This article foregrounds the postcolonial museum as a new source, and site, from which to write South Asian histories of partition and its aftermath. It focuses on collecting practices in India within East Punjab, following the partition of the British-era Punjab province in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Tapping hitherto-unused archival sources, it reveals the considerable financial investment and drive to collect at this time, belying the idea of museums being ‘dead’ colonial assets, and demonstrates their centrality to how citizenship and belonging were articulated (or withheld) in independent India. Some discoveries have far-reaching implications for both historians and museum professionals. The article also shines a light upon a new range of actors—both named and nameless, professional and citizen—who have been marginal to historical enquiry thus far. Moving beyond the familiar colonial templates within which museums in the region have until now been studied, it asks critical questions of the postcolonial museum in South Asia by interrogating the relationship between collections, and the Indian nation-state and its subsidiaries.

This article discusses Chaudhari Mulkiram (April 1910–August 1954) and the contesting ideologies, memories, histories, and socio-political conditions surrounding his career from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. Mulkiram belonged to the Dhangar, a sub-caste of the Khatik caste in Meerut. He was the first Dalit of the United Provinces (UP) who qualified for the Public Service Commission in 1939. This article shows his socio-religious and socio-political relations and responses to the Arya Samaj, Congress, and Scheduled Caste Federation. It reveals how the representatives of these agencies portrayed his life and work. This article also discusses how his relations and responses helped and influenced his caste members in the western UP. It argues that the Arya Samaj, Harijan Sevak Sangh, and Congress used the first generation of Dalit civil servants like Mulkiram to cultivate local leaders and to mobilize local Dalits, peasants, labourers, and villagers to act in their political interests against Ambedkar’s movement. Hence, in the 1940s and early 1950s, Mulkiram presented himself as a Gandhi bhakt, Jan Neta (public leader), and Sanyasi (household monk and socio-religious reformer).

This article is about the experiences of three Chinese men who were involved in smuggling between India and China during the Second World War. Chen Mengzhao's rise as a leading figure in India-China smuggling in Calcutta uncovers the hidden links between the black markets in India and China during the Second World War. Gao Wenjie disguised himself as a Chinese army officer and utilized this fake identity to facilitate his smuggling business. Wang Li-an was sent to Calcutta to undertake smuggling for a Chinese government department. In telling these stories, this article argues that most smuggling in modern India and China was undertaken in transnational contexts that resulted in transnational effects. Ironically, the Nationalist government's state-building project to contain India-China smuggling ended by facilitating it. This project was further perceived by the British authorities as a Chinese conspiracy against India's sovereignty. The misunderstanding between the Chinese and British authorities led to the end of Chinese immigration to India in 1945. Overall, this article provides a new perspective to make sense of the tensions between the Chinese, Indian, and British governments during the Second World War.

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

This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.

Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.

Focusing on soy sauce exports from Hong Kong to the United States, this article traces the origin of the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label to the US-led embargo on Chinese goods during the Korean War and explores the repercussions the recent Sino-US conflict generated on the label. By examining the history of an enterprise embroiled in two episodes of global trade disruptions, this article reveals how politically motivated US trade policies steered businesses in Hong Kong to pursue commercial opportunities by leveraging geopolitics, both global and local. Strategically capitalizing on Hong Kong’s position during the Cold War that allowed local exports to the United States, Hong Kong entrepreneurs created an international product chain. When the latest Sino-US trade war erupted, Trump’s elimination of the distinction between China-made and Hong Kong-made exports coincided with a wave of local consumerism in Hong Kong and unintentionally imbued meaning into homegrown products. From a commercially expedient marker aimed at satisfying the US government’s anti-China trade requirements, the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label has recently been repurposed as a badge of local pride and perseverance as Hong Kong/mainland tension escalated. Necessitated by global trade policies and infused with connotations of shifting geopolitics, the malleable ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label signified not only reactions to US policies but also fluid Hong Kong/China relations. In successive rounds of US-initiated trade disruptions, the place-of-origin label reflected Hong Kong’s changing place in global geopolitics and the city’s position vis-à-vis the PRC.

The article focuses on how low and lower-middle class youth employed in new private sector jobs in the booming service economy in Indian cities engage with the material environment of their workplace, and how, through their ‘aesthetic scrutiny’ of its materiality, come to ‘consume’ work. The setting is the store floor of a fast-expanding organized retail company, called Spexy, that sells budget eyewear products. Through ethnographic elaboration, the article follows how the Spexy staff deride the ‘un-branded’ products, ‘un-technical’ equipment, and ‘un-professional’ uniforms at their workplace. The company, as constituted of these ‘poor’ materials, is mocked for failing in its ‘company-ness’ and branded ‘fake’. The material environment of the workplace provides a platform for the articulation of larger configurations of ‘feelings’ the youth seek to give and get through formal employment in a private company. These articulations, in turn, reveal larger sociocultural valuations regarding ideas of social mobility and visibility in contemporary India where there is a strong interest in brand regimes and brand value hierarchies, fixation with technological education and expertise, and attraction towards a corporate work culture in the private sector, and, concomitantly, a strong desire amongst the store staff to craft branded, technical, and professional work identities. By putting the scholarship on work and consumption in dialogue, the article demonstrates how bottom-rung urban workers look expectantly to the material environment of company work to fulfil these desires.

A growing body of scholarship has examined the intertwining of ideological polarization and inter-ethnic tensions during the Cold War. In this context, increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and how they were affected by international and national-level developments. Less scrutiny has been given to the role of sub-national forces, despite the fact that patterns of ethnic conflict sometimes varied markedly between different parts of a single country. This article addresses this lacuna via the case study of West Java, Indonesia. The article analyses the relationship between the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1950s and 1960s. International and national forces encouraged closer relations between the PKI and some ethnic Chinese Indonesians through the 1950s. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s there were also recurrent episodes of anti-Chinese harassment, driven primarily by anti-communist groups. The strength of the anti-communist coalition within West Java helped make the province the epicentre of anti-Chinese agitation during crises in 1959–60 and 1963. Yet shifts in the configuration of military and political forces in the region meant anti-Chinese actions in West Java during the contentious period 1965–67 were less severe than in some other provinces. Overall the article highlights the need to consider the interaction of not only international and national processes but also sub-national regional dynamics when analysing the relationship between Cold War polarization and inter-ethnic conflict.

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’.

By looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its claim for economic sovereignty, internally and externally. It led to a 17-month-long official trade deadlock, especially in the eastern region of partitioned Bengal. It ended when the two governments established an exchange ratio for the two rupees, no longer at par with each other. This interactive delinking of currencies was symptomatic of the improvisational decoupling of the colonial subcontinent’s post-colonial states. In tracing its trajectory, this article contributes to the inconsiderable literature on why devaluation did not happen in Pakistan, revises the rationale offered, and presents the event as a contingent exercise in economic decolonization, generative of a post-colonial sovereign difference.

Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social, and political life in these states. This article focuses on the political tussle between the BJP and the Church in this time period and attempts to explore the deeper ideological contestations and competing narratives underlying this struggle and their implications for the Indian political discourse. These include contestations over the very conceptualization of secular democracy in India and the role of religion in it; different understandings of religious conversions and freedom of conscience; and the conflicting agendas around the categories of ‘tribe’, ‘indigenous people’/‘adivasi’, and ‘janjati’/‘vanvasi’.

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

This article 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.

The article analyses how population genetics has impacted on nationalist discourses across the Taiwan Straits and affected the relationship between Taiwan and China since the 1990s. In Taiwan this cutting-edge science has helped to construct a native-based and Taiwan-centred national identity through promoting indigenous peoples’ rights, rejecting a blood-based, cross-Straits nationalism, and founding a pan-Pacific indigenous peoples’ community through genetic links and cultural affinity. In China, after subverting the nationalist myth of Peking Man (a Homo erectus group believed to be the common ancestor of the Chinese) by analysing genetic data, the same group of Chinese genetic scientists have constructed another nationalist myth of a genetically homogenous nationhood. Such a discourse not only valorizes Chinese nationalism through claiming a DNA-based Chineseness across ethnic distinctions but also asserts genetic links between China and Taiwan, therefore providing a ‘scientific’ basis for China’s nationalism in the new century.

This article makes an intervention in the study of the May Fourth Movement by examining the role the mass media played in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization processes set in motion by China’s experience at the Paris Peace Conference. In contrast with the mainstream narrative that constructs the May Fourth Movement as a spontaneous response to the loss of Shandong at Versailles, this article shows that it was preceded by a proactive diplomatic strategy to mobilize ‘public opinion’ over the Shandong question. The Chinese delegation’s decision to launch a media campaign in support of their diplomatic agendas at Versailles inadvertently turned domestic media into a platform for political debate. As a result of competition between the political elites who dominated the mediascape, discussions over the Shandong question shifted from focusing on international diplomacy to domestic politics in the spring of 1919. An examination of the ‘media war’ during the May Fourth Movement further demonstrates that the political elites’ variable ability to adopt media strategies to shape and channel public opinion resulted in changing the political landscape of the post-May Fourth era. By focusing on the role of the mass media in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization in China’s strategy at Versailles and during the May Fourth Movement, this article forges new connections between the international and the domestic. It also invites further reflections on the nature of the May Fourth Movement by showing that the media was a tool of political mobilization that connected the political elite to the masses.

In the first half of the 1960s China witnessed an unprecedented florescence of theatrical works on Third World decolonization, which aimed to disseminate the ideology of Maoist internationalism and cultivate transnational and interracial solidarity among the Chinese public. Existing scholarship on Maoist internationalist theatre tends to understand the phenomenon as the domestication of Third World decolonization for China’s political ends. This article, by focusing on the heterogeneous processes of production, adaptation, and reception, illuminates the practical and epistemological challenges of representing an internationalist subject, the imperfect performance of foreign culture and history, and the porous process of meaning-making for Chinese performers and audiences. Using previously untapped historical materials, such as performance programmes, personal recollections, and newspapers, this article explores the staging of the Congo Crisis (1960–1965)—a widely mediated international event in Maoist China and a central conflict in the global Cold War—in the spoken drama War Drums on the Equator (1965), its many local variations, and a dance drama adaptation, The Raging Congo River (1965). By mediating and enacting ‘embodied and affective knowledge’ about Congo, these theatrical works made the political motif of internationalist solidarity into sonorous and kinaesthetic artefacts that engendered plural meanings to Chinese performers and audiences. This article further reveals flawed perceptions, processes of corrections, and the epistemological limitations in the performance of the Congo Crisis in Maoist China.