This short article introduces the Forum on Muslim modernity in South Asia, placing its four articles—by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, and Justin Jones—in the context of existing scholarship. I highlight the authors’ contributions to the study of Islamic reform and of women’s agency, in particular, in understandings of Muslim modernity in South Asia. Each of the contributions is on a discrete topic; this introduction therefore endeavours to pull at the threads within each that underscores their interventions in the study of Muslim modernity and that tie them together in this Forum.

This article contributes to historiographical examinations of gender and capitalism in eighteenth-century India. Focusing on the fragile nature of revenue farming ventures in this period, the article illustrates how propertied women in the Eastern Gangetic plains used matriarchal authority and affect to lead their agrarian and mercantile family firms into commercial transactions. The article shows that the household was the locus of these commercial relationships and that of the competing and layered sovereignties of distinct state and non-state actors. At the same time, matriarchs exercised their authority beyond it. Travelling in palanquins, or having their kin conduct transactions on their behalf, they asserted their maternal authority and social status in different publics to protect their firms’ interests. In a second key argument, the article suggests that Mughal law, fostered by native officials in the early colonial courts in Banaras, facilitated propertied women’s participation in this economy. Matriarchs demonstrated a keen understanding of this fractured jurisdictional landscape and used it to their advantage as they manoeuvred from one legal forum to another. The third argument of this article illustrates that colonial regulations redefined, and could even compromise, propertied women’s engagements in land revenue transactions. These shifts were made possible through the mobilization of gender and specific understandings of womanhood and the household. In this article, I show that these attempts to disenfranchise propertied women in Banaras were intimately connected to the Company’s vision of a colonial public in which it could monopolize sovereignty.

Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.

This article discusses the continuity between cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism from 1932–1941 by exploring the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and its international staff. The CMCS managed China’s international trade and directed the custom houses in northern China before 1937, and in occupied China and free China from 1937–1941. The customs revenues generated by this international trade were pledged to service China’s international obligations. This article argues that both Chinese and Japanese staff members’ activities to maintain the status quo could be considered as wartime collaborationism from the perspectives of Japan, Manchukuo, and the Collaborationist and Chongqing governments, but all parties tolerated their activities until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The reason for this was that all parties benefitted from the CMCS’s management of international trade and its implementation of international obligations which had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. This article situates wartime collaborationism within the long-existing institutional network that was welcomed as cosmopolitan collaboration in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, rather than treating it as a unique wartime setup and ideology. Such a view also illuminates the postwar exchange of personnel and cooperation among former enemies, which grew out of prewar collaboration and wartime collaborationism.

This article studies some major shifts in the relationship between law and Sufism in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It does so by focusing on Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) to examine, first, how these two key facets of Islam interact with each other in his thought and, second, how some influential Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have understood and positioned themselves in relation to this aspect of his thought. Though one would be hard pressed to know this from the sanitized modern image of Wali Allah as a scholar of the Quran and hadith, and of a Sufi piety uncompromisingly anchored in them, his Sufism reveals a wide and, from many a modern Muslim perspective, unwieldly range of ideas and practices. Yet it was precisely in that unwieldy breadth and depth that it was generative of some of his key insights into matters of the law. Even as many people have continued to insist on the imbrication of law and Sufism, a sanitization of Wali Allah’s Sufi image serves to highlight wider processes whereby an earlier era’s generative relationship between the two has come to be increasingly attenuated since the late nineteenth century.

This article investigates cotton promotion policies in colonial Korea, with a focus on the role of a series of semi-governmental organizations (SGOs) in implementing colonial policies to shape farmers’ interactions with global, capitalist markets. Colonial attempts to develop the cultivation of cotton, a quintessential commodity of modern capitalism, highlight the incorporation of the Korean countryside into imperial networks of commercial commodity production and circulation. However, despite appeals to the rhetoric of capitalism and the expected response of profit-maximizing cotton cultivators, in practice colonial cotton campaigns relied on the active intervention of the colonial state to reinforce the adoption of new scientific and commercial agricultural practices. SGOs performed multiple roles in the promotion of cotton cultivation—distributing resources, defining expertise, regulating the production and sale of cotton, and attempting to change the behaviour of cotton cultivators, landlords, and even merchants in line with the colonial government’s strategic interests. As such, SGOs represent an understudied extension of the colonial state into the rural economy, which influenced the conditions under which farming households engaged in the commercial cultivation of cotton.

Qian Daosun (1887–1966) was imprisoned for collaborating with the Provisional Government in North China under Japanese occupation, and to this day he is labelled as hanjian (traitor). Yet, Qian was first and foremost a cultural literatus, librarian, and an exceptional translator with an in-depth understanding of Japanese culture and languages. This article examines the crucial role that Japan and the Japanese language played for Chinese cultural literati in their quest to save China. It also brings to the forefront the dilemmas and agonizing choices Qian faced in his attempt to promote Sino-Japanese cultural exchange in the midst of war, in particular as a librarian. Wartime libraries are highly contested sites of selection, destruction, censorship, preservation, confiscation, and knowledge production. An added layer of complexity was Japan’s cultural policy in China that promoted Japanese-language collections and governed libraries such as the Beijing1 Modern Science Library where Qian worked. What exacerbated Qian’s dilemmas was his upbringing, which led him to form close personal connections with like-minded Japanese literati. Lastly, this article revisits the hanjian label by comparing Qian’s fate to that of other librarians and returned students of Japan, such as May Fourth writer Lu Xun and patriotic bibliophile Zheng Zhenduo. By deliberately examining May Fourth writers alongside hanjian and Japanese intermediaries, the intention is to dismount arbitrary labels and divisions that have set them apart and against each other in the resistance versus collaboration dichotomy.

This article examines the theological and hermeneutical foundations and fault lines of Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia. It does so through a close reading of a massively consequential but thus far unstudied debate on the normative sources and interpretive parameters of religion in colonial modernity between the scholars Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877), founders of arguably the most prominent bastions of modernism and traditionalism in Muslim South Asia: the Aligarh Muslim University and the Deoband Madrasa, both established in the late nineteenth century.

This article explores the roles imperial women played in the practices and systems of the northern states during the Sixteen Kingdoms (304–439) and Northern Dynasties periods (386–581), two of the most politically turbulent periods in Chinese history. The article will focus particularly on the absence of crown princesses and intermarriage practice in Northern Wei, and the appearance of coterminous empresses in Former Zhao and Northern Zhou. While a vast scholarship has viewed the rulership strategies and policies of the Northern Dynasties as a process of Sinicization, or one-sided acculturation, this article considers the perspective of the northern rulers who were aware of a multicultural populace. In an effort to shore up their power in court and rule effectively over a dispersed, heterogenous population, these northern rulers enforced agendas employing imperial women as the medium through which to engage elites of diverse backgrounds and tie these groups to their imperial families. Imperial women served in critical roles that brought to the court a delicate balance among various powerful factions, lending stability to the reigns of emperors and promoting cosmopolitanism in a period prior to Tang (618–907).

The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.

This article examines Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) and the memory of his ‘collaboration’ with Japan during the Second World War. A Taiwanese-born writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years, his drifting identity was full of ambiguities. Although he was one of the key intellectuals behind Taiwan’s New-Old Literatures Debate and responsible for introducing many May Fourth ideas to Taiwan, he also played an important role in bringing Japanese literature and thought into Chinese discourse during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During the war, he continued to teach in Beijing and travelled to Japan to attend the Greater East Asia Writers’ conferences. Some of his works from this period call for the Chinese people to support the empire and eradicate Western culture and literature from Asia, but many of his writings also indicate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism.

This article considers the memories of Zhang, his various intellectual contributions, and his oeuvre, arguing that his collaboration must be understood and contextualized within his intellectual landscape through a research methodology that examines continuities and change across decades of his life and work.

This article uses techniques of microhistory to explore how Janbai, the third wife of Sir Tharia Topan, exerted economic, religious, and social influence in Indian Ocean networks. An Ismaili woman from a Gujarati trading family who lived in East Africa, Janbai lies outside of the social worlds that have dominated studies of Muslim modernity in South Asia, which centre on Sunni male professionals from North India. Janbai was illiterate and largely disconnected from textual debates about modernity. In fact, she was just the sort of woman that reformers castigated for their supposed attachment to religious superstitions and customary practices. In contrast, studying Janbai through an alternative frame of ‘material modernity’ reveals the complex biography of a women who neither conformed to the idealized ‘new’ woman, nor simply reproduced inherited practices. Instead, she navigated rapid social mobility, shifting geographies, and new technologies and institutions, particularly colonial law courts, in ways that echoed and departed from how women had long exercised agency. The article argues that scholars, by foregrounding textual archives and discursive analysis, have tended to reproduce the marginalization of women like Janbai. In contrast, looking to sources such as jewellery and photographs, and reading textual archives with greater attention to gendered patterns of consumption and investment, brings Janbai from the margins to the centre of our understanding of modernity. In addition to enriching our understanding of the lives of women, increased attention to materiality and visuality opens up critical new avenues for writing a more variegated history of Muslim modernity.

This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

The last 15–20 years have seen the emergence of a new trajectory of ‘Muslim feminism’ in India which has grounded Muslim women’s rights discourse both in the direct interpretation of Islamic scriptures and also in principles derived from the Indian Constitution. Examining two prominent Muslim women’s organizations—the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan—this article examines how this form of Muslim feminism has become a central repository of Islamic modernist thought in India in light of its perceived failure in some other sections of Muslim public life. Based on writings and educational materials produced by these organizations, this article discusses their methods of harnessing the teachings of the Quran, their application of ‘Islamic feminist’ methodology to interpret Islamic family laws, their identification of equivalence between Islamic and constitutional values, and their attempts to engage the state in their efforts to promote the modernization of Muslim Personal Law.

The Japanese empire’s occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and ‘bottom-up’ wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as ‘bogus students’ who supposedly received Japanese ‘enslavement education’ from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history.

The first printing press landed on the western coast of India in the mid-sixteenth century. The introduction of printing technology did not immediately lead to a flourishing print culture, and the oral and scribal traditions continued to thrive for at least three more centuries. This article examines the emergence of print culture in nineteenth-century western India by surveying the literary sources in the Marathi language. It argues that the book was regarded as a sacred object in the pre-print era and reading was considered a ritualistic activity. Print, on the other hand, was seen as defiling and therefore orthodox Brahmins hesitated to embrace the technology of printing. They were also threatened by the democratizing potential of printing. As the print culture bourgeoned, the sacredness of the book declined and it turned into a profane commodity. A market for vernacular books and periodicals started emerging gradually. However, pre-modern notions of literary patronage did not wither away as authors and publishers continued to bank on state patronage.