This chapter reviews the history, culture and politics of South Asian languages in the UK. South Asian migration to the UK dates back to the British colonial period. It expanded in the twentieth century, first with British Indian participation in the two World Wars and then with post-war British policies that initially encouraged South Asian immigration for low-skilled labour. South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. Overall, sustained migration, relatively large settlements, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrants has meant that South Asian speech communities have tended to maintain their languages, though with inroads by English in each successive generation. South Asian languages initially struggled to be included in school curricula and university provision. Some languages, such as Urdu and Arabic, have wider religious or cultural appeal and see much higher uptake through education than other South Asian languages, even languages with more native speakers. Almost no research has been conducted on structural change within South Asian heritage languages, a rich area for future research on language contact and generational change.

Detective or crime fiction has had a long and varied history in South Asia, at times inflected by local concerns, at other times transporting readers into a world of international intrigue. This chapter traces its development from its colonial origins under the aegis of a local boom in print media, ‘intrusive’ colonial law and policing and the influx of European narratives combined with precolonial tropes. The chapter focuses on iconic ‘homegrown’ detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi in the 1930s, the quintessential Bengali gentleman detective engaged in the high pursuit of truth, the debonair detectives Faridi and Imraan created by Indo-Pakistani writer Ibne Safi in the 1950s–1970s, and the heroes of ‘hard-boiled’ Hindi crime fiction in the 1970s–1990s. Crime fiction has also allowed women writers to imagine bold female detectives who challenge and debate gender norms, from Kamala Satthianadhan’s trailblazing Detective Janaki (1934) to Sujatha Massey’s Perveen Mistry. Crime fiction in South Asia has been intensely translational, not just from English but also across South Asian languages. It has pioneered its own distribution channels and spawned adaptations across media platforms.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

This chapter examines the practice of internal self-determination in the context of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It examines the Tamil minority struggle for self-determination, and how the demands for both federalism and separatism have been made through the broader language of self-determination. The chapter shows how different minority groups make demands which amount to internal self-determination, how the government responds to such demands, and also how the language of internal self-determination has been viewed skeptically by the Tamil minority. The chapter shows the potential and problems internal self-determination as a concept holds in the context of a protracted ethnic conflict.

It is generally acknowledged that Hinduism, as the name of a distinct religion, did not exist before the nineteenth century. Before that, “Hindu” had simply meant “Indian” and encompassed a variety of beliefs and practices (diffuse spirituality). There were also indigenous “Thomas Christians” dating fromthe 1st century CE. When missionaries arrived, lower caste groups found Christianity attractive. A sea-change occurred around the nineteenth century when Westerners found “Hinduism” to be incurably superstitious. Indians responded by reforming their practices (towards concentrated spirituality). Christianity continued to appeal to marginalized groups such as women, untouchables, and aboriginal ethnic groups. Hindu nationalists continue to view Christianity with suspicion.