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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This article examines three rare early twentieth-century Tibetan autobiographies composed by Karma Sumdhon Paul, Trin Chen, and Phüntsok Lungtok. They worked as mission teachers in the regions of Darjeeling and Kalimpong at a time when Protestant missionaries were barred from entering Tibet and were eagerly waiting for the forbidden city of Lhasa to be opened up to the Christian faith. All three men served as cultural and linguistic intermediaries, teaching Tibetan to missionaries as well as in mission schools, hereby contributing to the dissemination of Christianity among Tibetans. Their life writings constitute several of the earliest Tibetan-language sources which document, from a personal perspective, the experiences of working with Protestant missionaries, undergoing religious conversion, as well as individual transformations. Having established bases in the Himalayas, the Scandinavian Alliance Mission, the Tibetan Mission, and the Church of Scotland initiated education reform by establishing English-medium mission schools, studying Lhasa Tibetan, recruiting literate Lhasa Tibetan speakers, and translating texts to be printed in Lhasa Tibetan. These interactions embodied a unique modern character, emerging for the first time during the early twentieth century and stemming from the encounter between Protestant missionaries and Tibetans. The remarkable life stories recorded by Karma Sumdhon Paul, Trin Chen, and Phüntsok Lungtok present us with a rare Tibetan perspective into the historiography of Tibet and the West, a phenomenon predominantly shaped by written accounts authored by European missionaries, intellectuals, colonial officials, and travellers.