This paper uses a historical ethnography of the construction of Korangi Township outside Karachi to analyse the configuration of power in the post-colonial Pakistani state of the late 1950s and 1960s. Foucault's distinction between ‘sovereign’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘security’ power helps to reveal how possibilities of non-interventionist control were deliberately discarded in favour of an (often theatrical) exercise of ‘raw’ power. The way in which the township was conceived by the international architect and city planner, C. A. Doxiadis, often stood in contrast and tension with the ways in which it was executed by General Ayub Khan's military regime (1958–1968). Rapid early success—tens of thousands of refugee slum dwellers were resettled within six months—went hand-in-hand with equally-quick failure and abandonment later on. The Pakistani regime was only interested in demonstrating its ability to make decisions and to deploy executive power over its territory, but it made no sustained effort to use spatial control to entangle its subjects in a web of ‘governmentality’. In the final analysis, the post-colonial Pakistani state was a ‘state of exception’ made permanent, which deliberately enacted development failure to underscore its overreliance on sovereign power.

This paper argues that the concept of moral economy, formulated by E.P. Thompson and developed in Asian contexts by James Scott and Paul Greenough can be usefully employed to analyse the peasant narratives of Premchand, one of the greatest writers in Hindi-Urdu literatures. But such an application is possible only if the concept is expanded further. In Premchand's works related to peasantry we find several ideological currents. However, the idea of peasantry's own cultural resources in opposition to other social groups appears to be predominant in his later works. There is a sense of centrality of peasant culture which Premchand and some others among the Hindi literary intelligentsia came to acquire, and deployed for various purposes—against colonial regime, against the products of colonial modernity (e.g., factories, English schools, courts, medical profession), against the new urban middle classes and their culture, against urbanism as a whole and, sometimes, even against the Congress, the representative of organized nationalism. Distinct from both the everyday forms of resistance and open rebellion, Premchand visualizes a comprehensive peasant paradigm in opposition to colonialism, and urban middle-class perspectives.

Accessing the day-to-day, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis in the early 1950s can be difficult as a result of the relative paucity of relevant primary material. One set of sources, however, are the letters written to the editors of contemporary newspapers during this period, in which correspondents outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and aired their frustrations with, the everyday state in the years following independence and Pakistan's creation. This paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (Karachi) during 1950–1953 in order to explore the views of ordinary citizens as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortage, and corruption.

This paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.

The land-locked north China province of Shanxi, identified in 1870 by the geologist Baron Richthofen as ‘one of the most remarkable coal and iron regions in the world’, was the site of a provincially‑defined national movement far removed from the better‑studied treaty ports and their articulate and prolific nationalists. This late-Qing provincialism may be read as a mediating symbol of an emerging national consciousness.

Social tensions were exacerbated by external challenges brought by foreign agents, and their Chinese collaborators, of cultural and economic imperialism. Opposition to missionaries and Chinese Christians had begun as early as the 1860s. In 1898 the British Pekin Syndicate and its extra-provincial Chinese associates, with the backing of the central government, secured rights to Shanxi's rich coal and iron resources. These rights were ceded back ten years later after a successful ‘rights-recovery’ movement that possesses similarities to (but also significant differences from) the well-studied oppositional movements in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Shandong in the period 1905–1911. The duration of Shanxi's struggle, along with its extra-bureaucratic elite activism, popular mobilization, and cooperation with Beijing, makes its rights-recovery movement distinctive. The rhetoric and practices of the movement, which began before the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and reflects the rhetorical influence of these earlier protests, contributed to a strong regional solidarity that was backed by central state authority. There were various patterns of protest, one indigenous and provincial, one extra-provincial and nationalist, that interacted in the period 1902–1908. Provincial activists, including merchants, peasants, students, degree-holders, and officials, insisted that Shanxi's coal was for the use of the community, the province, and the nation on terms established by and for the people of Shanxi. In their victory, localism, provincialism, and the national project, had come together.

This paper explores the unusually weak voice of Chinese war veterans in post-1949 politics society and culture. Although Chinese movies and television often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and politicized depictions of China's military conflicts. In this respect, China departs sharply from the former Soviet Union—China's Leninist model for most of its formative years—as well as Vietnam, European inter-war fascist regimes and democracies. This paper argues that the relative weakness of authentic military voices in China can be traced to several peculiar features of modern Chinese history. The nature of warfare in China, as well as the absence of a national army, veteran organizations and a consensus over the legitimacy about China's wars, has led many to question the validity of veterans’ claims for a higher political and cultural status. Rather than allow veterans the space to portray war as they experienced it, intellectual elites in various cultural and propaganda offices dominate national war memory, presenting a simplistic and artificial rendering of China's wars.

Since the early 1980s, China's rapid economic growth and profound social transformation have greatly changed the role of popular religion in modern Chinese politics. In the case of nuo, these changes have been directly responsible for the incorporation of this popular religion into the implementation of Party-state's policy on ethnic minority and the provision of evidence to support the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's regime. Through manipulation and reinterpretation by local governments, the popular religion of nuo has not only become the target of local socio-economic development, a common phenomenon in contemporary China, but has also played a key role in ethnic identification, which is an important step for a post-Mao's CCP to maintain political stability in ethnic minority areas. In addition, nuo has through the research of Marxism-influenced schools fundamentally altered its position from an officially unrecognized religion opposed to both socialist political order and atheist ideology to a politically favoured ‘living fossil’1 of primitive culture. This proves the Marxist evolutionary theory in which socialism and communism are thought to be inescapable consequences of social development. The positive role played by nuo in modern Chinese politics has brought the popular religion much open support and endorsement from party-state officials at all levels, including top-ranking officials within the Central Committee of the CCP. Like any popular religion, nuo has over the centuries undergone significant changes, but never before has it experienced such dramatic changes in its relationship with an anti-religious and pragmatic central government, something which has significantly altered the course of its development.

The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The central symbols of this ‘development’ were three barrage dams, completed between 1932 and 1962. Because of the barrages’ huge economic and ideological significance, the ceremonies connected with the construction and opening of these barrages provide a unique opportunity to examine the public presentation of state authority by the colonial and postcolonial governments. This paper investigates the way that ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ appeared in discourses connected with these ceremonies, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing ‘progress’ on a province considered ‘backward’ by the state administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. The paper begins with the historical links between water-provision and governance in Sind, before examining the way that immediate political concerns of the sitting governments were addressed in connection with the projects, demonstrating the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The last part of the paper draws out deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout mid-twentieth century Sind.

Using recently-collected ethnographic life history data, this paper analyses in historical context the shifting boundary between governmental and non-governmental ‘worlds’ in Bangladesh. First, the paper explores the ways in which this boundary is an ambiguous one, and aims to show how it is constructed and maintained, through an analysis of new types of ‘boundary-crossing’ professionals who cross between the two sectors in the course of their career trajectories and their social relationships. Second, it suggests that such movements across this boundary throws light on changing professional identities in Bangladesh, such as what it means to work as a public servant or a development worker. High-achieving university graduates are now less likely to choose civil service careers than they once were, because new opportunities exist for them to work more flexibly as ‘non-governmental professionals’ in roles that may allow them to combine professional, consultant and activist identities.

Chinese leaders have repeatedly insisted upon the contemporary relevance of the ‘War of Resistance to Japan’ (1937–1945). However, the content of the official history of the war and the lessons drawn from it have changed dramatically from 1949 through 2010. This paper begins by reviewing theories of collective remembrance and then covers four historical periods: China's ‘benevolent amnesia’ on Japan's wartime atrocities before 1982; China's patriotic education campaign from the mid-1980s; the rise of history activism in China in the late 1990s; and the post-2005 reversal in official rhetoric on Japan and the wartime past. It concludes that, while the party-state retains an impressive capacity to shape the narratives of critical periods of modern Chinese history, Chinese leaders are likely to find themselves increasingly constrained by domestic forces and by external events beyond their control.

Grassroots accounts of the tragic events of partition are increasingly in the spotlight in studies of the transfer of power. This paper approaches the local perspective through the memories of British civil servants during their last few months in Punjab, assessing what these reflections suggest about the mentality of the departing ruling elite. The similarities between these recorded experiences suggest a process of coming to terms with grief and guilt for what they had witnessed through the creation of a narrative of transition from total power to total loss; a simplified imagery of a fully operational and peaceful pre-1947 Punjab descending with shocking suddenness into the violence of partition. This process of shaping memories not only offers an insight into the British civil servant's need for self-affirmation and a reaffirming of their sense of personal as well as professional value, but also has a broader importance in understanding the mentality of a group of people at the heart of pre-partition Punjab, who were instrumental in defining the emerging independent nation.

Hong Kong's hospital system has long been the territory of Western medicine. However, during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, an integrative approach, combining Chinese and Western medicines, was used in some hospitals in Hong Kong, suggesting a revival of Chinese medicine in the hospital system of this former British colony. This paper will explain how this could happen, by situating the event in the over 160 years' long history of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong. Specifically, it will focus on the role of ‘Chinese medicine’ and ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ in Tung Wah Hospital, a local charity established in 1870, which grew subsequently into one of the largest voluntary organizations in Hong Kong. It will also show how the fall and revival of Chinese medicine in this hospital were related to two epidemics: the bubonic plague in 1894, and the SARS outbreak in 2003.