From late sixteenth century, Bijapur’s sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627 ce), used nauras—a polyvalent term used extensively within the Sanskrit aesthetic realm—on his kingdom’s cultural artefacts as well as political and administrative insignia. An avid music lover, he is renowned for his Dakani work on music titled Kitāb-i Nauras (circa 1580s). Portrayed by previous scholars as religiously unorthodox, Ibrahim Adil II and nauras are located chiefly within narratives of Bijapur’s political instability and the sultan’s indulgence in leisure over statecraft. Recent scholarship has challenged such notions but no study focuses on the reasons for nauras’ crossover to the political domain or its appearance on state insignia. This article offers new insights by locating the sultan within a matrix of Indic, Turco-Mongol, and Islamicate sovereignty practices. In doing so, it argues that Ibrahim Adil II strategically employed the corporeal, religious, aesthetic, and polyvalent dimensions of nauras to forge a uniquely personalized embodied cosmic kingship practice to govern a multicultural populace. In particular, this article elucidates that the realms of art, aesthetics, and kingship were not mutually exclusive in the Indic or Islamicate worlds and that nauras was a rational manoeuvre to elevate the ruler above courtly factions and religious differences.

The early history of the institution of varṇa, rendered sometimes as caste and sometimes as social estate, is poorly understood, and to date there is no real working model for its development. Brian K. Smith’s Classifying the Universe retrojects a timeless and immutable caste system deep into Vedic prehistory as though in ancient times this institution resembled the exact same one that appears in the later Dharmaśāstras. Authors like Brian K. Smith, however, have readily translated texts that mention the rājanyà with ‘Kshatriya’, presupposing the two terms have an identical semantic because that is so in the Dharmaśāstras. I will argue that these two terms have distinct semantic domains. While rājanyà is restricted to enumerations of varṇa in Vedic texts, the term kṣatríya is never a part of this list. The term rājanyà seems to refer to a certain ritual situation, and I argue that the rājanyà is, tout court, a valid candidate for the rājasūya or ‘royal consecration’, but not yet a rā́jan himself. A kṣatríya, on the other hand, referred to a specific type of rā́jan, who led the coalition of the Vedic clans during the winter. This office was complemented by that of the maghávan, who led the coalition as summer rā́jan. When the institution of seasonally distinct rule was moribund, later generations reanalysed the term kṣatríya as a synonym of rājanyà and the term maghávan as merely one of Indra’s many epithets.

This article focuses on the Punjab-Baluch borderland region during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It shows how this region was a conflict zone, not only between local communities across borders but also between the two colonial frontier governments of Punjab and Baluchistan. The article explores the nature of these conflicts by examining a cross-border dispute involving women. It analyses how different competing legal systems—Shariat, customs, and colonial law—operated on the ground and were used by the disputants to resolve the conflict. Additionally, it discusses how, during this process, the colonial state documented women’s presence and used their voices and actions to serve the objectives of state-making. Through this case study, the article demonstrates that in local feuds involving women, colonial authorities emerged chiefly as disputants rather than just arbitrators. By claiming to be the legitimate custodians of the ‘abducted’ women, the two frontier governments competed against each other to fulfil the aspirations of the tribal communities they represented. This intra-tribal and intra-colonial dispute reveals deep fissures in colonial understanding of questions of state intervention, sovereignty, and colonial subjecthood—rendering the imperial project inconsistent, fragile, and contradictory in the Punjab-Baluch borderlands.

Government alarm over the extent of enteric fever (typhoid) among British troops in India in the late nineteenth century focused concern on adulterated milk as a likely medium for the transmission of disease and incentivized the creation of cantonment dairies, of which there were more than 30 by 1914. Aided by the introduction of modern milking techniques and butter-making equipment, military farms and government-sponsored dairies helped create a new market for dairy products in India, fostered the growth of privately run dairies, and encouraged the idea of milk consumption as an aid to health. The new dairies, with their intensive cattle-breeding programmes, were further seen as model institutions and centres for the dissemination of scientific dairying across India. The cantonment dairies drew in part on India’s own cattle culture and anticipated the ‘white revolution’ of the 1970s; but the uniqueness of the cantonment environment, the high costs of intensive dairying, and the reliance on specialized breeding inhibited the wider application of the military dairy model while intensifying Hindu opposition to cantonments as cow-killing sites.

This article recovers Jaina representations of brahmans in Prakrit suttas and narratives composed from the fourth century bce to the seventh century ce. I begin by surveying references to brahmans in early Jaina suttas. There, brahmanhood is primarily discussed in the context of Jaina ascetics, whether that is by co-opting brahmanhood as a marker of Jaina ascetics, branding brahmans as the opponent of Jaina ascetics, or else naming brahmans as another group who obtain food and shelter from the same local households as Jaina ascetics. This representation of brahmanhood changes in Prakrit Jaina narratives composed from the fifth to the seventh centuries ce. In these texts, Jainas write new stories that describe the origin of brahmans. Although this story is narrated in diverse ways, all versions, I argue, reimagine brahmanhood as a site for constructing the identity of Jaina householders vis-à-vis Vedic householders and the royal court. Jaina ascetic practice is no longer at stake. Nor is patronage from the local population of householders. Instead, stories about the origin of brahmans reflect on inter-religious competition among householders for donations gifted by the king. In the final section of this article, I explain why the stakes changed. By reading Jaina literature together with contemporaneous brahmanical texts and inscriptions, I suggest that Jaina storytellers from the fifth to the seventh centuries ce write stories about the origin of brahmans to examine their material context in which Vedic brahmans had become the primary recipient of royal patronage while Jaina householders received next to none.

The epigraphic corpus of medieval South Asia constitutes a dense record of the loquacious lives of artisans and other literate professionals who worked with their hands. While the labour of inscription was—and continues to be—dismissed as non-intellectual, caste-marginalized artisans used the space they were granted in stone at the bottom of epigraphs and at the bases of sculptures as an opportunity to assert their own epistemic values and their own hierarchy of knowledge. These artisans worked closely with poets and scribes from privileged castes in shared poetic, political, and intellectual projects, often labouring in conjunction with the same scholars over the course of many years. At times echoing the ideologies of writing, language, and education that were enunciated in elite literary circles, and at times standing in opposition to them, these artisans articulated a vision of erudition distinct from that often associated with pre-colonial South Asia. Following these artisans allows a significant revision of the role literacy played in pre-colonial South Asia. And it offers a moment to reconsider how artisan literacy continues to be used in narratives of divergence that invoke the history of technology. This article shows how novel understandings of the status and intellectual labour of artisans were developed in the medieval period and continued to be deployed into the early modern period—and indeed, in the caste-inflected print cultures that emerged around the decennial census.

Britain exercised a distinctive form of extraterritorial jurisdiction around the Yunnan-Burma border before 1949. In 1902, Chinese and British officials established a joint trial system under the 1902 Manai Agreement. From then on, Chinese, British, and Burmese officials convened temporary frontier meetings each winter in border areas, including in Manai, Nawngma, and Sima. These meetings adjudicated disputes involving theft, injuries, and trans-frontier cultivation pursuant to tribal customary law. The frontier meetings normally issued four distinct types of judgments and awarded a uniform remedy in the form of damages. This system served the practical needs of border tribes by delivering swift justice to prevent blood feuds and maintain law and order. These meetings developed a case law for resolving borderland cases that diverged from the national laws of both China and Britain. This system was jointly administered by Chinese, British, and Burmese officials under ostensibly reciprocal terms, though Britain’s exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction in China ultimately placed a heavier burden on the Chinese side. The joint trial system came to an end after Burma officially gained independence in 1948. British extraterritorial jurisdiction in China was not absolute but operated through distinct jurisdictional systems in the interior and in the borderlands.

This article reframes Lyari’s gangs in Karachi as brokers of political order rather than merely criminal entities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that the figure of the ‘gangster’ functioned as a political intermediary, stabilizing contradictions between military regimes, capital accumulation, and working-class urban life. Through portraits of three interlocutors—a tragic and unlikely ‘gangster’, a gang underboss who mediated between state projects and the denizens of his neighbourhood, and a socialist activist targeted for elimination by the gangs on behalf of the state—the article demonstrates how state, civil society, and scholarly discourses have unwittingly colluded to produce ‘Lyari-as-gangland’ without attending to what the gangs actually did in Lyari apart from the violence that overdetermines their era of dominance. It argues that coding brokerage as criminological masks the gang’s everyday functions in projects of public health, housing, and bureaucratic mediation. Furthermore, the rise of gangs to this role is historically situated in the conjuncture of the role of Pakistan’s military dictatorship in the global war on terror, where violent non-state actors were instrumentalized to produce a highly unequal order in the city.

By all classical orthodox definitions, most early modern Vīraśaivas were not brāhmaṇas. Vīraśaivism, we have presumed, is a devotional religion of social protest, and thus by definition must have disavowed the trappings of Sanskrit scripture. And yet, in early modern south India, evidence shows that Vīraśaivas across regions invested significant energy in composing, circulating, citing, translating, and commenting on Sanskrit texts. What sense can we make, then, of the disruptive presence of Sanskrit in the space of social protest? This article makes the case for a sustained and open encounter with South Asia’s multilingual archive that would allow us to provincialize the association of the Sanskrit language with brahmanical systems of caste oppression. By recovering the history of such other Sanskrits, we might instead enquire into how the systemic modes of oppression that endure today can be, and have been, otherwise.1

How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foster emotional engagement with its revolution? How did the advent of new media transform this engagement? Building on research that has noted the importance of emotions in the CCP’s revolution, this article explores these questions through a study of CCP radio and the person of the announcer. Using broadcast circulars and directives, memoirs, and diaries, it explores how broadcasters found an appropriate emotional tone for political texts, and how individual broadcasters functioned as nodes in the diffusion of emotions over an expanding network of radio stations. I make three arguments: first, that along with the well-documented normative forces of Party organization, announcers relied on reason and introspection to find their own emotional expression of a text and, with that, an emotional engagement with the revolution; second, that announcers were not anomalous in their reasoned engagement, but represent a consistent strain of community-building emotional practice within the ranks of the CCP; and third, that the advent of radio empowered the CCP to scale up its subject-oriented emotion work, developed at Yan’an but locally bound, to the regional and, eventually, the national scale. In this scaling up, extant CCP work-practice interacted with the promises and limits of the new media to create a distinct broadcasting culture that would shape the use of radio throughout the Mao era.

Scholarship on fascism during interwar China has hitherto focused on the ‘Blue Shirt Society’ and the ‘CC Clique’, two Guomindang (GMD) right-wing cliques loyal to their patron Chiang Kai-shek. So far the Generalissimo’s own perceptions and agendas with fascism have been shrouded in myth, probably due to his evasive attitude and the availability of sources. Scholars dealing with the topic have also tended to delineate a peculiar variant of ‘Chinese Fascism’ by drawing on various theories of fascism. This article proposes an alternative approach inspired by transnational fascism—rather than seeing it as an analytical tool, it treats fascism as a highly malleable concept. Focusing on Chiang Kai-shek, the article historicizes his evolving engagements (perception, interaction, appropriation, etc.) with the idea during the Nanjing Decade by diving into critical primary sources, in particular the Diplomatic and Historical Archives of Foreign Ministry in Rome (ASDMAE), the Chiang Kai-shek Archives at Academia Historica (Guoshiguan) in Taipei, Chiang’s diary and writings, among others. It shows that rather than a fixed view, Chiang’s engagements with the idea during the period underwent a process of changes as situation and relevance of fascism evolved. It thus intends to contribute to the topic both empirically and methodologically.

If music’s place remains ideologically contested in the national cultural formation of post-colonial Pakistan, what are the terms, if any, by which the state engages with this art form? Answering this question, along with others, this article advances the term ‘logic of managing culture’ to explore the Pakistani state’s relationship with music. Through contesting India-centric scholarship on music and cultural politics in the South Asian context and relying on an eclectic array of empirical evidence, I argue that the post-colonial state’s engagement with music is marked by a set of priorities that entails a logic of managing music rather than reproducing it. This orchestration plays out at two major levels: the international, involving strategically projecting selected elements of Pakistan’s musical-cultural identity internationally, and the national, relying on language (Urdu) and religion (Islam) for national integration, while bypassing the role of music. I suggest that this amounts to a logic of cultural management, wherein the state, through a set of cultural institutions, ‘conducts’ music and its practitioners while presupposing the ideologically contested place of this art form in the national cultural formation of Pakistan.

This article presents conclusions from a study of 1,400 criminal trials in cases involving anti-caste and tribe violence, filed in the trial court of Aurangabad District (Sambhajinagar) in western India. Employing computational analysis upon the metadata and text of decisions filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) (POA) Act 1989 during a 20-year period (2002–2023), I offer an exploratory socio-legal analysis of hate-crime adjudication in India. This article sheds light on hitherto unexplored questions about criminal adjudication in India such as: Which cases are most likely to result in acquittals and convictions? What kind of evidence does the court consider and in what manner is evidence read? How frequently are cases dismissed due to witnesses turning hostile? What kinds of punishments do Indian courts hand out? How long do criminal trials typically last? What kind of charges are most commonly brought against the accused in these cases? How easy is it to get bail and what conditions do courts typically impose? How long do POA-accused spend in jail before they get bail?. In doing so, this article offers a first-of-its kind phenomenology of ‘hate-crime’ adjudication and, more broadly, of criminal adjudication in India.

This article employs the satellite as a methodological lens to reconceptualize China’s Great Leap Forward, investigating this movement as an aesthetic crusade rather than a mere cause of political and economic pandemonium. Emerging as the movement’s most prevalent entity, the satellite underwent protean transformations—from an epitome of the Cold War to an emblem of socialist utopia, from its initial embodiment in popular science books to its embedment in mythologies, and from a contagious trope in bureaucratese to the most indispensable constituent in the creation of arts for the masses. Nevertheless, due to its belated materialization, the satellite emerged not as other socialist objects whose materiality was taken as a given, but as an object-yet-to-be-made, one that best articulates the paradoxes of Maoist material abundance, likewise suspended between fantasy and fulfilment. In this light, I argue that the satellite becomes a ‘thing’, one that exceeds its physicality, exploits the agency of words, and gained regulative potency. Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, operas, poems, folksongs, and visuals, I delineate the satellite’s encounters with politicians, cadres, writers, peasants, and workers, mapping its sanctification into a fetishized object that encapsulates Maoist China’s struggles, with its ideological contests, political visions, historical legacies, and class conflicts.

This article explores how interethnic marriage produces and governs ambiguous identities within legally pluralist port-city settings. Taking the construction of ‘Chineseness’ in the Dutch Batavia before 1850 as a case study, this article analyses how identity was contested, negotiated, and reconfigured in a colonial legal landscape. Drawing on archival records from the Batavia Kong Koan (the Chinese Council), this article argues that normative orders from the homeland, such as Confucian ethical distinctions between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ and gendered prescriptions governing family life and female conduct, were not merely adapted to local conditions but were frequently disrupted by diasporic realities. Through case studies of interethnic marriages and female-initiated divorces, the article highlights how female agency within the Kong Koan’s hybrid legal regime fractured the ideological coherence of the Confucian moral order and exposed the instability of ‘Chineseness’ under colonial rule. Situated at the intersection of claimed Chinese custom, Dutch colonial statutes, and the everyday realities of interethnic co-residence, the Kong Koan did not preserve tradition so much as mediate and fragment it. Rather than reinforcing a fixed notion of identity, the institution became a mechanism for its continuous remaking. By locating identity within everyday social practice and the institutional logics of colonial governance, this article challenges essentialist conceptions of diaspora. It offers a historically grounded account of how an ethnic identity like ‘Chineseness’ was continuously unmade and remade at the intersection of multiple legal and cultural systems within colonial jurisdictions.

This article examines the historical formation of modern chölkha identity, a cornerstone of contemporary Tibetan nationalist thought. Rather than a direct continuation of medieval Tibetan identity categories, this article argues that modern chölkha identity is a contingent product of the Tibetan encounter with colonial modernity, especially in exile. By analysing the introduction of the modern census and electoral representation in exile, this article demonstrates how institutional logics of governmentality reconstituted once-fluid, elite-defined spatial categories into standardized, mutually exclusive popular identities. This is not to suggest that chölkha identity was invented ex nihilo by exiled Tibetan nationalist elites. On the contrary, and well known among scholars, the chölkha, as a spatial category among the literate class, has existed since the thirteenth century. Yet, as this article argues, its form, scope, and semantic load were different from those of its modern counterpart. Drawing on this history, the article proposes a ‘sequential thesis’ as a way of reframing Benedict Anderson’s concept of seriality. This article argues that ‘unbound’ and ‘bound’ serialities are best understood not as opposing types but as historical sequences, a process wherein fluid imaginaries are contingently captured by the state’s institutional grid, generating the rigid collective subjectivities that define the modern world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the South Korean government, scientists, and farmers fostered the promotion of a domestic dairy and grassland agriculture. With the technical and financial cooperation of the Australian, Canadian, Danish, Japanese, New Zealand, and West German governments, the Korean actors imported livestock, established model farms, and conducted research projects on grassland and forage. Dairy production played a crucial role, as it combined agriculture with modern technology. While researchers have pointed out the ‘civilizing force’ of cattle in colonialism, this article extends the role played by dairy agriculture in post-colonial societies. In the wake of the Cold War developmentalist framework, both domestic and transnational actors shaped not only dairy agriculture, but also Korea’s environment and diet long term. Aside from American-backed efforts around the ‘green revolution’, multiple other actors cooperated in rural development and represented a different understanding of dairy and agriculture. They actively transferred new cow breeds, grass seeds, and milking technology to the South Korean countryside; their efforts were partly welcomed and partly rejected by Korean locals. The article focuses especially on two Korean-German projects—the bilateral model dairy farm in Anseong and the grassland research project—and locates them in the context of this transnational cooperation.