In the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. The Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance of zielverkopers (labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

More than 800 years ago—at approximately the same time as the founding of the first European universities—the renowned monastic institution known as the Nālandā Mahāvihāra disappeared from historical records. Since 2006, a transnational Asian initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as ‘Nalanda University’ in Bihar, India, has been embraced at the highest government and philanthropic levels by a consortium of South, Southeast, and East Asian nations. Nalanda, described as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’, and the issues surrounding its revival raise important questions about how a new interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and a newly imagined vision of ‘Asian’ education are seen as converging to promote Asian interests. First, I consider the ambivalent relationship of the revival and its pre-modern namesake against the Nālandā Mahāvihāra's known history. Then I characterize two kinds of discourse on the contemporary project: one that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and frames the revival as serving transnational Asian goals; and another that is Indic and imagines Nalanda as advancing Indian national concerns. While, for the various stakeholders, serious fissures are evident in the symbolic values of Nalanda—as an exemplar of Asia and of India—both types of discourse, taken together, reveal important insights into the development of an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’.

This article concerns the history of economic planning in India in the late 1960s, when a vigorous debate took place on the institutions, instruments, and ‘personnel’ of developmental planning. Examining the years from 1967 to 1971, this article shows how dramatic attempts were made by warring politicians with the help of technocrats to decentralize economic planning, grant states more fiscal autonomy, and drastically reduce the powers of the Planning Commission. This article examines how these critical economic initiatives unfolded but were ultimately overshadowed by political power struggles in which the planning process and the Planning Commission became important tools in attempts for centralization.

This article explores how nutrition science became a significant part of the nation-building project in both Republican China and the early People's Republic of China within the context of burgeoning popular concerns over bodily health and an increasing sense of urgency. Insofar as nutrition science offered a new type of expertise about what to eat and what not to eat in daily life, it entailed harnessing the state's potential persuasive power to garner willing compliance, if not tacit obedience, from the population. Unlike previous scholarship, which takes the viewpoint of government authorities and the medical elite, this article argues that popular concerns about bodily health and culinary curiosity that were prevalent in major Chinese cities helped to popularize state-led dietary reform campaigns that culminated during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and continued even after the revolutionary regime change in the 1950s.

Before the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, almost all Chinese leaders and intellectuals believed that the large-scale agricultural settlement of China's western peripheries would rapidly deliver extensive economic and social benefits. At the onset of the war, many officials from the western provinces pressed the central government to fund programmes to allow millions of refugees from Japanese-occupied territory to settle on and cultivate ‘wasteland’ (huang) on the peripheries of their jurisdictions. Influenced more by pre-War ideology than the demands of the War, central and provincial governments established ‘land settlement and cultivation zones’ (kenzhiqu) in these provinces. However, these ventures were much less well supported than their proponents had hoped. This was not only because the War strained government finances—funding for kenzhiqu was always limited relative to support for agricultural cooperatives—but also partly because kenzhiqu attempts to recruit settlers clashed with the acute labour shortage in core zones of unoccupied China, which led to the abandonment of already cultivated land there, and partly because of the mistrust between central and regional governments. Nonetheless, wartime advocacy for more land cultivation in the Northwest did have important repercussions, leading to a renewed interest in penal colonies.

This article studies the impact of the creation of a new state in northern India through an analysis of space. The space under consideration is the town of Gopeshwar, which serves as the administrative headquarters of a district in the state of Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand was created as a distinct Himalayan state in 2000 after a prolonged period of mass agitation to this end. The movement for statehood had emphasized historical neglect coupled with exploitation of the mountains of Uttarakhand by the plains. Beginning with an analysis of the town plan, this article moves on to describe how this place is made into a space by everyday practices. In particular it concentrates on the narratives of agents of the state who express a longing to escape this ‘remote’ town. Through an interrogation of the trope of remoteness, this article argues that the creation of the new state has served, ironically enough, to accentuate the traditional characterization of the Himalaya as a backward, inferior space within India.

Some Hindus are killing animals in larger numbers, more regularly, and in more spectacular fashions than they have ever done before. In contradiction of the ethnographic record asserting the diminishing significance of ritual killing since the nineteenth century, sacrifices to tutelary deities that had long been abandoned are being reactivated or enacted for the first time. However, such a counter-intuitive surge in the popularity of sacrifices is occurring at a time when the very deities to whom they are dedicated are apparently losing their potency. This seeming paradox, this article proposes, is an implication of both the entrenchment of electoral democracy and the material transformations accompanying economic liberalization in rural Tamil Nadu. In an electoral democracy, the political significance of tutelary deities—and consequently their charisma—has diminished. Their productive valence however, as exemplified in ritual sacrifices, has become ever more resonant in India's post-liberalization milieu, with its heightened sense of opportunity but also competitiveness and uncertainty.

This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

This article re-examines the frustrated Westernizing efforts of Yung Wing and the recalled students of the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (1872–1881). It does so in response to recent scholarship (in both the Chinese and the English languages) which affirms the ‘transformative role’ of the returnees in late Qing reform and modernization. On the basis of a variety of sources, this article suggests, instead, that for those patriotic students returning to the Middle Kingdom, eager to bring about a fundamental change in its political system and rejuvenation of its civilization, disillusionment was often inevitable, and the choice—short of revolution—became one of either marginalization or co-option by the autocratic state. Despite all their achievements, China's earliest students of the West ultimately failed to set the country upon a new modernizing course—a failure that pointed, beyond itself, to an emerging (and subsequently persistent) pattern in the troubled relationship between the new, Westernized elite and the state in modern China.

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society.

By the late 1800s the colonial state's increasing capacity to regulate, finance, and tax had begun to open up new opportunities for locally based French enterprises in Indochina. Chinese syndicates that had previously dominated the economy found themselves deprived of existing revenue streams and denied access to new ones. The result was an ‘Indochinese moment’ when a handful of colonial conglomerates used profits from state contracts, monopolies, and subsidies as a base for growth and diversification after 1900. Yet scaling the commanding heights of the economy was not easy, and was only achieved thanks to sustained and powerful state intervention. Moreover, one of the effects of the economic crisis after 1928 was the end of this Indochinese moment and a shift in initiative to a new partnership that linked an increasingly technocratic state with the financiers and experts of the Bank of Indochina. This article investigates this complex interaction of state power, technology, and capital flows with local Chinese, French, and indigenous Indochinese actors, using one particular conglomerate, the Fontaine group, as a case study to shed light on the mechanisms that linked an interventionist state to capitalist enterprise and ultimately to the remaking of the Indochinese economy.

During the late nineteenth-century colonial era in India, the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat (Finality of the Prophethood) assumed remarkable salience as a theme for religious debate among Muslim sects. The controversies around the establishment of the Ahmadiya sect in 1889 brought the issue of Khatam-e-Nubuwwat to the centre stage of religious polemic or munazara. Tense relations continued between Ahmadiya and Sunnis, in particular, though the tension remained confined to the domain of religious polemic. However, immediately after Pakistan's creation, the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat squeezed itself out of the epistemic confines of the ‘theological’ and entered the realm of the ‘political’. Majlis-Tahafuz-i-Khatam-e-Nubuwwat (the Association for the Safety of the Finality of the Prophethood) grew out of the almost-defunct Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam on 13 January 1949, with the principal objective of excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the Islamic fold.1 This article seeks to reveal how the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat has impinged upon the course of Pakistani politics from 1949 onwards as an instrument of religious exclusion, peaking in 1953. The pre-history of religious exclusion, which had 1889 as a watershed—the year when the Ahmadiya sect took a definitive shape—thus forms the initial part of the article.

Debates about secularism in post-independence India have often revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. A sharp distinction is drawn between them by those who argue that the Gandhian model (or, what in common parlance and state discourses is called communal harmony) stems from Indian cultural and religious values, and lies beyond the realm of the state. The Nehruvian model, however, is a state project through and through. This article transcends this dichotomy to show that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these models does not necessarily mean that secularism and communal harmony faithfully reflect their ideas and, despite the differences in their aims and methods, both models are united in the discourses and practices of the state as strategies of ‘governmentality’. After redefining the core of communal harmony as reciprocity (rather than tolerance), I show how it is performed, how it supplements the state's efforts to keep the peace in a religiously plural society by the force of law, and shores up the state's legitimacy deficit. However, the state's simultaneous involvement in Nehruvian and Gandhian projects is not an innocuous fact because it undermines the state's constitutional and secular obligations to non-discriminatory citizenship in the Indian nation. The argument is that the state's endorsement of dargah-centred Islamic piety as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’ the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.

By looking at the case of the 2011 Wukan rebellion in Guangdong Province, the following article explores the role played by foreign media in influencing the protest's ultimate outcome: an intervention from above by provincial authorities in favour of the villagers. Placing Wukan into a four-level model incorporating local, provincial, national, and international dimensions, this article considers how Wukan might serve as a model for contention that may influence future acts of popular protest in China in the digital age. It suggests that while appealing directly to foreign media can help claimants increase their leverage over local officials and prompt interventions from above, such actions are likely to modify and accelerate, but not fundamentally transform, existing patterns of localized, community-specific acts of contention seen earlier in the Reform Era.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as post-colonial regimes in Africa and Asia hauled down imperial iconography, to the surprise and approval of many Western observers, India evidenced little interest in sweeping away remnants of its colonial heritage. From the late 1950s onwards, however, calls for the removal of British imperial statuary from India's public spaces came to represent an increasingly important component in a broader dialogue between central and state governments, political parties, the media, and the wider public on the legacy of British colonialism in the subcontinent. This article examines the responses of the ruling Congress Party and the British government, between 1947 and 1970, to escalating pressure from within India to replace British statuary with monuments celebrating Indian nationalism. In doing so, it highlights the significant scope that existed for non-state actors in India and the United Kingdom with a stake in the cultural politics of decolonization to disrupt the smooth running of bilateral relations, and, in Britain's case, to undermine increasingly tenuous claims of continued global relevance. Post-war British governments believed that the United Kingdom's relationship with India could be leveraged, at least in part, to offset the nation's waning international prestige. In fact, as the fate of British statuary in India makes clear, this proved to be at least as problematic and flawed a strategy in the two decades after 1947 as it had been in those before.

Previous researchers have noted that the telegraph had a significant impact on late Qing politics in a variety of ways. This paper, however, argues that the telegraph in China failed to become a popular means of communication due to technical problems and misguided pricing policies. The Telegraph Administration (Zhongguo dianbaoju) was established in 1882, and its service suffered from persistent problems with regard to speed, stability, cost, and security. In order to keep profits up so as to be able to pay dividends to its shareholders, the Telegraph Administration did not invest in the latest and most efficient telegraph machines which would have enabled it to improve its service, cut down on telegraph fees, and attract more customers. Instead, it had to keep charges high for both private and commercial telegraph users, but at the same time it was not able to resolve delays in transmission, even for government messages. Although the service had an impact on the overall communications market in China—not least due to its near-monopoly position—and returned a degree of profit to its shareholders, the mindset of its administration and its approach to management limited the company's ability to develop a successful niche in the market or to achieve its potential as a driving force in China's economic development.

To what extent are different parts of the world exceptional when it comes to the history of forced migration and refugee experiences? For instance, is forced migration in Asia distinct from developments elsewhere? Or is forced migration in Asia part of wider processes of displacement and emplacement so characteristic of the modern world? Over the past few decades, the fields of refugee and forced migration studies have ballooned. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, geography, and history have sought to understand the nature of population displacements in the modern world. Much of the early scholarship in this field focused on Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. Scholars have also sought to understand the nature of protracted refugee situations in Africa.1 More recently, scholars have investigated forced migration within globalized and transnational frameworks.2 Yet no sooner had scholars started to think of displacement in these terms than critics began to contend that the unique, and localized, dimensions of displaced populations, including refugees, forced migrants, and internally displaced people, were being ignored. Questions about what is gained and what is lost in approaching the study of modern refugee populations from various vantage points now frame much of the work in the fields of refugee and forced migration studies.3

In the aftermath of the Korean War, the People's Republic of China was effectively an international pariah. Accounts of this period in Chinese textbooks emphasize how the Chinese turned this around, either during the Geneva Conference or the Bandung Conference, through deft planning and enterprise. Yet few pay any attention to how such manipulation of world opinion became increasingly difficult for Beijing after that initial success. One outcome of China's public relations campaign meant friendly Afro-Asia leaders voiced their opinions, in alarming numbers, to their Chinese counterparts regarding issues such as Asian security, mainland China's economic development, and the Taiwan problem. Indeed, recently declassified Chinese Foreign Affairs archive documents demonstrate that China tried to marshal such non-Soviet bloc opinions to its advantage during the first Taiwan Strait crisis (1955). Chinese efforts were successful in that there was no lack of volunteers to air dissent with American foreign policy. But these new allies also wished to mediate between the United States and the Republic of China, on the one side, and mainland China on the other. Moreover, such efforts were often at variance with China's domestic and strategic outlook in the region. China thus had to embark upon an active ‘management’ of disparate world opinions, which was an entirely new endeavour. Although China tried to provide a sanitized ‘script’ for its new friends, most had their own ideas. By the time of the second Taiwan Strait crisis (1958), the volume of third party interference had grown. Overwhelmed by such international attention, China responded by openly rejecting unwelcome mediation efforts and demanded outright condemnation of the United States. Thus, ironically, with its growing prominence on the international stage, China found itself unbearably weighted down by the burden of world opinion, a position previously occupied by the United States.

Independent India's new state-owned infrastructural industries were not only entrusted with the mission of producing essential public commodities, but they were also required to promote the economic and social advancement of their workforces. To achieve this objective, big public enterprises in particular, helped by the financial power they derived from their control over the strategic sectors of the domestic economy, established generously endowed welfare programmes. This article argues that such a developmental ideology shaping managerial policy orientations is central to understanding why accepted explanations for the rationale of employer-sponsored social benefits are insufficient when it comes to studying similar initiatives in the Indian public sector. To substantiate its argument, the article explores the provisioning of social needs over a period of roughly half a century (1948–2002) at a large state-run producer of telecommunications equipment, Indian Telephone Industries. The welfare regime as it evolved here boasted one unique feature: it rested on dual foundations, with both the company and the trade union assuming independent responsibility for the well-being of employees. A range of informal self-help schemes devised by workers further supplemented the institutionalized social security net set up by the management and the union. The article also discusses how the firm sought to scale back its largesse in the aftermath of economic liberalization.