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.

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.

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.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.

Anglican missionaries took advantage of the spread of the empire to prosleytise to Native Americans and African Americans. Motivated by a desire to bring the gospel to so-called heathens and halt the spread of Catholicism, Cambridge men travelled to North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India to spread Protestantism. If they chose not to head abroad, they instead provided donations to missionary organisations, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, or assisted in the administration of plantations owned by these organisations. As Cambridge missionaries and dergymen encountered enslavement, prominent University figures became increasingly interested in debates concerning and morality the efficacy of Indigenous and African slavery. Some fellows were actively sceptical of the moral grounds for slavery, whilst others believed that enslavement was grounded in Christian belief. Rather than emerging in the era of abolition, scepticism and debate about the moral foundations of enslavement were consistent features of British intellectual life for over a century.

The chapter explores contrasting approaches to population policy and family planning in Yugoslavia, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and India, focusing on the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. It discusses how Yugoslavia shifted toward supporting global population control policies in stark contrast to other Communist countries, while Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, maintained strict anti-contraception laws. The United States evolved from reluctance to active involvement in global birth control programs to widespread financial support, and India transitioned to coercive sterilization policies during the state of emergency that was declared by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. The chapter argues that UN resolutions around family planning and human rights played a key role for these policies despite the fact that these resolutions were not binding. How the resolutions were interpreted depended strongly on regional and local power configurations. The relationship among human rights frameworks, political decisions, and societal attitudes shaped the divergent paths taken by these countries in addressing demographic and family planning issues.