This article studies the extraordinarily broad advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the First World War. Though often interpreted as politically motivated, it shows above all a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. In this it followed an established pattern of Indian elite concern with martiality. It also reflected anxieties of Indian weakness and effeminacy—something elites indicted themselves for, but which, importantly, they assumed to be more generally prevalent. Sampling calls for enlistment in the public space throughout the war, the article focuses on Bombay Presidency—a region that gave rise to such prominent Indian voices for enlistment as M. K. Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Bombay's recent experience of relative exclusion from military recruitment, and from membership of the ‘martial races’, was representative of much of India. This article enables us to view the effects of such ‘demartialization’ away from the classic case of Bengal. It suggests that it helped to inspire the call to enlist, especially as public spokesmen for the ‘martial race’ ideology explicitly linked martiality with manliness. The concern for enlistment ultimately superseded political calculation even for so hard-nosed a politician as Tilak. And though elites were most obviously concerned for their own martial vigour and leadership, they were also concerned with the manliness of the bulk of India's population, especially in Gandhi's conception of war as a preparation for satyagraha.

This article explores the history of the Husainabad Trust (‘the Trust’), a quasi-religious endowment that supported a number of key Shi‘a institutions in Uttar Pradesh (UP). It asks how Shi‘a elites were able to sustain their political clout and cultural independence in India whereas, in neighbouring Pakistan, they struggled. The fate of the Trust after independence led to a contest between the Shi‘as and the state, but also among Shi‘as themselves. The resulting confrontation between the Shi‘a community in Lucknow and across UP was, it shows, complicated by internal divisions among Shi‘as who, though united against state interference in their religious and royal trusts, were divided on how best to manage them. The Trust assumed importance for Shi‘as after independence because they lost some of the Trust properties to Pakistan and also because the Trust provided the means to support the largest public manifestation of Shi‘a presence in Awadh, Muharram. Husainabad, it suggests, helps to explain how and why Lucknow re-emerged after independence as the heartland of the Shi‘as of India, and arguably of South Asia.

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination.

Our title quotation is taken from an interview with the chief trustee of a leading Hindu temple in south London, and captures the curious mixture of philanthropy, politics, and individual ambition that has emerged around Sri Lankan Tamil temples in the diaspora. During the long years of civil war, temples became centres of mobilization for the growing Tamil diaspora, and were often accused of channelling funds to the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and its various front organizations. Since the end of the war, in 2009, the same temples now support orphanages and other good works in Sri Lanka, and their efforts are starting to be emulated by temples in Sri Lanka itself. At the heart of our article is a dispute between the UK Charity Commission and the chief trustee of a London temple, who is accused of misuse of temple funds and ‘failure to dissociate’ the temple from a terrorist organization. A close reading of the case and its unexpected denouement reveals the difficulties of bounding the zone of philanthropy.

During the Indian Emergency (1975–77) a range of opposition groups and the Indian state competed to mobilize the Indian diaspora. The Emergency therefore needs to be understood as a global event. Opposition activists travelled overseas and developed transnational networks to protest against the Emergency, by holding demonstrations in their countries of residence and smuggling pamphlets into India. They tried to influence the media and politicians outside India in an effort to pressurize Indira Gandhi into ending the Emergency. An important strand of ‘long-distance’ anti-Emergency activism involved individuals from the Hindu nationalist movement overseas, whose Indian counterparts were proscribed and imprisoned during the period. Several key Hindutva politicians in recent decades were also involved in transnational anti-Emergency activism, including Subramanian Swamy and Narendra Modi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's role in opposing the Emergency—particularly the way in which it enabled overseas Indians to act as ‘smugglers of truth’—remains an important legitimizing narrative for Hindu nationalists. Indira Gandhi's Congress government mounted its own pro-Emergency campaigns overseas: it attacked diasporic opposition activists and closely monitored their activities through diplomatic missions. The state's recognition of the diaspora's potential influence on Indian politics, and its attempts to counter this activism, catalysed a long-term change in its attitude towards Indians overseas. It aimed to imitate more ‘successful’ diasporas and began to regard overseas Indians as a vital political and geopolitical resource. The Emergency must be reassessed as a critical event in the creation of new forms of transnational citizenship, global networks, and long-distance nationalism.

This article reveals the Charter Act of 1833 as a turning point in the history of British-Indian political thought, which foreclosed, for a generation, liberal efforts to reform Britain's avowedly despotic regime in India. Anticipating a victory in their transmarine campaign to make the state accountable to an Indian ‘public’, reformers were disillusioned to find instead that the new Act was founded on enlightened despotism. Attempting to gather popular support for the authoritarian vision of reform espoused by Thomas Babington Macaulay and the other framers of the Act, Governor-General William Bentinck organized a grand fireworks display in Calcutta. The failure of this event, however, compounded the initial backlash against the Act, widening the rift between state and ‘public’, and precipitating the latter's decline as an effective political formation.

Siam managed to replace royal absolutism with limited monarchy in June 1932 without any chaos or bloodshed. But the transition quickly proved to be far from complete. The country was to undergo a major upheaval before suffering a semi-civil war only about a year after the princely rule was toppled. The new regime, accordingly, began to consider its constitution as a symbol behind which the people could be mobilized. A massive campaign for the document was then launched in late 1933 and it soon culminated in what can be regarded as the practice of constitution worship. This article will look at the campaign in detail, especially with respect to its underlying logics; the aim is to reveal and analyse the attempt by the revolutionary regime to transform the first permanent constitution into a sacred entity. Meanwhile, in pursuing such an aim, this article will shed light on the formation of a constitutional culture in Siam. Given that a basic law had never existed in the country, the article will discuss not only how the state promoted the permanent constitution, but also how the Siamese society encountered and experienced constitutional rule for the first time.

This article explores how local civil servants produce the conditions of possibility for bureaucratic authority in Nepal's contested political environment of war and post-war ‘transition’. Specifically, it examines the everyday practices of local civil servants as they attempt to influence the distribution of such public resources as agricultural inputs and local government budgets. The article asks: how do local civil servants produce the authority necessary to get things done in the face of changing local government structures and rival authority claims from both wartime Maoist People's Governments and resurgent patronage politics in the post-war period? In a context characterized as ‘ordinary extraordinary’, the article suggests that local civil servants employ a form of practice that has been termed ‘tactical government’ and proposes three distinct forms of this practice. However, the article also argues that tactical practice tells only part of the story and that it can be insightful to enrich our understanding of tactical government with an analysis of more general life projects. Bureaucratic practices are also motivated by factors such as the significance of the contested resource and paternal ideas of ‘the common good’. Such a suggestion is in line with recent work on everyday lives in situations of protracted violent conflict and insecurity, and on the role of culture in producing civil servants/services. Looking at these two forms of practice together, in particular their interconnections, gives us a fuller account of how authority is produced. Furthermore, it allows more nuanced and detailed perspectives into the complex process of state-making.

Exploring the rise and fall of government compradors, this article highlights Sino-British collusion in the corruption and extortion cases of the Hong Kong colonial government in the 1840s and the 1850s. A number of compradors worked for the Hong Kong colonial government throughout the nineteenth century, acting as a key communication channel between Chinese residents and colonial officials in the formative years of the colony. Various institutions of the colonial government, for instance the Colonial Treasury, Post Office, and British military, employed compradors. Colonial officials also personally employed compradors, who supported their principals’ work in the government. However, a symbiotic relationship between corrupt colonial officials and compradors had become a public problem by the mid-1850s. The colonial government responded to this by diversifying its Chinese staff rather than depending on monopolistic compradors, and also launched a scheme to nurture and employ British personnel who could act as intermediaries between the British and Chinese communities. At the same time, different kinds of Chinese intermediary elites emerged in Hong Kong from the 1860s onwards, and government compradors’ monopolistic authority in mediating between colonial officials and the Chinese public gradually declined. The volatile government comprador system highlights a key phase in the history of the evolution of the comprador system in Hong Kong.

‘High skilled’ Kamma migrants from Coastal Andhra domiciled in the USA maintain strong ties with their villages and towns of origin. Since the 1990s, one key way in which they have sustained relations with their roots is through transnational philanthropy. Over the last two decades, migrant donors have diversified the modalities of their philanthropic engagements, increasingly institutionalizing them through US-based transnational associations. While the institutionalization of philanthropy may appear to be an import from the USA, closer examination reveals its historical antecedent in the caste-based Varaalu system practised by the Kammas during the late colonial period. The transnationalization of older forms of giving are marked by key modifications in the way giving is conceptualized—from being localized, need based, and individualized to being based on merit, efficiency, and professionalization. The term ‘donation’ is used to describe their philanthropy, rather than daan or charity, and the politics of semantics points to the modernizing impulse within the community to transcend caste owing to their diasporic location. Yet, by aiming to reach deserving beneficiaries while upholding meritocracy, donors often circulate philanthropic resources horizontally on a caste inflected and highly politicized transnational plane. The discourse and practices of transnational giving in post-reform India bring out the contradiction that simultaneously obscures the workings of a caste while transnationalizing its boundaries.

This article focuses on how the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgency performed de facto sovereignty and public authority in Northeastern Sri Lanka. It is situated within the wider academic debate on governance by state and non-state actors. We venture to unravel the complex linkages between the LTTE's governance practices and legitimation strategies by looking at narratives, performances, and inscriptions. While monopolizing the justice and policing sectors, in other sectors the LTTE operated pragmatically in conjunction with the state. The organization tried to generate and sustain public authority and legitimacy through a variety of violent and non-violent practices and symbols. It ‘mimicked’ statehood by deploying, among others, policing, uniforms, ceremonies, nationalist songs, commemorations of combatants, and the media. This not only consolidated its grip on the Northeast, but also engineered a level of support and compliance. We conclude that the LTTE's governance included practices that were created and carried out independently from the Sri Lankan state, while others took shape within a pre-existing political order and service provision by the state. The article elucidates the LTTE's mimicry of the state, as well as the operation of parallel structures and hybrid forms of state-LTTE collaboration. This facilitates a nuanced understanding of rebel governance beyond a simple state versus non-state binary.

This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

This article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

This article argues that ideas of health and disease in the Assam tea plantations of northeastern India exceeded instrumental logics of bodily disorder, medical ‘objectivity’, and preventive cure. It looks at cholera, kala-azar (or black-fever), and malaria—the three main killers in these estates—to show that imperatives of private capital and law conditioned and constrained parameters of well-being, mortality, and morbidity in these plantations. It therefore suggests that epidemiological theories and praxis emerged from a simultaneous—but expedient—reading of three versions of the labour body: the pathological, the productive, and the legal. The overlaps between commerce, law, and pathogens provide for a unique, if not exceptional, social history of health in colonial India.

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India, and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of labour migrants, the article argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the article explores the ways in which migration, its effects, and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination—a process that is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the article gives attention to continuity at the material, personal, and more emotive levels. This runs counter to research that situates migration as rupturing or change-driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways, providing comfort and familiarity, but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced, and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad.

Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), a small traditionally endogamous group, are well known in India for their philanthropic giving. The Parsis of Mumbai are beneficiaries of hundreds of Parsi public charitable trusts today, and this article will show how trusts, as particular forms of giving, establish perpetual communal obligation connecting the past and present. It will show how the circulation of personal assets through customary inheritance within a family is replaced by the trust with the circulation of communal obligations in perpetuity. While this mechanism of giving has a marked endurance, what has changed is what constitutes ‘the good’ within these deeds. Moving away from traditional philanthropic practices of subsidizing education, medical care, and welfare to the poor, the focus of giving has shifted to the pursuit of communal reproduction, both biological and social.

Recent studies of Asian religious traditions have critiqued Western philosophical understandings of mind–body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind–body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal—claimants to an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in imagination and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience—I demonstrate that, although these devotional groups stress on combating theologies, with emphases respectively on the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’, in their narrations of religious experiences, however, both groups allude to rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment. So, while influenced by ideas of (mental) ‘purity’ and (bodily) ‘actuality’, respectively, practices of both groups rely on similar states of mind–body continuum. So I argue that the mind–body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in the discursive and experiential domains of these non-Western religious contexts. Through my analyses of the texts and embodiments of these opposed devotional groups, I show that theology gets both organically entangled with as well as challenged by phenomenological experiences. I further argue that explorations in the tenor of religious studies sharply enrich the anthropology of religiosities. Also, such engagements between theology and anthropology have been relatively lacking and need more emphasis in studies of contemporary South Asian religions.

Youth frustration was a front-running issue during Nepal's decade-long civil war (1996–2006) and democratic protests (2003–2006). Young activists were mobilized as foot soldiers in these political battles, but they also capitalized on their position to establish themselves politically. They earned public recognition for their direct action; however, they have struggled to stay relevant as their parties shifted from protesting against the government to running the government. In response, youth activists leveraged the public support they earned and general concern over youth disenfranchisement to demand an active role in state restructuring. The Maoist-majority Constituent Assembly government partially heeded them by handing over the task of drafting the National Youth Policy to their youth wings and other youth activists. This policy shaped the youth-focused agenda of the newly designed Ministry of Youth and Sports and other government bureaus. This article uses the National Youth Policy as the context for an examination of how youth activists are establishing public authority beyond (violent) protest. By focusing on the micro-politics of the committee appointed to draft the Policy, I analyse the techniques its members used to assert their political values and agendas through policymaking in order to secure their positions during politically turbulent times. This article elucidates how formalized governing practices and revolutionary politics blend to reconstitute state order in the aftermath of civil war.

The Bengali bhadralok have had an important impact on Indian nationalism in Bengal and in India more broadly. Their commitment to narratives of national progress has been noted. However, little attention has been given to how ‘earthly paradise’, ‘garden of delights’, and related ideas of refinement and nobility also informed their nationalism. This article excavates the idea of earthly paradise as it is portrayed in Satyajit Ray's 1958 Bengali film Jalsaghar, usually translated as The Music Room. Jalsaghar is typically taken to depict, broadly, the decadence and decline of aristocratic ‘feudal’ landowners (zamindars) who were granted their holdings and, often, noble rank, such as ‘Lord’ or ‘Raja’, during Mughal or British times, representing the languid past of the nobility, and the ascendance of a restless business-oriented class that represents an emerging present and possible future. The zamindars are shown as pursuing aesthetic and spiritual delight, ecstasy, and edification through soirées. These soirées are produced for those among the nobility who are sufficiently cultivated and cosmopolitan to appreciate the finer things in life, such as the classical music and dance showcased in this film. The businessmen, too, aspire to host such exceptional events, but are too crass to do so properly and, moreover, they are motivated by a desire to accrue prestige, thus using soirées as a means to an end, rather than to experience aesthetic and spiritual elevation as an end in itself. I argue that the film calls on the bhadralok to value aesthetic cultivation and to actively counter its evanescence. The film thus beckons and authorizes the bhadralok to sustain the value of the timeless past, including nobility and refinement. Yet the bhadralok are also expected to embody and expand a new, progressive, and utilitarian spirit that would modernize India. With the aristocrats gone, and the entrepreneurs eager to assume authority, the film charges the bhadralok to construct a nationalism in which the immortal, character-building values of classical art, for example, can yet be sutured to utilitarian progressivism. I argue that the film conveys this even though it does not explicitly portray or even mention the bhadralok, or feature uniquely Bengali music and art. Accordingly, this article does not focus on the actual aesthetic and political practices of bhadralok nationalism. The aim is to shed light on one genealogy through which the bhadralok sanctioned themselves as India's stewards along these lines.