Abstract As the father of his nation Gandhi is naturally associated with India’s territory. From his ideas about home rule and village republics to mobilizing peasants in the country’s heartland, the Mahatma’s mission was linked with the vast landmass of India. Yet Gandhi was born in a port city that served as a gateway for Gujarat’s commerce across the Indian Ocean, a trail which he followed first as a student to London and then as a lawyer in South Africa. Moving between land and sea, Gandhi was able to unsettle the territorial foundations of India’s colonial society with new ideas and practices from everywhere and nowhere. Even his manifesto of 1909, Hind Swaraj, was written on board a ship. Rather than vanishing into the great territorial expanses of the subcontinent, this shifting and even liquid world of ideas, images, and practices allowed Indians to free and transform themselves, even while their land was in the possession of others.

Abstract Gandhi praised silence as a moral virtue opposed to the political importance of voice. He considered the understanding derived from communication to be incomplete and unequally accessible, with its knowledge of others motivated by the desire to control them. While Indian nationalists wanted their voices heard by the colonial state, the Mahatma was concerned instead with the limits of voice and communication. He criticized their claims to authenticity and focused on the incommunicable element crucial in all human relations. How might ignorance, as the necessary ground of such relations, then, serve to augment rather than limit moral and political life?

Abstract Shahzia Sikander speaks to Faisal Devji about her shift from painting to sculpture and the meaning of public art in the contemporary United States.

Emerging out of religious conflict in early modern Europe, the terms race and caste as we understand them today went on to define hierarchical relations in different parts of the globe. Yet, they have never completely parted ways and Suraj Yengde's essay explores these hidden connections in the use that American sociologists made of both categories. They generally did so by setting one term against the other in the attempt to account for racial discrimination in the United States. Race and caste were mediated by class in these debates, a category seen as being more modern and progressive than either of them. The comments that follow argue that caste and race are not simply the precursors of class and continue to interact with each other without the latter's mediation. Anti-race and anti-caste politics are also more connected to religious forms of universality.

The First World War is often seen as marking a transition from a world of empires to that of nation-states. As perhaps the inaugural global event, it is understood as making possible the international order we still inhabit. Yet the war also gave rise to powerful movements that sought to oppose and even dismantle this order. Soviet communism provided one such challenge and pan-Islamism another. While Lenin's desire to convert a war between states into one between classes turned into the dream of an alternative international order, the world's largest pan-Islamist movement in India retained its non-statist imagination. Like Gandhi's Noncooperation Movement, of which they were a part, India's pan-Islamists radicalized the language of empire rather than turning to religion for a new internationalist ideal. And they did so by aiming to escape the war as a global event.

Qur'an burnings have come to constitute a subculture in Scandinavia. Why have they focused on sacrilege against Islam's scripture, while blasphemy against its prophet still dominates polemics in other parts of Europe? This essay traces the emergence of blasphemy as the principal form in which such polemics occur to colonial India. It shows how critics there tried to attribute Muslim protests against insults to Muhammad with a religious language they seemed to be missing. With its globalization after the Cold War, this debate about blasphemy was taken up in Europe. But in the Nordic countries it has been replaced with sacrilege as a way of rehearsing the religious element that remains absent from Muslim demonstrations of offence against alleged insults to Islam.

Qur’an burnings have come to constitute a subculture in Scandinavia. Why have they focused on sacrilege against Islam’s scripture, while blasphemy against its prophet still dominates polemics in other parts of Europe? This essay traces the emergence of blasphemy as the principal form in which such polemics occur to colonial India. It shows how critics there tried to attribute Muslim protests against insults to Muhammad with a religious language they seemed to be missing. With its globalization after the Cold War, this debate about blasphemy was taken up in Europe. But in the Nordic countries it has been replaced with sacrilege as a way of rehearsing the religious element that remains absent from Muslim demonstrations of offence against alleged insults to Islam.

In a short story called ‘Naya Qanun’ or The New Constitution, the Urdu writer Saadat Hassan Manto describes a character called Ustad Mangu’s eager expectation of a new constitution for India.1 Chie...

Histories of the present are premised upon the loss of their subject, which is paradoxically deprived of its integrity by being tied back to the past. Attending to the present has been the prerogative of anticolonial and Cold War writing, for which the disconnection of present from past was crucial. If Gandhi, a critic of historical consciousness as a modality of imperialism, represented the former, Arendt did the latter kind of thinking. Histories of the present disregard these forms of thought, which stress rupture over continuity. This makes them Eurocentric almost by definition, as well as anti-global in their conceptualization. The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 offers us an example of how an event, understood provincially within a Euro-American history of the present, can be globalised to quite different effect.

If the “old” Jewish Question had asked how a Jew could be a citizen, the “new” one posed by Daniel Boyarin’s remarkable and courageous article asks how nationality can exist without a state. Striking about this formulation is the distance it marks from the European debates about emancipation and assimilation that had defined its predecessor. Boyarin’s context is not continental but imperial, taking into account Jews in colonized lands as much as the historical relationship between Europe and empire. As Hannah Arendt was the first to argue in The Origins of Totalitarianism , this relationship possessed an outward trajectory that went through anti-Semitism and an inward return by way of genocide. 1

The dominance of empire in contemporary scholarship has edged out the study of nationalism as its historical foe and alleged successor. Rather than being confined to the past, empire has been revived to describe the present and future, even serving as the predecessor to globalization. Yet it was arguably nationalism that served as the enemy of many movements we define as anti-colonial in the last century. Instead of representing a distinctive form of power, empires were often seen as being corrupted by nationalism, whose majoritarian violence had to be opposed in the name of minorities. At the forefront of these struggles internationally were Muslim minorities whose political thought drew upon anarchist ideas to combat nationalism as the true face of empire.

Anthropology TodayVolume 37, Issue 1 p. 26-26 Comment TRUMP'S TRUTH: a comment on Arjun Appadurai Faisal Devji, Corresponding Author Faisal Devji faisal.devji@sant.ox.ac.uk St Antony's College, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Faisal Devji, Corresponding Author Faisal Devji faisal.devji@sant.ox.ac.uk St Antony's College, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12612AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue1February 2021Pages 26-26 RelatedInformation