This chapter explores how judicial mechanisms employed by apex courts have migrated across South Asia and Southeast Asia, using India, Pakistan, and Malaysia as examples. The chapter focuses on two case studies – Pakistan and Malaysia – to examine how judicial mechanisms, like the basic structure doctrine articulated by the Indian Supreme Court, have been strategically adapted by courts in Pakistan and Malaysia to strengthen their institutional power. This chapter considers the use of judicial rhetoric and constitutional comparativism in crafting opinions of popular salience by examining the distinct ways in which these Asian courts have engaged with foreign and comparative case law.

Inter-Asian Law is starkly absent from constitutional accounts of reproductive rights in Asia. Instead, Asian jurisdictions tend to draw from the Global North, with the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade occupying norm status. To explicate the potential of Inter-Asian Law in transforming reproductive rights, an act of imagination is required, suspending Roe as the central comparative frame and introducing alternate, hypothetical referents from Asia. This chapter conducts this task at two stages. First, it develops imagination as a method of comparative constitutional law. Second, applying the imaginative method, it hypothesizes what reproductive rights might look like if Nepal served as a referent for India and India as a referent for Bangladesh. In documenting explicit shifts in the constitutional construction of these rights, the chapter cements the place of Inter-Asian Law.

That obtaining a driving license in India is all too easy is a public secret; the prime reason behind this “ease” is the ubiquitous and ambivalent figure of the broker who, as public understanding goes, is enmeshed in a system of bribery at the Regional Transport Office (RTO). This chapter explores why brokerage and bribery have become institutionalized at the RTO. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over three years in the southern city of Hyderabad, I analyze the frameworks through which the act of hiring a broker is rationalized and articulated by Hyderabadi motorists. I show how brokerage is justified and even actively desired through two central framings both of which emphasize that brokers act as buffers in mediating between motorists and the RTO: one, brokers act as an insurance against an arbitrary state and, in doing so, make the state legible to motorists and vice versa; and two, brokerage enables a distancing from corruption and blurring the line between legality and illegality. All these factors contribute toward a quiet but potent institutionalization of brokerage at the RTOs in Hyderabad and, on one level, become caught up in the complex contestations around the very function and purpose of a driver’s license.

This chapter asks whether there is anything we might productively characterize as an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations. I use the example of the Essential Religious Practices (ERP) Doctrine as a window into this analysis. The ERP Doctrine offers the best-case argument for the existence of an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations because, after its initial articulation by the Indian Supreme Court, it has been widely influential within South and Southeast Asia. I use two of the contexts where ERP analysis has been influential – Malaysia and Sri Lanka – to show how there has indeed been significant conceptual migration within Asia with regard to religious freedom jurisprudence. The ERP Doctrine’s travels are clearly reflected in the flow of jurisprudential ideas and via robust campus-court exchanges. At the same time, differences in the theoretical networks and sociopolitical contexts within which the ERP Doctrine has traveled prevent it from constituting a homogenous and hermetically sealed Inter-Asian approach.

Despite its status as a low-income country, India has produced the third highest number of unicorns in the 2010s. We offer a supply–demand model of start-ups to explain this surprising outcome. On the demand side, India’s large and fast-growing market, coupled with ‘leapfrogging advantages’, have encouraged start-ups in many digital businesses. On the supply side, India’s abundant and affordable technical talent, nurtured by the country’s IT/software companies and the R&D centres of foreign multinationals, have combined with a surge in angel investors, incubators, accelerators and local and foreign venture capitalists. Government policies have reinforced both demand-side and supply-side factors, as have global developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions involving China. Although the climate for start-ups deteriorated in 2022–2024 in India (as it did worldwide), the fundamentals are strong for India to continue to be an important source of digital start-ups and unicorns.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

As climate disasters escalate, the Global South faces a staggering $387 billion annual shortfall in adaptation finance. Despite urgent needs, adaptation remains severely underfunded, sidelined by investors who favour mitigation projects with clearer returns. This chapter explores how philanthropic capital can be the missing piece, unlocking adaptation finance through risk-tolerant investments, blended finance, and ecosystem-wide collaboration.

It examines India as a case study, showcasing how philanthropic organizations can de-risk adaptation projects, support climate resilience, and influence policy reforms. Drawing on global data and case studies, the chapter argues that philanthropy can catalyse systemic change by bridging financing gaps, scaling high-impact solutions, and fostering collaboration between governments, businesses, and civil society, ultimately driving an adaptation revolution.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

This chapter explores employment testing bias and fairness in India. The developments that have led to fair employment practices in India with special reference to affirmative action policies, the reservation system, and the regulatory authorities that oversee hiring processes are reviewed. Measures aimed at the prevention of biases, including structured interviews, blind hiring, and training about unconscious bias are discussed. The chapter also reviews the legal framework for employment fairness, the role of public and private sector organizations, and issues such as the impact of artificial intelligence on selection procedures. Results from a survey of Indian organizations are used to provide empirical insights into the existence, as well as effectiveness, of fairness policies in curbing hiring biases. Further, the chapter compares the situation in India to global perspectives on employment testing bias and fairness and highlights the need to further refine regulatory mechanisms and organizational policies in hiring. Finally, this work indicates significant gaps across various aspects of fair hiring practices in India and identifies areas that require focus and research.

Chapter 7 analyzes changes in India’s important foreign relations, focusing on the post-Cold War period. The chapter argues that India’s approach to the world changed significantly in the post-1990 period, but has since then been marked mainly by incremental changes.