be a valuable resource.

We use a primary data-set comprising the work-life histories of 90 individuals from Coastal and central Karnataka who migrated for work to Mumbai, Bangalore and other destinations sometime between 1935 and 2005. These migrants were all below the age of 15 at the time of leaving home, and their work-life histories provide a unique platform for studying persistence, change and spatial variation in relation to the incidence and causes of child labour migration, in the intrahousehold agreements and dissent that preceded these migration events, and in the workplace experiences and other outcomes awaiting these very young migrants. While migration prior to 1975 was mostly from the Coastal belt, it was often prompted by financial distress and usually targeted small, South-Indian eating places in Mumbai. More recent migration frequently involves educational ‘misfits’. In spite of their young age when leaving home, our informants typically came to regard migration as a transformative and attitude-changing experience that opened new avenues for acquiring work-related and other skills, languages included. This transformative potential varied across time, destinations and occupations and is, we suggest, intimately linked to leisure becoming a reality. Limitations are identified for those who migrated early, for agricultural labourers whose social lives would often be confined to caste-fellows from their native place and for girls working as domestic servants. This paper illustrates how early migrants to Mumbai were uniquely placed, in that migration for work improved their educational opportunities. Their accounts of the Kannada Night Schools they attended provide a useful corrective to official documents and evaluations.

For all the attention paid to the economic, social, and moral dimensions of prostitution in Thailand, no scholar has thus far conducted an empirical study of the relationship between the vice and political change in the countryside, where most sex workers come from. Using the case of Phayao Province in northern Thailand, I attempt to redress this lacuna. I show how rampant prostitution, the most acute social issue in Phayao, has ushered in the rise to power of one virtuous woman from an ethnic minority family—Ladawan Wongsriwong. Located on the economic and social margins of Thailand, many village families in Phayao traditionally relied on prostitution for income, causing a massive influx of young girls into the lucrative sex industry in Bangkok and abroad. In the 1990s, however, AIDS started taking a heavy toll on Phayao's small population. Against this backdrop, Ladawan emerged as a prominent female leader in the male-dominant rural society of Phayao by conducting an extensive issue-oriented campaign against prostitution. This case questions much of the literature on rural politics and female leadership in democratizing Southeast Asia that underestimates the importance of social issues.

Studies of Punjabi partition-related refugee resettlement have revealed a gap between official accounts and those provided by migrants. The former seek to legitimize the state by narrating its role in the transformation of helpless refugees into productive citizens. First hand accounts on the other hand frequently write the state out of the rehabilitation process. This paper seeks firstly to illustrate these processes at work by contrasting the narrative account contained in the Government of India publication, The Story of Rehabilitation, with interview material collected amongst former refugees. It then goes on to reveal the presence of state agency in cases of rehabilitation, despite refugee denial. Finally, it explores the refugee-state tensions arising from migrants’ experience of local level bureaucratic and police services’ corruption, which goes some way towards explaining the narrative dissonances.

While historians of South Asia have examined in elaborate detail critiques of sati and child marriage in the Hindu community, a similar approach to Muslim familial reform also needs serious attention. By investigating discourses on the question of polygyny1, this paper is an attempt in this direction. In the light of these discourses, the paper argues that polygyny, influenced by modern sensibilities of reform and social change, underwent different interpretations during the colonial period. The debate on polygyny was not homogenous and uniform and research reveals a plurality of viewpoints on the subject. The argument was often based on an assumption of sexual difference which, in some cases, emphasized the infertility and reproductive incapacity of the first wife, and in others, presented an idealization of domestic ideology where the second wife made the ‘perfect’ home. Simultaneously, there were also strong critiques of polygyny by women writers who underscored the misery of the first wife. These debates do not necessarily settle the question in favour of a particular position, but reflect a conversation held on marriage, children and family, and express how love, conjugality and affection were narrated in the public sphere.

In today's China, public memory of the War of Resistance against Japan, 1937–1945, is more visible than ever. Museums, movies, television programmes, and commemorations focus heavily on the victimization of the Chinese people at the hands of the Japanese invaders. Japanese atrocities, particularly the Nanjing Massacre, are at the centre of much of this remembering. But what of the wartime period? How did journalists and writers discuss Japanese atrocities? This paper finds that most wartime writing stressed the theme of ‘heroic resistance’ by the Chinese rather than China's victimization at the hands of Japanese. Exceptions to this approach included efforts to publicize Japan's action to Western audiences in the hope of gaining support for China's cause, and a related focus on the bombing of the civilian population by the Japanese. This paper suggests major differences between the current approach to remembering the war and to writing during the war itself.

Japan's early postwar leadership and American occupiers alike asserted that democratization was a new lesson that the Japanese public would have to learn. In fact, the ideas of democratic reformers had been broadcast to a large audience as feasible programmes decades before 1945. Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of Democracy in 1919, outlined the benefits that democratic reforms might provide in a post-World War I world. Decades later, Japanese people faced a new postwar struggle, not as victors but as the vanquished. Gaikotsu, writing in 1945, reflected on democracy in these new circumstances in his study, Amerika-sama. Although the situation was vastly different, victory and defeat in world wars had opened paths to new possibilities. This paper examines Gaikotsu's prewar writings as prescient prescriptions that he revisits in his essay Amerika-sama, or ‘Honourable America,’ at the point they begin to be played out, in some instances only partially and at times for ill as well as good, in occupied Japan. These reflections strikingly demonstrate the continuity of ideas during the prewar past and postwar present. Amerika-sama is a representative expression of many programmes Gaikotsu and likeminded humanistic activists attempted to put into practice from the late nineteenth century until they were suppressed during the wartime years. Mainstream political parties, prewar and postwar, often found it difficult to embrace Gaikotsu's ideas and political programmes. Nevertheless, the general public embraced them and they now find legal support in the Constitution of Japan.

The story of Ya Mo is that of a great Thai heroine honoured with a grand monument (the Suranari memorial) in the centre of Khorat, a city in the north-east of Thailand. The monument is a sacred shrine embedding Ya Mo's guardian spirit which protects the people of the city. She is a grantor of protection, auspiciousness and good luck, and can fulfil wishes, needs and requests. Her spirit can be benevolent as well as ferocious and revengeful. She is a warrior and a guardian, but also a grandmother and a symbol of patriotism, kinship and loving kindness. Ya Mo and her shrine must be perceived in relation to Thai religion and the position of deities, spirits, ghosts and otherworldly beings in Theravāda Buddhism. Ya Mo represents a wide range of meanings and functions, but when viewed exclusively as a historical figure, most of these do not surface. In order to understand the Ya Mo phenomenon, the field between religion and magic in Thai Theravāda Buddhism must therefore be explored, as well as how people create and uphold distinctions between religion and magic, and how they communicate and negotiate between these two spheres or dimensions. This paper attempts to analyse how non-Buddhist monuments and shrines, in this case a historical memorial to Ya Mo, erected as part of Thai nation-building, represent a vivid part of Thai religious and spiritual life, deeply rooted in a Buddhist worldview.

The earliest writings of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), the famous Muslim social reformer and educationist, were in the field of History, including two books on the monuments and history of Delhi that bear the same title, Asar-al-Sanadid. This paper compares the first book, published in 1847, with the second, published in 1854, to discover the author's ambitions for each. How do the two books differ from some of the earlier books of relatively similar nature in Persian and Urdu? How radically different are the two books from each other, and why? How and why were they written, and what particular audiences could the author have had in mind in each instance? How were the two books actually received by the public? And, finally, what changes do the two books reflect in the author's thinking? These are the chief questions that this paper seeks to explore.

During the 1920s, liberal intellectuals in Japan took up their pens to express concerns about the proliferation of violence in political life. Political violence, they feared, was eroding Japanese civilization and culture, degrading constitutional government, and fomenting disorder and instability. Such anxieties encouraged ‘statism’ in their thinking, as a number of liberals called upon the state to provide order and security, without considering who was to police the state. This paper argues that Liberalism was undermined by this trust and authority endowed to the state and was undone, not just by state oppression, but by liberals themselves at the level of democratic practice.

This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a ‘language community’ with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of ‘memory writing’ that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, ‘testimonial literature’, articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be ‘heard’ by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to ‘listen’ to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time.