Abstract 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.
Abstract 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.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaya found itself entangled in complex geopolitical and ideological struggles, where local and global forces intersected and clashed. The British colonial authorities depicted Chinese student-led, left-wing activities through the lens of the Cold War, framing them as communist insurgency and their artistic expressions as propaganda tools. However, a closer examination of the artistic practices of Chinese youth during this turbulent era reveals a plurality of motivations and ideals that transcended strict ideological binaries. This article offers a cultural and historical examination of the ascent and decline of the art societies-the Yi Yan Hui, its successor the Equator Art Society (EAS), and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), as embodied by its inaugural principal Lim Hak Tai. By tracing the personal and artistic journeys of pivotal artists and scrutinizing their aesthetic approaches, the article aims to challenge the long-held binary opposition in the art world of decolonizing Singapore and to shed new light on the on-ground experiences of Chinese youth struggling against Cold War tensions. Utilizing a visual lens, it highlights the agency of left-wing youth and socially engaged artists and reconsiders how these individuals navigated the intertwined realities of Cold War geopolitics and their imagined ideals of independent Singapore and Malaya.
Drawing upon archival records from the Republic of China and first-hand memoirs of direct witnesses, this article examines the June 15 and August 10 incidents of 1948 in Thailand,1 highlighting the intricate interplay between anti-communist and anti-Chinese politics. While existing scholarship has largely located these events within Phibun Songkhram's anti-Chinese educational policies, this article moves beyond conventional narratives by uncovering their deeper political implications. The June 15 Incident primarily targeted overseas Chinese communists, the Qiaodang, substantially undermining its mobilizational and organizational capacities, whereas the August 10 Incident predominantly affected prominent Chinese merchants and Kuomintang-affiliated groups, reflecting broader anti-Chinese objectives. The article argues that anti-communist and anti-Chinese agendas were mutually constitutive, strategically intertwined by the Phibun regime to garner international support from Western powers and consolidate domestic control. By employing flexible diplomacy and deliberate ambiguity, the Thai government adeptly navigated Cold War tensions and internal political pressures, minimizing geopolitical risks while strengthening regime stability. Ultimately, these incidents reveal the profound consequences of instrumentalizing ethnic and ideological tensions, which significantly reshaped diasporic Chinese communities and the trajectory of Thailand's early communist movement.
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, China gained infamy for widespread banditry across its territory, with Manchuria being one of the regions most affected. During this period, the emerging Japanese empire saw banditry as a 'local specialty' of Manchuria. However, the representations of Manchurian bandits in the Japanese media were not entirely negative; they were often depicted as masculine heroes fighting for justice. What did this fantasized image of Manchuria as a land of horse-riding righteous bandits signify? This article analyses the term bazoku (meaning horse-riding bandits), and the fantasy of Manchurian bandits in the Japanese popular media from the 1900s to the 1920s, exploring the politics shaping these representations. The image of Manchuria as a land of bazoku in the Japanese media reconceptualized it as a Japanese frontier, separated from China. The term bazoku came to embody a specific spatio-temporality-Manchuria from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries-demonstrating the epistemological construction of Manchuria as an outlaw territory outside of Chinese jurisdiction, thus justifying Japan's intervention. The bazoku fantasy also shaped Japanese imperial masculinity, characterized by intellectual qualities such as rationality and leadership, cultivated through self-discipline, and thereby deemed fit to lead Asian nations. This construct established a hierarchy of nationally defined masculinities, with Japanese masculinity positioned at the top. In this context, imperial masculinity supported the Pan-Asianist ideology that legitimized Japanese expansion across Asia.
Drawing on archival sources from Albania, China, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, this article places the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's (DRV) response to the Prague Spring in 1968 within an international framework. The available documentation suggests that DRV policymakers repeatedly expressed deep concern about Alexander Dub & ccaron;ek's radical reform programme and, prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion, signalled their support for external intervention. The article moreover contends that Hanoi's stance reflected broader anxieties about its own national reunification struggle, fears of ideological destabilization, and continued reliance on fraternal assistance.
Maternity benefits are historically envisioned as a means to promote maternal and infant health in India. It was a major rationale for the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961. However, maternity benefits also came to be increasingly questioned in the mid-1960s for allegedly leading to more births and 'derailing' the national family planning programme. Limiting maternity benefits as a disincentive strategy for population control was proposed through various platforms. This article examines one such attempt in the Indian Parliament. During the discussion on the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill of 1965, Shakuntala Paranjpye, a renowned advocate for birth control, sought to add a restrictive clause limiting maternity benefits to the first two deliveries. Despite leading to an intense debate among the legislators, the amendment was voted down. Nevertheless, the debates are worth exploring to understand the prevailing notions about reproductive behaviour, differential fertility, and alleged ignorance of the working-class women. Primarily drawing on the legislative debates on the Maternity Benefit Act, this article shows how maternity benefits became a distinctive site for negotiating population control. By limiting maternity benefits, this article argues, the amendment sought to regulate the reproductive behaviour of the working class and promote a limited and 'quality' population.
This article explores the underlying rationale of Gandhi's 'sudden' decision to suspend the Non-Cooperation Movement following the Chauri Chaura incident through the lens of his experiments with brahmacarya (celibate self-control). Although existing scholarship has extensively studied the incident, a crucial paradox remains unexplained: Gandhi halted the movement after Chauri Chaura with its 22 deaths, yet remained 'silent' about other mass violence, including the devastating Malabar Rebellion which reportedly claimed 10,000 lives. This article reveals that Gandhi's practice of v & imacr;ryasangrah (semen concentration), previously overlooked in historical analyses, holds a key to understanding this decision. Within his corporeal cosmology, mastery over sensual desires manifested as 'peace (& sacute;& amacr;nti)' and generated the 'power (bal, & sacute;akti)' of non-violence. Conversely, failure in sexual self-control materialized in 'violence (hims & amacr;)', disrupting individual and social harmony. Through this embodied spiritual framework, Gandhi ultimately interpreted Chauri Chaura as a manifestation of his failed inner experiments, compelling him to suspend the movement.
This article examines the ideological and organizational evolution of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world's largest Hindu Nationalist organization, in response to the challenges posed by the anti-caste politics in post-Independent India. Focusing on the leadership of Balasaheb Deoras (1915-1996), the third sarsa & nacute;ghac & amacr;lak of the RSS, it situates the period between 1973 and 1990 as a critical yet understudied period in the history of the Sangh, marked by a significant departure from the organization's earlier defence of caste hierarchy. Unlike his predecessors, Deoras publicly rejected the caste system in the early 1970s and paved the way for the Sangh to adopt the rhetoric of S & amacr;m & amacr;jik Samarast & amacr; (Social Harmony), which became the central pillar of the Sangh's engagement with the question of caste in its bid to create a wider Hindu community which posed itself as caste-neutral and caste-assimilative. The article argues that the Sangh's engagement with caste was neither superficial nor a new feature of its post-2014 avatar. Samarast & amacr; helped the Sangh develop a conservative model of caste reform, one that invoked the language of social change without challenging the Brahmanical ideas inherent to its Hindu Nationalism.
This article examines the kidnapping and forced marriages of women under the Peshwas, investigating whether the state prioritized justice for victims or its Brahmanical credentials, given that the annulment of fully performed marriages was prohibited under the Shastras. Far from passively upholding the inherited order, the Peshwa regime actively leveraged intersectional dynamics of gender, caste, and religion to transform that order into a consolidated patriarchal Brahmanical system, reinforcing and totalizing caste-based customs, hierarchies, and governance through judicial and administrative interventions. The article also reveals a binary governance model, highlighting distinctive modes of justice between the capital city of Pune and the countryside. The article interrogates the ambiguity and fluidity of categories used to denote abduction, as well as the associated normative frameworks and penalties, showing how the discursive deployment of familial, communal, caste, ritual, pride, and political dynamics denied women's agency and subsumed alternative narratives, such as elopement and/or consensual cohabitation. It demonstrates how coercion against women as well as women's agency were viewed and conceptualized. Moreover, the government's adherence to patriarchal Brahmanical ideology, derived from the Shastras, not only shaped legal responses but also actively contributed to the ongoing perpetuation of abductions and forced marriages.
This article examines the fate of the Soviet community in North Korea, arguing that its trajectory closely mirrored the evolving relationship between the Soviet Union and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Between the 1940s and the 1990s, Moscow-Pyongyang relations transformed from quasi-colonial Soviet dominance in the late 1940s to Pyongyang's successful assertion of political independence in the mid-1950s, followed by antagonism in the 1960s and 1970s, a thaw in the mid-1980s, and, finally, a decline into insignificance from the 1990s to the early 2020s. Similarly, the Soviet community shifted from a position of political influence to a marginalized group that eventually disappeared altogether. The narrative begins with the community's formation following the Soviet occupation of North Korea in 1945 and traces its evolution through the shifting geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. The article explores the roles of various subgroups within the community-Soviet administrators, ethnic Koreans with Soviet citizenship, and ordinary Soviet citizens-highlighting the unique social and political challenges each faced under the Kim regime. It examines the community's decline in the late 1950s as Kim Il-sung consolidated power, expelling Soviet advisers and enforcing naturalization policies that compelled most members of this group to abandon their Soviet ties or endure severe discrimination. Drawing on recently declassified Russian archival documents, the article provides a fresh empirical perspective and offers a periodization of the community's history. In doing so, it sheds light on a little-known aspect of Soviet-North Korean relations and the broader dynamics of post-colonial transitions.
'Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question', the much-celebrated aphorism from Oswald de Andrade's 'Cannibalist Manifesto' (1928), conflates literature and cannibalism, offering Brazilian modernists a means of creatively ingesting the culture of the colonizer and liberating themselves from oppression. This article extends de Andrade's emancipatory notion to a new context through a critical analysis of the (anti-)colonial discourses of Chinese cannibalism in the Japanese empire. Although cannibalism functioned as a recurring calumny in Western colonial practices of 'othering', the figure of the Chinese man-eater circulating in Japanese imperial discourse from the Meiji (1868-1912) to the Taish & omacr; eras (1912-1926) has received scant scholarly attention. Two contrasting engagements with the subject of Chinese cannibalism are read contrapuntally: Kuwabara Jitsuz & omacr;'s seminal Sinological study, 'The Custom of Eating Human Flesh Among the Chinese' (1924), and the counter-discursive essays of the Hong Kong writer Ye Lingfeng, published during the Japanese occupation (1941-1945). Ye's anti-colonial discourse is analysed through the lens of 'writing back' or, more precisely, 'literary cannibalism', a post-colonial strategy that rewrites canonical texts as a form of subversion. Similar to, yet distinct from, 'writing back' in Anglophone and Francophone post-colonial literatures, Ye's rewritings constitute a form of 'literary restoration' aimed at reversing the colonial distortion of Chinese cultural heritage under Japanese imperial rule. Ultimately, this article proposes literary cannibalism as a critical framework for (re)discovering marginalized voices and bodies of knowledge at the periphery of empire throughout the course of Japanese and Western colonization in modern East Asia.
This article examines the S & umacr;raj Prak & amacr;& sacute; (1843), a devotional historical narrative on the Sikh Gurus by Santokh Singh, to argue that the text mobilizes an Advaitic lexicon within a distinctively Sikh framework of Guru-centred devotion. Drawing on the intellectual training Santokh Singh received at the Gi & amacr;n & imacr;& amacr; Bung & amacr; in Amritsar, the S & umacr;raj Prak & amacr;& sacute; systemically enumerates Advaita Ved & amacr;nta concepts only to sublate them into Sikh practices of bhakti and service (sev & amacr;). The article situates Santokh Singh within a broader Sikh lineage stretching from Bhai Gurdas (1551-1636) and Mani Singh (1644-1738), while also setting his writings alongside wider early modern devotional Ved & amacr;nta writers like the Assamese writer, & Sacute;ankaradeva (1449-1568). Using Michael Allen's framework of a 'Greater Advaita Ved & amacr;nta' and Rao and McCrea's notion of an 'Age of Ved & amacr;nta', the article demonstrates how Santokh Singh's writings exemplify the devotional reworking of non-dual philosophy across sectarian lines. More broadly, it highlights how Sikh scholastic traditions were not passive borrowers of Ved & amacr;nta but active participants in reshaping it, demonstrating how Advaita was a pliable, transregional idiom that could be domesticated through Guru-centred devotion into what may be called Sikh Advaita.
This article considers the material practices of forging 'Hindu' spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity's movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for 'offensive' trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in 'Hindu spaces' in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.
This article rethinks how colonial presence and foreign settlements reconfigured urban spaces beyond the treaty-port system by examining Chengdu, an inland, non-treaty-port city. Focusing on the 1930 boundary-wall controversy at West China Union University, a missionary college, it shows that anti-imperialism was refracted through local expectations of access to space and how everyday spatial practices had blurred the line between foreign enclave and local community. In the absence of colonial infrastructures, WCUU pursued indigenizing strategies to embed themselves in urban life; its later move to enclose the campus with walls was criticized as imperialist encroachment. Occurring amid heightened nationalism, the controversy drew force both from nationalist idioms and from ordinary residents' everyday grievances-economic strain, insecurity, and disruptions to daily routines-in a notably turbulent interwar Chengdu. The conflict brought to the fore two visions of Chengdu's urban identity: one championed by Western-educated local elites and another articulated by local people defending what they understood as public space. Moreover, I demonstrate how missionary institutions in less overtly colonial settings grappled with the contradictions inherent in their liminal status-simultaneously functioning as colonial enclaves and aspiring to integrate into local society.
This article considers British early nineteenth century attempts to reclaim Sagar Island, at the southwestern extremity of the Bengal delta, by clearing the island of jungle and settling and cultivating it-a project led first by colonial authorities at Calcutta and then by a joint-stock company established for the purpose, the Sagar Island Society. It considers the motivations behind the reclamation attempts, what they involved, and why they failed. The consequences - economic, human, and ecological-of the reclamation attempts are examined. The article reconstructs the almost entirely unknown history of events on Sagar Island from 1810 to 1833 through extensive new archival research and the study of rarely consulted publications from the period, before exploring their implications. In doing so, it sheds new light on the nature of British colonial capitalism and the environmental impact of British colonial interventions in South Asia, contributing to our understanding of the economic and environmental history of colonial Bengal and of the wider British imperial world. The article contends that events on Sagar Island offer a cautionary lesson about public and private initiatives to extend the frontiers of revenue extraction, and about the hubris of human efforts to 'improve' natural environments through large-scale projects of transformation. New insights are offered into the collusion between government and capital in British Bengal between the East India Company charter acts of 1813 and 1833, and into the colonial and capitalist origins of the Anthropocene.
Situated at the intersection of the history of science and medicine and the history of bodies, this article investigates the lives of the dead in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. By the late nineteenth century, the dead moved into the socio-material landscape of the 'sanitary city' of Calcutta via crematoriums, burning ghats, dissecting theatres, and anatomy labs. Subsequently, one notices two new developments. On the one hand, Calcutta witnessed the rise of pathological anatomy, whereby the dead drifted into biology. On the other hand, massive mortalities triggered by disease and the paranoia of death in rural Bengal spurred the proliferation of ghost stories. In understanding attitudes toward death, occult, spiritualism, mesmerism, and the unexplained, can 'unreason' be a useful framework to comprehend the past? Drawing on the colonial archive of municipal reports and vernacular archive of fiction to the activities of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the Theosophical Society in Adyar, I examine how the two stories-the urban, anatomical, reasoned science and the spectral 'irrational' fantasies-often coexisted as the dead moved from hospital beds to dissecting tables to spiritualist awakenings and horror tales. I argue that in this web of entanglement between the living and the dead, between 'scientific' culture and the phantasmagorical ethos, and in the liminal boundaries between positivism/passion, and surgery/mesmerism, we witness the birth of a new affect-laden sensibility in British Bengal.
The Indigenous pottery of Nagaland is handmade, a tradition passed down through generations. It remains a key part of social and religious life, serving as a means of expression. Modern indigenous pottery practices involve taboos and beliefs from the clay extraction to the firing of the pots. This paper examines the ethnographic aspects of pottery making, the tradition, and the operational chain. It reviews the beliefs, taboos, and rituals observed during clay mining and firing to evaluate their connection to pottery production from a socio-cultural and socio-religious perspective.
This paper examines how tourism served as a vehicle for informal political propaganda in postwar Taiwan under Guomindang (GMD) rule. Following the Second World War, when the GMD began governing Taiwan, the government recognized tourism's potential for ideological projection and national legitimation. Through analysis of tourism promotional materials, policy documents, and news reports from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, this paper demonstrates how Taiwan deliberately positioned itself as the authentic guardian of 'Cultural China' within a competitive regional context. The GMD government strategically deployed Chinese cultural traditions and landmarks as tourism attractions to establish Taiwan's cultural legitimacy, particularly targeting overseas Chinese communities through 'returning home tourism' initiatives that framed Taiwan as the authentic homeland for all ethnic Chinese. Significantly, while Hong Kong promoted itself under the banner 'The Orient is Hong Kong' primarily to Western tourists, Taiwan's dual strategy sought to attract both international visitors interested in experiencing 'mysterious China' and overseas Chinese through tourism experiences that showcased 'Free China' or 'Cultural China'. This approach constituted a systematic attempt to legitimize Taiwan's claim to represent China proper, even as its formal diplomatic position deteriorated in the 1970s. The paper argues that Taiwan's tourism strategy represented a deliberate political calculation that transcended economic objectives, transforming cultural tourism into a powerful tool for asserting sovereignty and maintaining international relevance despite growing diplomatic isolation.
In 1936, one of the largest mass disrobings of Buddhist monks and novices in modern history took place in northern Thailand. Around 1,000 monks and novices were disrobed, with some estimates as high as 2,000. The disrobed monastic clergy were members of the 'Tiger Order'. The movement took its name from its leader, Khruba Srivichai (1878-1939), who was born in the Year of the Tiger. The arrest of Srivichai and the subsequent mass disrobing were crucial turning points in the formation of the modern nation-state of Thailand. Nonetheless, this extraordinary mass disrobing has been virtually erased from historical memory. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories conducted with over 200 northern monks and villagers, this article seeks both to highlight the historical fact of the mass disrobing and analyse the process of its erasure from memory. Analysing four phases in the chronopolitics of erasure, this article shows how processes of remembering and forgetting underlie the paradox of both the maintenance of memories of Srivichai and the disappearance of memories of the widespread disrobing.
