This article examines the long-distance bicycle journeys undertaken by Indian travellers during the inter-War period, focusing on two Bengali globe cyclists, Bimal Mukherjee and Ramnath Biswas. Through an analysis of their travelogues and press writings, the study explores how cycling served not only as a mode of mobility but also as a form of anti-imperial political expression, helping the riders craft counter-narratives to colonial discourses of dominance and project a vision of resilient, self-reliant Indian subjecthood. The article situates their travels at the intersection of international travel, knowledge production and political consciousness, demonstrating how Indian globe cycling emerged as a radical practice that challenged imperial monopolies on mobility and the making of political cultures.
This study examines the practices of gifting in the princely state of Swat under the rule of Miangul Abdul Wadud (1917-49) and his successor, Miangul Abdul Haq Jahanzeb (1949-69), highlighting the interplay between personal generosity, political strategy and cultural patronage. Gifts, fines, allowances and material rewards functioned not merely as symbolic gestures of benevolence but as deliberate instruments for cultivating loyalty, securing alliances and reinforcing hierarchical structures within the governance framework. Regular stipends operated as structured quasi-gifts, consolidating authority both within the state and in relations with external actors. Beyond political utility, the Walis' gifting practices encompassed cultural, educational and recreational domains, including the distribution of books, patronage of literary gatherings and the sharing of hunted game. This study demonstrates that in Swat state, gifting was integral to governance, operating at the intersection of authority, diplomacy and social obligation, thereby illuminating the broader significance of material culture.
Through a close reading of the acclaimed Pakistani film, Joyland (2022), the article argues for a shift in South Asian queer cinema studies away from frameworks of identity, visibility and narrative resolution, and towards an examination grounded in the three interlinked registers of subjectivity, relationality and aesthetics. Situating the film within the Pakistani and South Asian broader context, the article contends that queerness in Joyland is constructed not as a singular identity or as emancipatory, but as a lived condition shaped by stringent family dynamics, patrilineal societal norms and adherence to normative gender roles. The paper posits Joyland as a unique South Asian cinematic intervention that situates queerness through failures of masculinity, transgressive desires, and traversing normative gender and sexual roles.
This article examines women's cycling in late colonial India (1890s-1940s), exploring how its meanings and possibilities in India were shaped by the racial, social and gendered structures of colonialism. Drawing on visual and literary sources, newspapers, and autobiographical sources, the article shows how women in India navigated constraints of respectability and gender propriety through this technology. Public reactions ranged from ridicule and anxiety to celebration and reformist approval, revealing contradictory interpretations of the female cycling body. The article demonstrates that women's cycling in India defies binary narratives of emancipation versus restriction, instead revealing the bicycle as a complex site where gender, race, technology and nationalism intersected, producing an uneven terrain of negotiation.
Many lessons might be learnt about the borderland as a transnational place in the Global South in our era of paranoid hyper-nationalism. Gramsci's insights teach us that the rehabilitation of a dissident population as a preventative measure by militaries is no different when it comes to combating the 'first elements' of insurgency. This article examines the response to these measures by a single social movement that has been borrowing development and human rights norms from the international setting to expose the failures of the new regime, post-pacification, for nearly two decades. Our participants, selected by the PTM (Pashtun Tahafuz Movement or Pashtun Protection Movement) itself for their experience of conflict in Waziristan, ultimately show us how 'an unprecedented concentration of hegemony' is required for the task of rehabilitating populations in the historically liminal places between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Missionary hospitals in India are ubiquitously stamped with the mark of their Western founders discursively, spatially and commemoratively. This article critically examines the work and place of Indian women doctors in mission hospitals to argue that they were crucial in the provision of healthcare to Indian women, and therefore to India's claim to independence from British colonisation. I focus on Christian Medical College, Vellore, South India. The hospital and college grounds prominently feature the founder, Ida Scudder, eliding numerous Indian women who furthered the aims of the institution because they could negotiate the mission mandate (proselytisation) and the nationalist imperative (Independence and improving the status of rural Indian women), where Scudder could not. Women doctors like Hilda Lazarus, Kamala Vythilingam and Mary Verghese were instrumental in ensuring that CMC Vellore adapted to shifting political tides of nationalism and anti-colonial organising in the late colonial era, and its continued success.
Rabindranath Tagore's (1861-1941) critique of the political and urban civilisation of the West as opposed to the spiritually oriented civilisation of the East consolidated the materiality/spirituality binary in the Manichean world of colonial Bengal. This dichotomy is codified in Tagore's commentary on cultivated leisure, establishing the nebulous idea of taste through negating the 'thingness' of subject-object relations. Complicating such absolute discursive divisions, this paper proposes materiality as a method to read Tagore's 1929 novel, Relationships (originally published in Bengali in 1929 as Yog & amacr;yog). Contextualising the ambiguities of 'thing theory' within the colonial context of Bengal, this paper examines Tagore's navigation of modernity and its conflictual materialities beyond an overdetermined rejection of the corporeal. Informed by Tagore's writings on material culture, it locates interruptions in the novel's metaphysical mode, disturbing the 'humility of things' to reveal implicit materialities that mark the leisured spaces of retreat from the colonial praxis.
Bicycles were initially a mode of transport that represented the upper classes. However, by the 1920s, bicycles, along with rickshaws, tongas and pedestrians, symbolised subaltern mobility in India. This association with subalternity transformed the cyclist into a nuisance for civic authorities. In the colonial and postcolonial state's vision of modernity, controlling mobility in urban spaces was essential for capital accumulation and thus fast-moving motor transport was privileged. In this context, slow-moving cyclists, especially those from the working classes or poorer classes, appeared as obstructions. Analysing the dichotomous relationship between freedom and obstruction of movement on modern Indian roads and street spaces explains the complex experience of technological modernity in South Asia, often associated with the freedom of movement brought about by the railways and motor cars. The article contends that roads and street spaces were also marked by restrictions on movement imposed by the state's ideas of public order.
This article explores the social lives of the bicycle under the British Raj by bringing together the history of technology with cultural history and gender history. It first examines the discursive dimension of the bicycle and cycling in India, demonstrating that the new mobility technology was celebrated as an emblem of techno-modernity and, by extension, European superiority. The second part concentrates on analysing the practical uses of the 'steel horse' by the imperial establishment. It enhanced the reach of administrators, soldiers, police and missionaries, and thus helped stabilise imperial power. The third part turns to South Asian engagements with the bicycle, tracing how different groups resisted, appropriated and reworked the technology. Taken together, they reveal that the diffusion of the bicycle in colonial India was far from a straightforward instance of Western technological imposition. Rather, it constituted a dynamic, interactional process shaped by friction and the continual renegotiation of power.1
