On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.

India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparative exploration of the reciprocal relationship between state structuring and ethnicity in India and Nepal, with a focus on the effects of territorial versus non-territorial forms of recognition. It pushes against recent tendencies within South Asian Studies to see ethnic identity as called into being solely by state practices or ‘governmentality’ on the one hand, or as a newly commoditized form of belonging produced through neoliberal reforms on the other. Instead it argues that ethnicity must be understood as a multivalent concept that is at once embedded in specific histories of state and sub-state formation, and generative of them. Comparative in scope yet driven by qualitative data collected over years of engagement across the region, the paper charts a middle way between detailed ethnographic studies and large-scale comparative endeavours.

Mao's Great Famine in Wuwei County, Anhui Province, between the years of 1958 and 1960, resulted in the deaths of about 245,000 people, a quarter of the local population. By focusing on grain production and consumption, this article adopts a local perspective to examine the county's official archives and analyse the background, rationale, and processes of local authorities that led to one of the highest death rates in the country. A local perspective provides an empirical microanalysis of the Great Famine; illustrates the complexity of this catastrophe; argues for local factors such as factional struggles, central-local interactions, and the political atmosphere created by the series of pre-1958 campaigns as key to local variations of the disaster; and delivers national implications for viewing Mao's China. Official archives explored in this article reveal that an over-reporting of grain output might have resulted in the Great Famine, but did not necessarily lead to the massive death toll, and that local politics, particularly intra-party factional struggles, intertwined with central-local political interactions, were crucial for the terrible tragedy that ensued in Wuwei, and that the end of this famine resulted not from peasants’ resistance, nor the change of radical polices to moderate ones, but from the decreased demand for grain caused by the massive number of deaths.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jain leaders faced a series of religious questions at the royal Mughal court. At the request of their imperial Muslim hosts, Jain representatives discussed aspects of both Islam and Jainism on separate occasions, including the veracity of Islam, whether Jains are monotheists, and the validity of Jain asceticism. The Mughals sometimes initiated these conversations of their own accord and at other times acted on the prompting of Brahmans, who had political and religious interests at stake in encouraging imperial clashes with Jain leaders. Jain authors recorded these exchanges in numerous Sanskrit texts, which generally remain unknown to Mughal historians and Sanskrit scholars alike. I examine the Jain accounts of these cross-cultural debates and expound their political, religious, and intellectual implications. These engagements showcase how the Mughals negotiated religious differences with diverse communities in their kingdom. Furthermore, the Sanskrit narratives of these dialogues outline complex theological visions of how Jain beliefs and practices could thrive within a potentially hazardous Islamicate imperial order. More broadly Jain and Mughal discussions provide rich insight into key developments in religious precepts and local identities in early modern India.

This article examines the way in which legal codification, the scrutiny of the high courts, and the expansion of the ‘native Bar’ restructured colonial ‘preventive policing’. Habitual Offender legislation in England targeted the ex-convict, but in India the bad-livelihood sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC sections 109–110) permitted a far more flexible construction of ‘habituality’. They illustrate the degree to which summary judicial powers wielded by the executive head of the district were incorporated into the code, not excised from it. Educated Indians critiqued this combination of executive and judicial powers in the hands of the district magistrate, yet CrPC ‘preventive sections’ proliferated. Furthermore, in 1918 the Punjab province passed a Habitual Offender Act which, drawing upon the pattern of the Criminal Tribes Act (Act XXVII of 1871), permitted CrPC section 110 to be used to restrict the suspected ‘habitual’ to a certain area as well. Hitherto amendments to the CrPC were supposed to be matters for central not provincial legislation. The Punjab Act inaugurated an era of provincial enactments to intern or release ‘habituals’, structured around essentialist contrasts between urban and rural space. Under the surface of drives to codify colonial law a striated jurisdictional topography continued to re-form.

This article examines changing conceptions of the Himalaya in nineteenth-century Bengali travelogues from that of a sacred space to a spatial metaphor of a putative nation-space. It examines sections of Devendranath Tagore's autobiography, written around 1856–58, before discussing the travelogues of Jaladhar Sen and Ramananda Bharati from the closing years of the nineteenth century. The article argues that for Tagore the mountains are the ‘holy lands of Brahma’, while Sen and Bharati depict the Himalaya with a political slant and secularize the space of Hindu sacred geography. It contends that this process of secularization posits Hinduism as the civil religion of India. The article further argues that the later writers make a distinction between the idea of a ‘homeland’ and a ‘nation’. Unlike in Europe, where the ideas of homeland and nation overlap, these writers imagined the Indian nation-space as one that encompassed diverse ethno-linguistic homelands. It contends that the putative nation-space articulates the hegemony of the Anglo-vernacular middle classes, that is, English educated, upper caste, male Hindus where women, non-Hindus, and the labouring classes are marginalized.

This article examines the cosmopolitan world of the colonial zenana through the marriages of two mid-twentieth-century royal Indian women, Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra and Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur. In particular, it analyses the close connection between zenana women's education and emergent adolescent sexuality. These women ordinarily began their studies in mixed-gender classrooms with their brothers and male cousins as children. As they neared the age of menarche, girls were extracted from the formal schoolroom and undertook instruction in household management and childcare in preparation for their expected roles as wives and mothers. Despite being prematurely cut off from the childhood classroom, women's educational backgrounds (in both Western and Indic forms of knowledge) and future learning potential remained an important part of their postmarital identity. Young, anglicized Indian men increasingly desired wives who reflected the modernity that they hoped to represent as imperial subjects and were encouraged to adopt by British advisors and tutors. They required wives who would not wear pardah and thus reflect more Western ideals of companionate marriages of friendship, yet simultaneously live in gender-segregated palace quarters, uphold traditional kinship networks, perform religious duties, and engage in the maintenance of a large polygamous household. Definitions of sex, marriage, and domesticity were increasingly cross-cultural and pan-historical in nature, incorporating aspects both of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’, the Indic and the European, the regional and the transnational.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

This article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.

In the Theravāda Buddhist polities on the mainland of Southeast Asia, abiding concerns about the proper structuring of the relationship between the ‘two wheels of dhamma’ (i.e. the realm of religion and the realm of politics) have had a profound influence on processes of state formation and political legitimation. This article explores one such religious ‘effect’ on the constitutions and electoral laws of modern Burma/Myanmar, Siam/Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, namely the official disenfranchisement of Buddhist monks (and, in some instances, Buddhist ‘nuns’ as well as non-Buddhist clergy). The article traces the historical evolution of this Buddhist exception to the democratic principle of equal and universal suffrage, and assesses the extent to which dominant theoretical approaches in the social sciences help us to understand the politics of religious disenfranchisement in Southeast Asia. It finds that neither secularization theory nor the religious-economy approach can explain observed patterns. Instead, the article offers an account of the politics of religious disenfranchisement that emphasizes the role of ideas and historical context.

This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of religious environmentalism in India. It examines accounts of a large number of incidents described in Indian language newspapers, the colonial archive, and hunting literature published between the 1870s and 1940s, in which British and other sportsmen clashed with villagers in India while out hunting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the colonial sports-hunting obsession was in its heyday, but opposition to hunting across India was also mounting. Rural villagers, in particular, were often willing to become involved in physical combat with hunters, apparently in order to protect local wildlife. Sportsmen often assumed that it was religious fanaticism that made Hindus defend the lives of what they saw as game animals, trophies, and specimens. The article provides evidence that, in addition to religion, a mixture of other motivations explains Hindu interest in the conservation of certain species. Anti-colonial consciousness, assertions of local authority and territoriality, and an environmental ethic can all be identified as being at work. The end result was the increased conservation of certain species of wildlife.

In India in the 1860s, print was becoming the primary medium for the reproduction of religious texts. The accessibility of print, and its ready uptake within a highly stratified and competitive religious landscape, had a significant effect on the ways in which groups contended for textual, and thus spiritual, authority. In 1867, the popular Tamil Shaiva mystic Ramalinga Adigal and his followers published Tiruvarutpa, a book of Ramalinga's poems that would help establish his reputation as a great Shaiva saint. Ramalinga and his disciples chose to publish the work in a form that shared the content and the material features of contemporaneous publications of Tamil classics, thereby claiming a place for his poems alongside the revered Shaiva canon. They showed an acute awareness that it was not solely the content of religious texts, but also the materiality of the printed object in which texts appeared, that sustained assertions for authority. This article argues that leaders on the margins of established centres of religious power in South India sought authority by exploiting the material aspects of print as the new medium of religious canons.

While the territory of Afghanistan is widely connected in the popular and historical imagination to long-distance trade, Afghan society continues to be popularly represented as being made-up of ‘tribes’, who subscribe to static ‘honour codes’, and tenaciously cling to archaic tribal values. This article examines the significance of traders of Afghan background to commodity flows across a wide range of contexts in the former Soviet Union, especially in Russia and Ukraine and the Muslim-majority Central Asian Republics. It charts the social and political backgrounds of the merchants who make up this trading network, the nature of their connections to one another and the forms of mobility that make these connections possible, their complex relations with the communities amongst whom they live, and the types of moral value they attach to their work as traders.

In ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offered a literary analysis of British records to demonstrate the inextricability of language from the colonial/imperial project's goal of world domination. Honing her arguments on the threat of a Himalayan queen (rani) to ‘become sati’ (i.e. immolate herself), Spivak interpreted the event as representative of the plight of subalterns and of ‘third world women’ in particular. However, a close reading of the records reveals profound discrepancies between Spivak's interpretation and conditions that existed in and around the kingdom at the time. This article contextualizes the rani's story by supplementing archival sources with folk traditions, local histories, and recent research on sati and Rajput women. It shows that the rani was actually an astute ruler, similar to her peers in the West Himalayan elite, and that her threat of suicide resulted from reasons that go beyond an alleged attempt at recovering agency from the dual oppressions of patriarchal indignity and an invasive superpower. The discourses about sati in contemporary texts are also investigated, revealing a considerable overlap in South Asian and European views of sati among Himalayan elites in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century northwest India.

The chief concern of this article is the organization and administration of rural policing in colonial Bengal during the last 40 years of the nineteenth century. It connects its design and implementation with the consolidation of India's colonial police force, while highlighting the ongoing negotiations made by the Bengal police in a wider colonial model. The article argues that the police administration of rural Bengal was shaped initially by the ordinary constraints of the colonial state which underpinned the design of the Indian police—namely its frugality and preference for collaborating with local intermediaries, a manifestation of salutary neglect. Yet, it highlights the role of Bengal's largely British police executive in renegotiating customs of governance and, ultimately, as an established model of policing in India. The article focuses, therefore, on ongoing and at times informal police reforms which were based upon notions contradictory to an official discourse about policing in India. This article thus contextualizes the development of rural police administration in Bengal in a strong tradition of police-led reform in the province. In so doing, the article redresses a traditional historiographical focus on the political origins and coercive function of the police, and problematizes current research which situates Indian policing within customs of British governance in the subcontinent.

Many scholars, politicians, and the lay people alike believe that Urdu in North India symbolizes a Muslim identity and culture. Based on an eight-month long ethnographic study and quantitative language data collected in Old Delhi, this article challenges this notion and shows that the symbolic meanings of Urdu have been mutating in post-colonial India. A cross-generational study involving both Muslims and Hindus shows that different generations assign different meanings to Urdu. Unlike the older generation, Muslim youth do not identify themselves with Urdu. A study of the Urdu sounds /f/, /z/, /kh/, /gh/, and /q/ in the speech of Muslim youth further demonstrates that they are losing three of these sounds. Another transformation involves the adoption of the Devanagari script to write Urdu by many Muslims. This change in the literacy practices of Muslims reinforces the shift in the symbolic meanings of Urdu. I argue that the transformation in the symbolic meanings of Urdu is reflective and constitutive of the sociopolitical changes that Muslims have undergone in the twentieth century.

This article explores the language politics of Manchukuo and the implications reflected in the literary texts of the Japanese writer Hinata Nobuo and the Chinese writer Gu Ding. Through the close examination of communicative failures, such as lexical misunderstandings, linguistic barriers, lies, and rumours in Hinata Nobuo's ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ and Gu Ding's ‘The Wilds’, this article illustrates the authors’ different responses to the impact of this language politics. While both authors were aware of the mutable nature of language, Hinata perceived the Japanese language as a symbol of colonial power and thus the miscommunications between Japanese and Chinese in his story address the ethnic hierarchy embedded in language in the specific context of Manchukuo. Gu Ding, on the other hand, did not see language as a defining element of the culture of a nation, and therefore tried to construct a new type of language and community that were not restricted by the discursive notions of the Chinese and Japanese nations. Gu Ding's primary concern was the modernization of his native place and, to him, adherence to traditional language forms was insignificant and deleterious.

Despite being recognized as a significant literary mode in understanding the advent of the modern self, biographies as a genre have received relatively little attention from South Asian historians. Likewise, histories of science and healing in British India have largely ignored the colonial trajectories of those sectarian, dissenting, supposedly pseudo-sciences and medical heterodoxies that have flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century. This article addresses these gaps in the historiography to identify biographies as a principal mode through which an incipient, ‘heterodox’ Western science like homoeopathy could consolidate and sustain itself in Bengal. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives render largely invisible, this article argues that biographies are more than a mere repository of individual lives, and in fact are a veritable site of power. In bringing histories of print and publishing, histories of medicine, and histories of life writing practices together, it pursues two broad themes: first, it analyses the sociocultural strategies and networks by which scientific doctrines and concepts are translated across cultural borders. It explores the relation between medical commerce, print capital, and therapeutic knowledge to illustrate that acculturation of medical science necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of class, kinship, and religion. Second, it simultaneously reflects upon the expanding genre of homoeopathic biographies published since the mid-nineteenth century: on their features, relevance, and functions, examining in particular the contemporary status of biography vis-à-vis ‘history’ in writing objective pasts.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. The Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance of zielverkopers (labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

In the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.