This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration.

This article undertakes a comparison between Safavid Iran and modern Pakistan with the aim of highlighting the similarities and differences between their respective state projects of crafting ‘Islamic’ polities. The comparison proceeds through a focus on the state-sanctioned practice of ritual cursing of Sunnis and Ahmadis in Safavid Iran and Pakistan respectively. In both cases, the states made extensive legal efforts to mark out these religious Others by vilifying them on charges of heresy and innovation. This article argues that this vilification was oriented towards creating homogeneity among political subjects of the polity, who were required by the state to curse and condemn these religious Others in order to demonstrate their submission to sovereign power. Ritual cursing thus functioned as an oath of submission that was elicited by the state to draw subjects into the project of sacralizing the polity and to discipline them into reproducing the normative order of the sovereign power. There are also significant differences between the two cases that throw light on the historical specificity of different modes of sovereignty in early modern and modern Muslim polities. While Safavid kings sacralized their realm through the diffusion of scriptural law moulded to enhance their own sovereign power, the Pakistani state is engaged in the sacralization of the national body politic through its official religious nationalist ideology.

On 6 December 1959, the image of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Damodar Valley Corporation dam project in Bihar with a 15-year-old Adivasi girl called Budhini Manjhiyan was flashed across the national newspapers. This was an iconic moment in the national debate around development and change which was to dominate modern India on whether lands, predominately rural and tribal, were to be flooded to benefit the nation. Years later, in 2016, when the newspapers caught up with Budhini, she had returned to Jharkhand and was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her children. Her story resonates with the ways in which, in recent times, Adivasis are becoming increasingly visible as subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, conversion, development, and climate change. The post-colonial Indian state and its allies, with a developmentalist agenda uppermost in their minds, have made loss of land, displacement, migration, and forced resettlement a part of Adivasi experiences. Forces of globalization, often in tandem with the policies of the Indian state, are engulfing marginal spaces. The increasingly powerful majoritarian narrative of the state subsumes alternate voices with easy nonchalance. The foregrounding of planetary narratives on the fate of humanity in the era of the Anthropocene erases the importance of particular locales and specific communities that could offer an alternative to declensionist narratives. But amid this marginalization, there also lies a story of the assertion of Adivasi agency. Voices of Adivasis—although multiple and fractured—can be heard as they assert their identity, express their politics, and creatively negotiate with the state and its institutions. Scattered across India in geographically differentiated terrains, pursuing different occupations, and speaking different languages, the experiences of Adivasis are varied, as they inhabit many worlds. Their stories point to the multiplicity of cultures and myriad ways of thinking that must be accommodated within the ambit of the nation, and yet offer the possibilities of different ways of living and being on this earth.

This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism also contains a strand which is underpinned by nationalist biopolitics. While we find his writings deeply entrenched in racist colonial stereotypes about native Africans, they are also shaped by nationalist biopolitics that were emerging during decolonization, which led him to strongly condemn prominent groups of Indian immigrants in Africa as well. Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on the ambiguities of decolonizing discourses provide a useful springboard for a fresh reading. This preliminary reading of Pottekkatt's African travelogues, however, complicates Chakrabarty's observations about both pedagogic and dialogic modes of decolonizing discourses. It also points to the importance of the regional, and not the national, in the possibilities of South-South dialogue—to which Pottekkatt's accounts point, if only in a cursory manner.

Within a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place.

In 1915 the south-western quadrant of Ceylon was convulsed by a week of rioting in which the Buddhist Sinhalese majority attacked a Muslim minority known as the Moors. The consensus amongst historians has long been that the pogrom (as it is best described) was the spontaneous result of religious tension and/or economic grievances at the popular level, with no leadership beyond the uncoordinated activities of local agitators. The consensus ignores significant evidence of wider orchestration, including the activities of itinerant gangs and other mobile agitators, the deliberate propagation of identical false rumours throughout the affected area, and the activities of individuals and societies associated with the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist movement. Although the picture is far from complete, the best interpretation of the evidence is that this movement orchestrated the pogrom, albeit with varying degrees of success in each locality. That it was able to do so shows that Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism (as opposed to non-communalist, Ceylon-wide nationalism) was more deeply entrenched than is usually thought, which helps to explain Sri Lanka's political direction later in the century.

This paper looks at Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's political involvement in the Kashmir crisis of the 1930s under its second and most influential khalīfat al-masīh, Mirza Bashir al-Din Mahmud Ahmad, who took over the movement in 1914, six years after the death of his father, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Communal tensions springing from the Kashmir riots of 1931 provided Mirza Mahmud Ahmad with an opportunity to display the ability of his Jama'at to manage an international crisis and to lead the Muslim mainstream towards independence from Britain. Mahmud Ahmad's relations with influential Muslim community leaders, such as Iqbal, Fazl-i Husain, Zafrulla Khan, and Sheikh Abdullah (Sher-i Kashmīr), enabled him to further both his religious and political objectives in the subcontinent. This paper examines Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's role in establishing a major political lobby, the All-India Kashmir Committee. It also shows how the political involvement of Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya in Kashmir during the 1930s left Ahmadis susceptible to criticism from opposition groups, like the Majlis-i Ahrar, amongst others, in later years. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how Mahmud Ahmad's skilful use of religion, publicity, and political activism during the Kashmir crisis instantly legitimized a political platform for Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's entrance into the mainstream political framework of modern South Asia, which thereby has facilitated the development of the Ahmadi controversy since India's partition.

In this paper I take the women's movement as the site for unpacking some of the strains and tensions involved in practical interpretations of secularism in present-day India. Several sources within and outside the movement point out that there has been a tendency to take the existence of secularism for granted, and that the supposedly secular idioms and symbols used for mobilizing women have been drawn from Hindu religio-cultural sources. Women from Dalit and religious minority communities have felt alienated by this. Hindu nationalists have cleverly appropriated these idioms and symbols to mobilize women as foot soldiers to further religious nationalism. Through a case-study of a grassroots women's NGO working in Uttar Pradesh, I seek to explore how women's organizations may be reshaping their agendas and activism to address this issue. Specifically, I will examine how and why the 2002 Gujarat riots affected the NGO, the ways in which it has started working on the issue of communal harmony and engaging with Muslims since the riots, and the challenges with which it has been confronted as a result of its efforts. In doing so, I will show how the complexities of NGO-based women's activism have become intertwined with the politics of secularism.

The Naning War, long dismissed by historians as a ‘little war’, was part of a more expansive drama in the history of the Malay world. The war expressed traditional modes of power-broking and opposition, as well as anticipated later political developments in Malaya. From the wider perspective of imperial history, this important but neglected episode of British expansion in the East merits a modern treatment. This article seeks to rectify deficiencies of existing histories of the Naning War by exploring the nature of indirect rule and formal control from the metropolis, and authority and conflict at the ‘periphery’. It sets the war both within the cultural context of Malay warfare, and within the regional context of indigenous resistance and Islamic protest against British incursions.

This article investigates the tensions that emerge when transnational identities are juxtaposed against claims of multiculturalism and de facto assimilation processes. The article focuses on the resettlement of co-ethnics who arrived in China through forced migration between 1949 and 1979 and the generational transitions of their descendants. The Chinese state resettled these forced migrants from Southeast Asia on state-owned farms known as the ‘overseas Chinese farms’ and gave them preferential treatment as ‘returnees’ rather than ‘refugees’. They retained transnational cultural identities which set them apart from the China-born Chinese and suffered further stigmatization during the Cultural Revolution. This article highlights the limitations of using ethnicity as a lens for understanding how ‘difference’ is negotiated in China. In contemporary times the (multi)cultural identities of the refugee-returnees are promoted for the purposes of tourism to help reinvent the farms for economic sustainability. Yet the identity transitions experienced by the children and grandchildren of the refugee-returnees suggest that they are assimilating a national identity that subsumes their overseas Chinese cultures, serving to normalize a Chinese identity associated with the locally born Chinese instead. The article argues that the objectification of overseas Chinese heritage and assimilation ideology work together to selectively highlight China's historical connections to its co-ethnics abroad while simultaneously projecting a new national narrative of contemporary Chinese identity that is distinct from the overseas Chinese. This article on Chinese forced migration and resettlement provides useful insights concerning the negotiation of transnational identity with respect to multiculturalism and assimilation, and further suggests new directions for overseas Chinese studies today.

One consequence of the democratization of Eastern Europe has been a sharp reduction in the provision of development assistance by the former Communist countries. At its high point in the mid-1980s, aid from Communist Eastern Europe to the developing countries is estimated to have peaked at between $516–537 million a year, supplementing Soviet aid of some $4–4.5 billion. Taken together, it is estimated that Soviet and East European Communist aid represented nearly 10% of total world Official Development Assistance (ODA) disbursements during that period. Following the political changes that wrought democratization to Eastern Europe, these aid flows declined drastically or even ceased. This downward shift in aid reflected a profound and widespread aversion to any ongoing East European role in international development.

During the Second World War, the Japanese state enacted sweeping education reforms designed to prime the population for Total War. The policies of the National Education Ordinance of 1941 aimed to strengthen collective loyalty and self-sacrifice for the state. Military drill and ceremonial rituals were the outward manifestation of wartime education. But this article examines how teachers borrowed an aspect of progressive ‘whole-person’ education from the more liberal pre-war era—‘daily life writing’ (seikatsu tsuzurikata)—to shape children's dispositions and consciousness. Through such reflective diary writing, children would learn to internalize the ideal behaviours and attributes of the Total War civilian. By comparing education discourse with samples of children's writings, teachers’ written feedback, and interviews of former students of an elementary school affiliated with the Ministry of Education, I show how reflective diary writing, despite its progressive origins as a means of self-expression for self-actualization and social critique, could be co-opted by right-wing Japanese ultra-nationalism for its potential as a means of self-censorship, self-monitoring, and self-control. At the same time, its practice did help children endure the hardships of war and defeat.

This article reinterprets the Indonesian invasion of East Timor as a ‘diplomatic counter-revolution’. Using the central archival records of the Suharto regime for the first time in English-language scholarship, it unearths a diplomatic campaign undertaken by agents of the New Order to secure international support for an Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This diplomatic offensive spanned Southeast Asia, non-aligned and Afro-Asian networks, Western capitals, international institutions and media circuits, and global capital markets. Its success tipped the balance of power in Jakarta away from advocates of restraint like Adam Malik and towards advocates of annexation like Ali Murtopo. The diplomacy behind Indonesia's invasion of East Timor reveals that the architecture of globalization, lauded by some scholars as inherently liberatory, was in fact agnostic, capable of being turned to counter-revolutionary purposes in addition to revolutionary ones. And it suggests that diplomacy itself had been counter-revolutionized, as geopolitical and geoeconomic change combined to make the international system, particularly the states of the Global South, far more hostile to state-making claims and transformative world-making projects.

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.

The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

This article documents Adivasi resistance to the ‘loot’ of their land and resources since 1980, especially during the Kalinganagar movement in Odisha, roughly between 2004 and 2010, and the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, between 2016 and 2018. Using the lens of trauma and testimony, the article represents a combined effort by Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi activist, journalist, and writer who has borne witness to events during these years; Felix Padel, an anthropologist; and Vinita Damodaran, a historian. The land grabs are mainly oriented towards mining and metals production, justified in terms of ‘development’, which leaves many dead and destroys landscapes that Adivasis have cared about for countless generations.

This article focuses on how people who formerly worked as bonded labourers adapt to the new realities of an insecure capitalist labour market. It examines how the past shapes the uncertain labour situation of the present, including resistance. The article reflects on the current experiences of precarious labour at industrial sites in western Nepal. It describes how former bonded labourers and their descendants have begun working as contract workers in a modern industrial food-processing factory, with the help of contractors related to them by kin. The article further shows that one of the defining features of their new life as contract labourers is its chronic precariousness. Undisguised forms of confrontation, such as open disregard for management instructions, are also part of their new reality in the labour market. Contract labourers are often strongly assertive in the face of managerial authority, and this assertiveness has been shaped largely by either past experiences or memories of bonded labour. The article contributes to debates about bonded labour and its transformations in South Asia. It also offers a reflection on the limited impact of the Nepali Maoist Revolution on precarious labour and on the ethnic dimensions of this segment of Nepali society. Finally, it contributes to discussions about industrialization and Adivasi communities in South Asia and beyond.

In the late autumn of 1868 political events in Japan were no longer focused exclusively on Edo, Ōsaka and the lands of the south-western han; all of which could be easily visited by British sailors and diplomats. The Imperial armies had won important victories at Fushimi and Ueno but they had still not gained control of the whole of Japan. The last Shōgun had retired from the conifict but his supporters still mounted stubborn military resistance in Northern Honshū. At this stage it was important for Britain to know the state of this civil war and its likely outcome.

During the period from late 1824 to 1826, a crisis in the Grand Canal system led to intense and sustained imperial involvement in chiangsu regional government. The collapse of the Yen-hsu retaining embankments on Hung-tse Lake in northern Chiangsu sparked the crisis and caused serious flooding in the Huai-yang region east of the Canal, which destroyed sections of the Canal at the critical Huai—Yellow River junction, and dissipated the lake's unsilted water reserves that were crucial to the crossing of government grain boats at the Huai—Yellow River junction on their annual northward journey to Pei-ching. As a result, the transport of strategic grain supplies destined for the capital was brought to a virtual standstill, precipitating a major government crisis that challenged the newly established Tao-kuang Emperor and indeed cast a shadow on the dynasty itself because of the intense

Effective combat performance depends on the following: First, there must be a sound command structure capable of making rational decisions. Second, there must be efficient means of communication to transmit decisions through the chain of command and to give the commanders continuous control over their units. There must also be sufficient transportation to allow the units to execute their mission in a timely way. Third, there must be adequate quality and quantity of weapons and supplies commensurable with the given military mission. Fourth, there must be high-quality soldiers at all levels able to perform their duties competently. Finally, the entire military effort must be guided by clear and coherent strategic thinking.

The voluminous Blechynden diaries, in the British Library, offer incomparable opportunities for studying (among other things) domestic life among middle-level British residents of Calcutta around the start of the nineteenth century. This paper is concerned with a small part of the history of the Blechynden household, focusing on Arthur Blechynden, son of Richard and his successor as superintendent of roads. Richard's diary runs to more than 70 volumes and Arthur's to seven. These sources permit none of the structural analysis that was made the basis of family history by Peter Laslett and others; but they touch several points of the richer canvas painted by Laurence Stone, and those genres that are concerned with individual lives, with emotion, with relationships, and with identity, the kinds of subject approached by the contributors to Roy Porter's collection Rewriting the Self. In this paper some of these issues will be taken up, with particular reference to ideas of individuality and of race. That discussion will then lead on to another, on the construction of British imperial identity outside Britain and in the context of the formation of empire, an aspect that seems worthy of more attention than it has received.