This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.

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 Second World War, although rarely an explicit topic in Hindi literature, was a crucial moment not only in articulating the politics of the nationalist movement, but in imagining new configurations of national and international space. This article considers a brief travelogue by the poet and novelist S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ that describes a journey from Assam to the borders of Afghanistan. Although purportedly a description of travel across a historical and mythic landscape of then-undivided India, Are yāyāvar rahegā yād? [Oh Wanderer, will you Remember?] unfolds in the final moments of the war effort in India in 1945. Agyeya, who, uniquely among major literary figures, joined the British Army despite being arrested for terrorism in the 1930s, was tasked with leading a convoy of jeeps from Parshuram, Assam, to Torkham, on what is today the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, the majority of the route, through landscapes both of mythology and history as well as fuel depots and off-duty American soldiers, is narrated by the tyre of one of these jeeps. ‘Are Yayavar’ thus reveals a tense interrelationship between the unified, religio-historical space of India which the text presents the reader, and the world of international mobilization created by the war. Ultimately, Agyeya’s travelogue shows how Hindi writers engaged with the Second World War, and the ideas of space that it created, as ways of imagining the interrelations between national and international space in the first years of independence.

In the late 1950s, work began on the Kaptai hydroelectric dam, a massive project in the verdant Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an area bordering northeast India, east Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and Burma (now Myanmar), largely populated by indigenous hill communities. At the time, the CHT was situated in newly created East Pakistan, and Kaptai had become a focal site for the development of hydroelectric power. In the process, Pakistan relied upon international networks, including global aid organizations and American multinational construction firms, to fulfil its development dreams; in return the United States found a useful ally to contain Soviet influence and the growth of communism in Asia. In the high stakes exchange of economic aid for political alliance-making, East Pakistani administrators, US State Department officials, and American corporations became inherently entwined in a shared vision of development, to the detriment of local ecologies and the indigenous peoples who lived within them. This article will explore how both the public and private sectors used the language of primitivity, wildness, and atavism to marginalize minority ‘tribal’ populations in the devastating name of development and modernity.

This article argues that from circa 1845–1857, British colonial officials and administrators, abetted by Protestant missionaries and some so-called ‘native Christians’, attempted to replace Brahmanical regulation of everyday life with what I am calling ‘governance by conscience’ in British India. It uses the 1851 legal ruling in Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae, hailed by some for bringing ‘liberty of conscience’ and condemned by others as a wanton violation of Hindu personal law, to elucidate the connections between the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 (Act XXI) and education. My analysis highlights the centrality of Brahman wives and gender to debates about conscience, caste, property, and Christian conversion. During the violent summer of 1857, some condemned the Act and its use in deciding the case of Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae as provocation for the traumatic disorders then threatening to dismantle Britain's Indian empire.

Between 1941 and 1945, the Second World War changed the physical and moral geographies of Bengal, an important base for the British government. In 1943, a man-made famine resulted in the death of about four million peasants. The Bengal Famine has been the subject of intense scrutiny in terms of establishing the moral culpability of the colonial government and its provincial collaborators. This article revisits the wartime period and the famine as a moment of historical and social transformation. By examining the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association’s engagement with fascism, I argue that a new form of Bengali subjectivity emerged, one that recognized itself as part of a global collective, premised on its being forced to participate in the Second World War. I explore how this predicament led to reflection on the intellectual legacies of colonialism, including the promises of Enlightenment and the fraught universality of literature itself. By analysing selected works, I show how the Bengal Famine represented a moment of moral collapse that implicated both the imperial centres of power and the local colonial bourgeois class. A left-leaning intelligentsia had to struggle to find a language through which to express the inexpressible realities, local and global, of this genocide. What emerged was a tortured literature of complicity and conscience that decentred the peasantry. I argue that the historiographical problem of ‘peasant passivity’ is intrinsically tied to the literary and cultural production of the time, which made the peasant a symbol of social disintegration and moral transformation for the bourgeois middle class.

The 1906 Universal Exposition hosted in Milan was a defining moment for the late Qing in terms of its fisheries development. The exhibition not only allowed China to portray its strategic focus on its fisheries but also its determination to be seen as a modernized and progressive sea power in Asia. China’s involvement in this world’s fair also paralleled the process of political and economic consolidation of some of the country’s intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth century. These intellectuals’ accumulated experience, common goals, and international consciousness made it possible to assemble a group of professional experts I refer to as the ‘new fisheries elites’, who were able to construct the image of China as a modern fisheries power, if not a sea power, at various levels. The first part of this article will situate this exposition within the final two decades of the Qing Empire in the context of the political, social, and cultural transformation that was taking place around the world at the time. China’s presence at the world’s fair during this period displayed the adjustments of a changing and dynamic national image in terms of both its national circumstances and its international situation. The second part will then move on to discuss in what ways the Milan exposition was conceived by elites such as Zhang Jian, Luo Cheng, and Guo Fengming as a paradigmatic setting in which to showcase China’s drive toward modernity and becoming a sea power. Although China had participated in several other universal expositions, the Qing court had clearer and more pragmatic objectives in its participation in Milan in 1906. This was to demonstrate its recent progress and to change the common impression of China as an insecure, inexperienced, and incompetent country in terms of its fisheries governance and maritime vision. To produce this image, Zhang Jian and his team undertook a sensible and impressive approach towards presenting to the world China’s maritime awareness and the long historical continuity between this country and the sea. This was a conscious effort to produce an ideal of what a modern, progressive maritime China should look like.

Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India.

During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.

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.

This article investigates Japanese imperialism in northeast China through its road construction infrastructure projects within its railway auxiliary zone (1906–1932) and Manchuria at large (1932–1945). The materiality of roads unveils a history of how Japanese engineers adapted to local practices and absorbed local knowledge in building physical infrastructure and developing their technical expertise. These engineers engaged with local practices rooted in pre-existing social and natural environments to facilitate road construction. At the same time, in Manchuria their technical expertise in construction was built on the absorption and subsequent erasure of local workers’ vernacular craft. Rather than the physical realization of an imperialist, top-down vision of modernization, imperial infrastructure projects were in fact hybrid productions of technical expertise, and local vernacular knowledge and skills. By constructing roads, engineers helped to expand Japan’s political and economic influence in northeast China, assert domination over Chinese residential areas and business interests, and coerce Chinese subjects into complying with policies and rules issued by Japanese administrations. The materials of roads—gravel, granite flagstone, and concrete—illustrate a complex relationship between Japanese imperial agents and local environments.

This article describes how Taiwanese farmers adopted irrigation pumps to enhance their livelihoods under the shifting relationship of sugar and rice production in late colonial Taiwan. I argue that farmers utilized commercial technologies to make a living and prosper within the established order of Japanese colonial rule. With allocated procurement districts granting exclusive purchasing rights over sugarcane, sugar companies maintained substantial influence over sugarcane cultivation. However, with the proliferation of Penglai rice and new agricultural implements, the situation of the farmers changed substantially. Serious problems in the sugar industry due to economic depression and the rising price of rice in the 1930s led farmers to shift from sugarcane to rice cultivation by introducing a variety of pumps. Those with the means installed new motor pumps, while others independently constructed wind pumps by combining newly introduced parts with older techniques. Despite a prohibition by the colonial government, farmers continued installing pumps until the government established a planned economy in preparation for war. Moreover, distribution of pump capacity through both sales and sharing shows that Taiwanese farmers sought to maintain an informal yet significant cohesion throughout the process of agricultural commercialization. By focusing on the social dynamics surrounding agricultural technologies, this article challenges simplistic portrayals of technology transfer from Japan to the colonies.

Recent Second World War historiography has rightly highlighted the forgotten contributions of South Asia in the Allied war effort, and the everyday meanings of the war in South Asia. The role of cinema here, however, remains largely overlooked. This article focuses on British efforts to produce war propaganda in India with the help of Indian filmmakers, through varying tactics of incentivization and coercion. Between 1940 and 1945, the British colonial administration attempted several strategies to build a local film propaganda apparatus in India but, as I demonstrate, each stage was met with differentiated forms of cooperation, reluctance, and outright refusal, finally leading to the adoption of the unlikely genre of the full-length fiction film as the main mode of war propaganda in India. Derided as frivolous and half-hearted by critics at the time, the Indian-language ‘war effort’ film is more generatively framed as a form of ‘useless cinema’ that defied the logics of propaganda and privileged ideological ambivalence. This article brings together media history, film analysis, industrial debates about supply chains and licence regimes, aesthetic concerns about subtlety, and political differences about the ideological meanings of the war to situate the Second World War within the complex cine-ecologies of India. I read films and film industrial negotiations together to add to the multi-sited story of India’s experience of the Second World War that this special issue develops.

Mitsukoshi, a famed Japanese department store, opened a Korean Product Showroom in its Keijō (Seoul) branch in 1930. The Korean Product Showroom was the only space decorated in ‘Korean style’ within the Keijō Mitsukoshi building, which was designed in Neo-Renaissance style, much like its flagship store in Tokyo. This showroom offered Korean artefacts as luxury souvenirs aimed at Japanese tourists. The most popular items sold in the showroom were Koryŏ-style celadon ware and lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which Mitsukoshi ordered from local workshops in Korea. Interestingly, the workshops were run by Japanese entrepreneurs and sometimes even employed Japanese artisans. This article examines the inauthentic authenticity of ‘Korean style’ and ‘Korean products’ that the Japanese produced and consumed in colonial Korea. It does not imply that only Koreans are entitled to represent Korean culture. There have been many studies asserting that Korean culture was destroyed and distorted from its ‘original’ forms by Japan’s cultural genocide during the colonial period. This article neither is interested in repeating such criticism nor focuses on recuperating genuine Koreanness. Rather, it explores why the Japanese desired ‘pure Korea’ and how that desire shaped ‘Korean style’ and ‘Korean products’ through Keijō Mitsukoshi’s Korean Product Showroom and its products.

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.

After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

This article considers the Second World War’s effects on radio infrastructures and listening cultures in India through a detailed analysis of two radio stations: Radio SEAC and Congress Radio. Radio SEAC was a military radio station based in Ceylon targeting British soldiers stationed in Asia. It housed what was then one of the most wide-reaching transmitters. Congress Radio was a makeshift station in Bombay run by young and largely unknown anticolonial activists. While operating on vastly different scales and with rival goals, these stations’ political ambitions were surprisingly similar. Radio SEAC sought to restore confidence in the empire by invoking an old device of imperialism: what Brian Larkin calls the ‘colonial sublime’, the use of ‘technology to represent an overwhelming sense of grandeur’. Radio SEAC’s colonial sublime, however, was not aimed at colonized populations, but at disillusioned British soldiers, whose faith in the empire the station wished to revive. Congress Radio, in contrast, sought to summon what I call the ‘anticolonial sublime’ by deploying the aura of imperial technology against British rulers. Yet, whereas the colonial sublime required technologies to work smoothly, the anticolonial sublime did not. Congress radio broadcasters celebrated their station’s faulty reception, nurturing an aesthetic of rebelliousness. Analysing these two radio projects together, the article traces how the war shaped technological infrastructures while challenging conventional understandings about how radio connects with audiences. British administrators, like anticolonial activists, sought to bring about change less through programming content than through the aura of technological prowess they hoped their stations would generate.

This article discusses and analyses the Barger archaeological expedition of 1938 to the princely state of Swat. It argues that archaeology in princely, as well as in British, India did not originate and develop in a unilinear manner. This understanding is in line with the recent realization of variations in the historiography of native India. Given this, an attempt has been made to situate the Swat state in relation to British paramountcy. Miangul Abdul Wadud, the first British-recognized ruler of the state, was aware of colonial power relations and had a friendly attitude towards the British. He dealt with Swat’s archaeology with political and dynastic expediencies in mind. Since there was no proper legal and institutional dispensation in place in the area, the Frontier government officials and the political administration at Malakand treated the Barger expedition as a local matter, beyond the legal jurisdiction and disciplinary apparatuses of the colonial state. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the related laws were, thus, kept out of the entire enterprise. All this ensured a smooth transfer of antiquities to England at a time when strong legal-institutional and ethical dimensions to archaeology were in place within British India and in some princely states.

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.