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Since at least the nineteenth century, the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji (r. 1674–80) has served as a central symbol in Indian politics. This article interrogates his legacy through the lens of his famous sword, the Bhavani Talvar. At least three swords have been identified as this weapon since the nineteenth century; by analysing each of these claims in turn, I consider how the discourse around Shivaji's sword(s) traces the evolving legacy of Shivaji himself. Interested less in the historical merits of these claims than in the socio-political work they perform, I seek to uncover why the last of these three, now in London, has become essentially synonymous with the Bhavani Talvar in the popular sphere. Ultimately, I attribute this preference to the object's political resonance: supposedly given to the Prince of Wales by a descendant of Shivaji in 1875, the object has been a rallying cry for Indian politicians of diverse ideological persuasions, who, in demanding its return, have sought to position themselves as the heirs to Shivaji and the healers of a nation still ailing from colonial wounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang ('Great Northern Wilderness') in the country's northeast. The term 'Beidahuang' refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast 'wasteland' into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation's borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China's northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform 'wasteland' into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership's turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the 'Great Northern Wilderness' in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses how population genetics has impacted on nationalist discourses across the Taiwan Straits and affected the relationship between Taiwan and China since the 1990s. In Taiwan this cutting-edge science has helped to construct a native-based and Taiwan-centred national identity through promoting indigenous peoples' rights, rejecting a blood-based, cross-Straits nationalism, and founding a pan-Pacific indigenous peoples' community through genetic links and cultural affinity. In China, after subverting the nationalist myth of Peking Man (a Homo erectus group believed to be the common ancestor of the Chinese) by analysing genetic data, the same group of Chinese genetic scientists have constructed another nationalist myth of a genetically homogenous nationhood. Such a discourse not only valorizes Chinese nationalism through claiming a DNA-based Chineseness across ethnic distinctions but also asserts genetic links between China and Taiwan, therefore providing a 'scientific' basis for China's nationalism in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits Rabindranath Tagore's critique of nationalism as well as his interventions on the theme of samaj. The claim is that contained within Tagore's reflections on nationalism and samaj is a vision of political community that is stipulated as an alternative to the one espoused by the nation-state mode of politics. Tagore's formulations of the possibilities within samaj suggest his commitment to normative orders grounded in a notion of relationship as a basis for social cooperation. Tagore contrasts and prioritizes the relationship-based orientation of samaj with what he calls the 'mechanical' emphasis of forms of community associated with the nation-state. Tagore articulated his views during the high noon of anti-colonial nationalism in India, and he offers a striking secular and modern political alternative to nationalist visions of community, which I classify as upholding a vision of societal politics. In underscoring the modern and political bases of Tagore's critique of nationalism and his endorsement of social and political forms related to samaj, I suggest that it would be a mistake to classify Tagore's perspective on nationalism and samaj as reflecting anti-political, or local-traditionalist, or aesthetic responses to the problems attached to national models of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist nationalists, on the one hand, and proponents of greater secularization, on the other. In the 2019 general election, political entrepreneurs 'particized' these religio-political differences, which has far-reaching implications for majority-minority relations, to an extent that appears unprecedented in recent Thai political history. This argument is developed through an analysis of the platforms, policies, and rhetoric put forward by political parties contesting the election, which concluded an almost five-year period of direct military rule. This analysis suggests we need to pay greater attention to the role of political parties and electoral competition in maintaining and contesting the secular settlement in Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1922, a group of wealthy Parsis in Bombay founded an organization that they dubbed the Iran League. Originally designed to assist their fellow Zoroastrians in Iran, who had suffered from centuries of oppression, the League quickly expanded its objectives to include the promotion of broader Indo-Iranian cultural and economic relations. It became a major player in the flow of ideas, literature, business, and tourist traffic between the two countries. Parsi fervour for Iran stemmed from the brand of Iranian nationalism promoted by Reza Shah, which celebrated the country's Zoroastrian past. In response, the League's leaders argued that the Parsis of India could play a special role in the 'regeneration' of Iran under the shah's supposedly benign rule. By the 1930s, however, Parsis' embrace of Iranian nationalism became a clear reflection of their deep concerns about Indian nationalist politics: they cast Iran as an idealized alternative to contemporary India, where the Indian National Congress had supposedly taken an ominously 'anti-Parsi' turn. The Iran League, therefore, was caught between two nationalisms. Worry about India's future even prompted some Parsis to argue that their community should 'return' to their ancestral homeland of Iran. The story of the Iran League thus demonstrates the complex position of minorities vis-à-vis the brands of nationalism in development during the interwar years. The Parsis, a wealthy but microscopic minority, responded to political anxieties at home by romanticizing a foreign country and taking part in a wholly foreign nationalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that to gauge the significance of state planning in mid-twentieth century India, it is necessary to study the trajectory of what was called 'Indian political economy' during the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. Through a close reading of selected texts, I demonstrate that the transmutation of Indian political economy into an abstract science of economics was a function of Indian nationalists' inability to hold together the 'social', 'economic', and 'ethical' spheres within a single conceptual framework. The separation of these three spheres was the enabling factor behind the conceptualization of planning as a purely technical process of economic management. Further, the article contends that these conceptual developments cannot be adequately explained with reference to either 'elite' interests or the insidious effects of 'colonial' discourses. Rather, the narrative demonstrates that economic abstractions can—and must—be grounded in the historical development of capitalist social forms that transformed the internal fabric of Indian society. Drawing on a theory of capitalism as a historically specific form of social mediation, I argue that a Marxian social history of Indian state planning can overcome certain limitations inherent in extant approaches. Finally, the interpretation proposed here opens up the possibility of putting Indian history in conversation with a broader development during the first half of the twentieth century, namely the separation of political economy into economics and sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main focus of this article is the Haiphong shipping boycotts of 1907 and 1909–10, which were conflicts over freight rates on rice which arose between several Chinese rice hongs in Haiphong (Hải Phòng), the main port in northeastern French Indochina, and three European tramp shipping companies. When these companies set up a joint agreement in 1907 unilaterally increasing the freight rates for shipping rice to Hong Kong, the affected merchants felt unfairly treated and boycotted the companies' ships. Furthermore, in 1909, they formed a rival charter syndicate and set up a steamship company chartering the vessels of other companies to apply additional pressure on the firms to return to the previous rate. Although the Chinese suffered direct financial losses due to their insufficient expertise in this business, they were successful in achieving a considerable decrease in the freight rate on rice, which shows that boycotting, even when costly, proved to be an effective means to push for reductions and better arrangements with shipping companies. In contrast to a similar incident in the same trade—the shipping boycott of 1895–96 when the French government intervened with the Chinese government on behalf of a French shipping company—the later boycotts did not provoke the intervention of Western powers. This case suggests that growing anti-imperialism and nationalism in China, expressed in public discourses on shipping rights recovery and in the use of economic instead of political means, had an impact on the boycotts. Economic, not imperial, power determined the outcome of this struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Saritā , one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi 'middlebrow' reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā 's role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual's reading desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Second World War, the Japanese state enacted sweeping education reforms designed to prime the population for Total War. The policies of the National Education Ordinance of 1941 aimed to strengthen collective loyalty and self-sacrifice for the state. Military drill and ceremonial rituals were the outward manifestation of wartime education. But this article examines how teachers borrowed an aspect of progressive 'whole-person' education from the more liberal pre-war era—'daily life writing' (seikatsu tsuzurikata)—to shape children's dispositions and consciousness. Through such reflective diary writing, children would learn to internalize the ideal behaviours and attributes of the Total War civilian. By comparing education discourse with samples of children's writings, teachers' written feedback, and interviews of former students of an elementary school affiliated with the Ministry of Education, I show how reflective diary writing, despite its progressive origins as a means of self-expression for self-actualization and social critique, could be co-opted by right-wing Japanese ultra-nationalism for its potential as a means of self-censorship, self-monitoring, and self-control. At the same time, its practice did help children endure the hardships of war and defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recent decades, historians of modern East Asia generally considered Asianism to be an imperialistic ideology of militant Japan. Although Japanese expansionists certainly used the term and its concept in this way in the 1930s and 1940s, earlier proponents of Asianism looked upon it as a very real strategy of uniting Asian nations to defend against Western imperialism. Showing that Chinese intellectuals considered different forms of Asianism as viable alternatives in the early days of the Republic of China, this article examines a number of discussions of Asianism immediately following the 1911 Revolution. Concentrating on newspaper articles and speeches by intellectuals Ye Chucang and Sun Yat-sen, I show the international aspirations of the Guomindang elite at this crucial point in the construction of the Chinese nation. Despite the dominance of discourse on the nation state, these intellectuals advocated different Asianist programmes for strategic purposes within the first two years of the Republic, dependent on their very different relationships with Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embrace of markets and globalization by radical political parties is often taken as reflecting and facilitating the moderation of their ideologies. This article considers the case of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva , in India. It is argued that, rather than resulting in the moderation of Hindu nationalism, mainstream economic ideas are adopted and adapted by its proponents to further the Hindutva project. Hence, until the 1990s, the Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh, and the grass-roots organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), adopted and adapted mainstream ideas by emphasizing the state as the protector of (Hindu) society against markets and as a tool of societal transformation for its Hindu nationalist support base. Since the 1990s, Indian bureaucratic and political elites, including in the BJP, have adopted a view of the market as the main driver of societal transformations. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in particular, the BJP has sought to consolidate a broader support base and stimulate economic growth and job creation by bolstering the corporate sector and recreating the middle and 'neo-middle' classes as 'virtuous market citizens' who view themselves as entrepreneurs and consumers but whose behaviour is regulated by the framework of Hindu nationalism. These policies, however, remain contested within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society generally. The BJP's discourse against 'anti-nationals' and the use of legal sanctions against dissent is an attempt to curb these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Indian Emergency (1975–77) a range of opposition groups and the Indian state competed to mobilize the Indian diaspora. The Emergency therefore needs to be understood as a global event. Opposition activists travelled overseas and developed transnational networks to protest against the Emergency, by holding demonstrations in their countries of residence and smuggling pamphlets into India. They tried to influence the media and politicians outside India in an effort to pressurize Indira Gandhi into ending the Emergency. An important strand of 'long-distance' anti-Emergency activism involved individuals from the Hindu nationalist movement overseas, whose Indian counterparts were proscribed and imprisoned during the period. Several key Hindutva politicians in recent decades were also involved in transnational anti-Emergency activism, including Subramanian Swamy and Narendra Modi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's role in opposing the Emergency—particularly the way in which it enabled overseas Indians to act as 'smugglers of truth'—remains an important legitimizing narrative for Hindu nationalists. Indira Gandhi's Congress government mounted its own pro-Emergency campaigns overseas: it attacked diasporic opposition activists and closely monitored their activities through diplomatic missions. The state's recognition of the diaspora's potential influence on Indian politics, and its attempts to counter this activism, catalysed a long-term change in its attitude towards Indians overseas. It aimed to imitate more 'successful' diasporas and began to regard overseas Indians as a vital political and geopolitical resource. The Emergency must be reassessed as a critical event in the creation of new forms of transnational citizenship, global networks, and long-distance nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on new archival materials, reconstructs the experiences and observations of an Indian war correspondent from 1944 to 1946 as he covered the advance of Indian soldiers of the British-led Indian Army from northeast India, through Burma to Malaya at the war's end, then to their eventual deployment with the South East Asian Command in Java after the Japanese surrender. As it transpired, Captain P. R. S. Mani worked as an enlisted public relations officer of the British-led Indian Army but also sustained his commitment as a patriotic Indian nationalist, who gathered intelligence on the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia and on the impact of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Relatively little scholarship has focused on Asian war journalism. Mani's tension-ridden role as a self-styled ‘Indian Army observer’ provides an illuminating insight into the way in which Britain's lines of communication were appropriated and subverted during wartime and beyond, and into the way his own nationalism was reshaped by his unofficial transnational activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are challenging complexities in analysing both historical trends and contemporary structures in the region now comprising Pakistan. Interrelating both history and the present poses further challenges. With scholarship aligned on either side of the apparent watershed of 1947, analysts have hitherto remained negligent of a pattern of continuity and disjuncture that is explored in this article, which it is hoped will enable a deeper understanding of historical causations and outcomes. Further, we propose here that such multiple and diverse trends, while they might demand distinct empirical analyses, can coalesce within three overarching themes. Analysing these themes and their interstices, enables a more cohesive and integrated understanding of Pakistan's complex realities than has been hitherto forthcoming from the more segmented approaches that dominate discourse on the study of Pakistan's past and present. The author aims to shed light on why and how retardation in Pakistan is so resilient, and hopes that understanding these long-term outcomes will be greatly assisted by an analytical approach predicated on three themes: thwarted nationalism, economic counter-revolutions, and anarcho-vassalage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In analysing a campaign launched by the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in a Hindi literary periodical, this article seeks to read tea advertisements within the cultural history of gendered lives and nationalism in the decade leading up to Indian Independence. More specifically, it explores how multiple versions of feminized Indian modernity came to feature in the construction of black tea as a healthy, social, and national beverage. As the habit and custom of tea drinking was not common amongst the Indian population of the first half of the twentieth century, the advertisements focused on the creation of a culture of ‘proper’ tea preparation and ‘correct’ consumption. Not only did the middle-class woman and her family feature centrally in these advertisements; aristocratic and working women as well as movie actresses were all associated with the beverage drunk to reenergize and savour. While the advertisements addressed middle-class society and consciousness, this article argues that they did so by also drawing on, and not distancing from, diverse class, caste, and professional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guangbao, published in Guangzhou between 1886 and 1891, was one of China's earliest native-owned newspapers, with a circulation three times larger than the Xunhuan Ribao. The newspaper, founded by Kuang Qizhao, provides important information on the ideas that were circulating at the time in Guangzhou, a place where a number of reformers were beginning to formulate their thoughts. The newspaper may have sown some of the seeds for the nationalism that would become a powerful force after the Sino-Japanese War. The Guangbao protested against the mistreatment of overseas Chinese and printed stories recommending retaliation against Americans. It opposed Western imperialism, advocated a strong national defence, and even suggested annexing Korea. However, the newspaper was not xenophobic and tried to encourage good relations between Chinese and foreigners in China. Unlike future political newspapers, the Guangbao continued to support the existing political system—not because of fear or ignorance, but because of a sense that democracy may not have been appropriate for China at this time. Although Kuang was not a supporter of many Neo-Confucian traditions or beliefs, because he equated Confucian morality with Christian morality, and morality was needed to combat corruption, the Guangbao emphasized Confucian moral training.The newspaper also served as a platform to promote reform ideas. Kuang carefully picked ideas that he felt were appropriate for China, including: free universal and specialized education, women's rights, economic nationalism/industrialization/business, free trade, entrepreneurship through patent and copyright protection, support for the common people versus corrupt officials, and philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the meanings of Chinese nationalism and its relationship to vibrant and recurring National Products movements in modern China through the case of the Shanghai Coca-Cola protest of 1947–1948. In a campaign to revitalize national industry, the Chinese business community of Shanghai targeted Coca-Cola as a foreign luxury, and asked the Nationalist government to prohibit the importation of raw materials for Coca-Cola. However, archival materials show that not only was the Coca-Cola bottler in Shanghai—Watson's Mineral Water Company—a Chinese company but they had made large contributions during previous National Products movements. Using imported raw materials was also a very common practice in the Chinese soft drinks industry in the first half of the twentieth century. By revealing inconsistencies between the Chinese business community's statement of protest and the actual character of Coca-Cola's Shanghai bottler, this article argues that in this case Chinese nationalism became a pretext and tool for business competition. This research suggests that Chinese nationalism as an analytical lens remains complicated and its role and meaning in history must not be over-generalized. Rather than the existence of a unified and singular nationalism, Chinese nationalisms have been socially constructed over time, with multiple faces, interpretations, and functions for different interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion—the core of today's identity politics—were all embroiled in this debate, as were both the British colonial and Indian nationalist governments. In just 150 years, Balbodh (a variant of Devanagari) emerged as the sole script for the Marathi language. At least three different arguments were used to dismiss the Modi script. The first was about printing types, and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, the social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the reasons given for abolishing Modi. In the twentieth century, British resistance to nationalist efforts in western India, and then a fear of regionalism under the new nationalist independent republic, ensured that a single script able to be used for both Hindi and Sanskrit would be officially sanctioned for Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the politicization of ethnicity in Nepal since 1990. In particular it looks at how ideas of indigeneity have become increasingly powerful, leading to Nepal becoming the first and—to date—only Asian country to have signed International Labour Organization Convention number 169 (hereafter ILO 169). The rise of ethnic politics, and in particular the reactive rise of a new kind of ethnicity on the part of the ‘dominant’ groups—Bahuns (Brahmans) and Chhetris (Kshatriyas)—is the key to understanding why the first Constituent Assembly in Nepal ran out of time and collapsed at the end of May 2012. This collapse occurred after four years and four extensions of time, despite historic and unprecedentedly inclusive elections in April 2008 and a successful peace process that put an end to a ten-year civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is now widely rumoured that the ‘Asian century’ is upon us. But what does this really mean? As late as 1988, Deng Xiaoping—in remarks made before the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi—expressed some scepticism about the facility of the formulation. As Deng stated then: In recent years people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view. If we exclude the United States, the only countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are relatively developed are Japan, the ‘four little dragons’, Australia and New Zealand, with a total population of at most 200 million. (. . .) But the population of China and India adds up to 1.8 billion. Unless those two countries are developed, there will be no Asian century. No genuine Asia-Pacific century or Asian century can come until China, India and other neighbouring countries are developed. By the same token, there could be no Latin-American century without a developed Brazil. We should therefore regard the problem of development as one that concerns all mankind and study and solve it on that level. Only thus will we recognize that it is the responsibility not just of the developing countries but also of the developed countries.Whatever the doubts about his standing as a Marxist, then, we may say that Deng remained resolutely universalist in his perspective, at least outwardly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trần Hưng Đạo (1228–1300), the Vietnamese general who led troops to hold off Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, is honoured across Vietnam today as a hero of the nation (anh hùng dân tộc). This ubiquitous representation has, however, come about only recently, having been crafted in the twentieth century. Prior to that time, Trần Hưng Đạo was honoured in other ways. This article will examine precisely how it is that Trần Hưng Đạo was represented and remembered in various works—from official histories to spirit writing texts—between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. It will trace the transformations in these representations over time and argue that it was only in the early twentieth century that Trần Hưng Đạo began to be represented as a national hero. In its coverage of the transformations in Trần Hưng Đạo's representation, this article will demonstrate how modern nationalist ideas emerged in Vietnam in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as post-colonial regimes in Africa and Asia hauled down imperial iconography, to the surprise and approval of many Western observers, India evidenced little interest in sweeping away remnants of its colonial heritage. From the late 1950s onwards, however, calls for the removal of British imperial statuary from India's public spaces came to represent an increasingly important component in a broader dialogue between central and state governments, political parties, the media, and the wider public on the legacy of British colonialism in the subcontinent. This article examines the responses of the ruling Congress Party and the British government, between 1947 and 1970, to escalating pressure from within India to replace British statuary with monuments celebrating Indian nationalism. In doing so, it highlights the significant scope that existed for non-state actors in India and the United Kingdom with a stake in the cultural politics of decolonization to disrupt the smooth running of bilateral relations, and, in Britain's case, to undermine increasingly tenuous claims of continued global relevance. Post-war British governments believed that the United Kingdom's relationship with India could be leveraged, at least in part, to offset the nation's waning international prestige. In fact, as the fate of British statuary in India makes clear, this proved to be at least as problematic and flawed a strategy in the two decades after 1947 as it had been in those before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines changing conceptions of the Himalaya in nineteenth-century Bengali travelogues from that of a sacred space to a spatial metaphor of a putative nation-space. It examines sections of Devendranath Tagore's autobiography, written around 1856–58, before discussing the travelogues of Jaladhar Sen and Ramananda Bharati from the closing years of the nineteenth century. The article argues that for Tagore the mountains are the ‘holy lands of Brahma’, while Sen and Bharati depict the Himalaya with a political slant and secularize the space of Hindu sacred geography. It contends that this process of secularization posits Hinduism as the civil religion of India. The article further argues that the later writers make a distinction between the idea of a ‘homeland’ and a ‘nation’. Unlike in Europe, where the ideas of homeland and nation overlap, these writers imagined the Indian nation-space as one that encompassed diverse ethno-linguistic homelands. It contends that the putative nation-space articulates the hegemony of the Anglo-vernacular middle classes, that is, English educated, upper caste, male Hindus where women, non-Hindus, and the labouring classes are marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Museums have long been thought to be vital contributors to nation building and the creation of identity narratives, yet the stories they tell must be negotiated within the constraints set by differing levels of interpretive freedom. This paper examines how museum exhibitions changed between 1982 and 2009 at the museums serving the five capital sites of the non-Chinese Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125). While some of these places, such as Beijing, have now become unquestionably central to the national narrative, others are deep in rural areas and are peripheral even to provincial concerns. Exhibitions at these five museums vary considerably in the degree to which they either consider the Kitan and the Liao dynasty in their own right or attempt to place them within a national narrative. The wide range of approaches reflects the differing present-day concerns of the museums’ host locations, as well as the new multivocality that is developing in—among other places—China's regional cultural institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the League of Nations’ handling of the crisis resonated strongly in Nationalist China, where it recalled the League's failure to thwart Japan's claims to Manchuria in 1931. As these two crises unfolded, the League became a nexus around which Nationalist Party debates about the position of colonized and semi-colonized countries within the extant world order crystallized. Party adherents reflected on China's and Ethiopia's positions as independent nation states with limited territorial integrity or juridical autonomy, and assessed this situation in light of their respective League memberships. While party liberals continued to view the League as a flawed but worthwhile experiment in global governance, newly-emerged fascist activists within the party denounced it as an instrument for curtailing the sovereignty of weak nations. From these conflicting views of the League, it can be discerned how Nationalist disunity was partially grounded in disagreements over the nature and ideal structure of the global order, and how Chinese fascists agitated to escape from modern structures of imperialist domination while reiterating the latter's racial and civilizational exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the relationship between Nationalist Party (GMD) cadres and Chinese intellectuals. By studying the Central Politics School, a major GMD political training institute for professional party cadres, I hope to reassess the nature of the GMD one-party state and remind researchers of the difficult choices it faced between backing party-liners needed for the political struggle and accommodating depoliticized intellectuals needed for public administration. This paper will argue that GMD political impotence in competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was due less to an inadequate recruitment of capable experts than to the over-specialization of its well-trained cadres on technical tasks. In fact, the cadres from the Central Politics School generally resembled those considered to be ‘intellectuals’ at educational level and in ideology. This compels us to reconsider how to define ‘intellectuals’ and whether they were as uniformly alienated from the one-party state as most of the scholarly literature suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discourses of the Muslim ‘respectable’ classes of colonial North India. Since women are seen as the bearers of culture, tradition, the honour of the family, community, and nation, control over women's sexuality becomes a central feature in the process of forming identity and community. As a public woman, the courtesan became the target of severe moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The way in which the courtesan was invoked within aesthetic, ethical, and legal domains shifted over time, and by the third decade of the twentieth century, there appeared a new way of speaking and writing about the ‘fallen woman’ within the Urdu public sphere. A social critique emerged which heralded the prostitute-courtesan as an ethical figure struggling against an unjust social order. Since the courtesan symbolized both elite Mughal court culture as well as its decay, she was a convenient foil for some nationalists to challenge the dominant idioms of nationalist and communitarian politics. Moreover, certain late medieval and early modern Indo-Persian ethical concepts were redeployed by twentieth century writers for ‘progressive’ ends. This illustrated a turn to progressive cultural politics that was simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-communitarian, while maintaining a critical posture towards the dominant idioms of Indian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Mantetsu Employees' Association, founded in 1926 by a group of elite university-educated employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company, was an organization of unprecedented scope and vision which provided for the development of a limited form of self-government by the Japanese in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone during Japan's occupation of northeast China. Its founding principles resembled the ideological tenets of the metropole's movement of Taishō Democracy which had since the post-Russo-Japanese War energized supporters of widened popular access to the job of national governance. This paper traces how the Mantetsu Employees' Association reflected the political zeitgeist of post World War I metropolitan society whilst simultaneously developing in response to heightened Chinese nationalism in the northeast throughout the 1920s. It shows how the Association encompassed a wide range of employee ambitions—from increased involvement in imperial decision-making to labour advocacy on behalf of the Company's lowest-ranking Japanese workers to a critique of colonial policy as dictated by Tokyo's political parties. The paper introduces key Association players and their ideas as a means of questioning the nature of democracy in an imperial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes up the project of conceptualizing a new history of food in India through an exploration of conversations about food, digestion, desire, and embodiment that took place in Hindi-language publications in early-twentieth century North India. Through an exploration of cookbooks, guides to health and wellness, and food advertising spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, conversations about food preparation, consumption, and distribution come to be revealed as significant anchors of historical, political, economic, and cultural debates about the Indian nation in this period. The centrality of food to conversations that took up the reproduction and regeneration of the Hindu middle class helped to conceptualize an idealized Indian nation[A]. Subsequently, the focus on food advertising imagined the transformation of these citizens into consumers. Moving beyond the colonial fascination with native bodies and tropical constitutions, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the conversations that emerged out of a focus on food in popular culture did the work of envisioning new possibilities for post-colonial embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last three decades, a considerable body of English-language academic work has shed much light on Japan's empire-building project in Greater China during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Japanese-language studies of the country's pre-war financial history have also grown in leaps and bounds. Yet, to date, neither body of literature seems to have fully examined what might appear to the naked eye as one of the critical pre-war junctures, where Japanese financial history converged on imperial policy and Chinese nationalist responses thereto.1 This paper will therefore aim to fill part of the gap by examining how the Yokohama Specie Bank, arguably the backbone of Japanese finance in China Proper, was affected by Chinese anti-foreign boycotts throughout the pre-war era (1842–1937). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sheds light on the long-distance politics of a small and rather young diaspora—the Acehnese overseas—which proved to be very influential on homeland politics despite its relatively small size, especially with regard to the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia. Special attention is therefore given to the close connections between the politicized migrant population overseas and their involvement back home. Born out of the suffering of people in Aceh and in Malaysia—the main destiny for refugees—the Acehnese overseas started to organize informal associations and networks to foster mutual support. During the almost 30-year-long conflict, material, financial, and other forms of support were directed not only to members of the diaspora, but also to people in Aceh, as well as the separatists, which enabled them to continue their struggle for Aceh's independence from Indonesia. Unlike larger conflict-generated diasporas that can afford to send home large sums of money, the Acehnese diaspora's greatest strength was the ideological and moral support they provided to people back in Aceh. The evolution of the diaspora and its activities were closely linked to developments in the homeland. By emphasizing the dependence of diasporas on homeland developments, which dictates the level of their political engagement, this paper draws attention to the diaspora's support for both the perpetuation of conflict and conflict resolution. After the end of the conflict in 2005, the diaspora lost its prominent role, and became involved in rudimentary forms of long-distance engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper deals with the trends of fascist and fascist-like right-wing social and political thought in colonial Korea in the early 1930s. It shows that in the 1920s, Korea's right wing, its ability to reach out to the masses being severely limited, preferred mostly conciliatory tactics in its relationship with leftist radicals, often making efforts towards inventing ‘hybrid’ ideologies which would integrate the leftist social concerns into the mainstream religious or nationalist constructions (an example of such a hybrid were various Korean versions of Christian socialism). After the Great Depression, however, Korea's nascent bourgeoisie felt more threatened and became more interested in keeping abreast with right-wing extremist trends in the mother country (Japan) and elsewhere. Such representative ideologists of the Korean propertied class as Yun Ch'iho and Yi Kwangsu were praising Mussolini and employing strong Social Darwinist language in their exhortations to the Korean people to ‘regain their vitality and develop [a] spirit of collectivism, obedience and self-sacrifice’. However, until the very end of the 1930s many of Korea's right-wing ideologues remained pronouncedly religious (Yun as Christian, Yi as Buddhist). While highlighting the religious essentials of their worldviews they often abstained from imitating the most extremist traits of European fascist ideologies (for example, anti-Semitism). In many ways, Korea's fascism continued until the end of the 1930s to be an intellectual discourse rather than a mass movement, and retained a strong aura of belonging to more mainstream religious or nationalist traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1905, Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon applied well-worn principles of imperial order to reorganize northeastern regions of British India, bringing the entire Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin into one new administrative territory: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. He thereby launched modern territorial politics in South Asia by provoking an expansive and ultimately victorious nationalist agitation to unify Bengal and protect India's territorial integrity. This movement and its economic programme (swadeshi) expressed Indian nationalist opposition to imperial inequity. It established a permanent spatial frame for Indian national thought. It also expressed and naturalized spatial inequity inside India, which was increasing at the time under economic globalization. Spatial inequities in the political economy of uneven development have animated territorial politics in South Asia ever since. A century later, another acceleration of globalization is again increasing spatial inequity, again destabilizing territorial order, as nationalists naturalize spatial inequity in national territory and conflicts erupt from the experience of living in disadvantaged places. Remapping 1905 in the long twentieth century which connects these two periods of globalization, spanning eras of empire and nation, reveals spatial dynamics of modernity concealed by national maps and brings to light a transnational history of spatial inequity shared by Bangladesh and Northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Around 1930, at a time of rising nationalisms in China and India, English-educated Chinese and Indians in the British colony of Singapore debated with great intensity the issue of national identity. They sought to clarify their own position as members of ethnic communities of immigrant origin, while remaining individuals who identified the territory of British Malaya as their home. Readers' letters published in the Malaya Tribune, an English-medium newspaper founded to serve the interests of Anglophone Asians, questioned prevailing assumptions of how to define a nation from the perspectives of territory, political loyalty, race, and language. Lived circumstances in Malaya proved that being Chinese or Indian could encompass a range of political, cultural, and linguistic characteristics, rather than a homogenous identity as promoted by nationalist movements of the time. Through these debates, Chinese and Indians in Malaya found ways to simultaneously reaffirm their ethnic pride as well as their sense of being ‘Malayan’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces a set of interlinked Asianist networks through the activities of Mahendra Pratap, an Indian revolutionary exile who spent the majority of his life at various key anti-imperialist sites in Asia. Pratap envisioned a unified Asia free from colonial powers, but should be regarded as an anti-imperialist first and a nationalist second—he was convinced that India's independence would materialize naturally as a by-product of a federated Asia. Through forging strategic alliances in places as diverse as Moscow, Kabul, and Tokyo, he sought to achieve his goal of a united ‘Pan-Asia’. In his view, Pan-Asia would be the first step towards a world federation, in which all the continents would become provinces in a new world order. His thought was an intricate patchwork of internationalist ideas circulating in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and his travels and political activities are viewed in this context. Pratap's exploration of the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global, from an Asian perspective, was one of many ways in which Asian elites and non-elites challenged the legitimacy of the political order in the interwar years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The land-locked north China province of Shanxi, identified in 1870 by the geologist Baron Richthofen as ‘one of the most remarkable coal and iron regions in the world’, was the site of a provincially‑defined national movement far removed from the better‑studied treaty ports and their articulate and prolific nationalists. This late-Qing provincialism may be read as a mediating symbol of an emerging national consciousness.Social tensions were exacerbated by external challenges brought by foreign agents, and their Chinese collaborators, of cultural and economic imperialism. Opposition to missionaries and Chinese Christians had begun as early as the 1860s. In 1898 the British Pekin Syndicate and its extra-provincial Chinese associates, with the backing of the central government, secured rights to Shanxi's rich coal and iron resources. These rights were ceded back ten years later after a successful ‘rights-recovery’ movement that possesses similarities to (but also significant differences from) the well-studied oppositional movements in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Shandong in the period 1905–1911. The duration of Shanxi's struggle, along with its extra-bureaucratic elite activism, popular mobilization, and cooperation with Beijing, makes its rights-recovery movement distinctive. The rhetoric and practices of the movement, which began before the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and reflects the rhetorical influence of these earlier protests, contributed to a strong regional solidarity that was backed by central state authority. There were various patterns of protest, one indigenous and provincial, one extra-provincial and nationalist, that interacted in the period 1902–1908. Provincial activists, including merchants, peasants, students, degree-holders, and officials, insisted that Shanxi's coal was for the use of the community, the province, and the nation on terms established by and for the people of Shanxi. In their victory, localism, provincialism, and the national project, had come together. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will introduce intellectual debates from Pakistan's early years to show how the country's future culture was being discussed, deliberated and reshaped in these circles at the moment of its own inception as an independent state. By focussing on the communist perspective on Pakistan's independence, it will seek to illuminate some of those historical moments in Pakistan's history that have not received much attention either from historians or from the public. Within this context, the paper will present contesting voices that are critical of one another—particularly regarding the place of Islam in the new state—in order to rethink Pakistan's early history as a period that could have led to a range of possible future historical trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pakistan occupies an uncertain and paradoxical space in debates about secularism. On the one hand, the academic consensus (if there is any), traces a problematic history of secularism in Pakistan to its founding Muslim nationalist ideology, which purportedly predisposed the country towards the contemporary dominance of religion in social and political discourse. For some, the reconciliation of secularism with religious nationalism has been a doomed project; a country founded on religious nationalism could, in this view, offer no future other than its present of Talibans, Drone attacks and Islamist threats. But on the other hand, Pakistan has also been repeatedly held out as a critical site for the redemptive power of secularism in the Muslim world. The idea that religious nationalism and secularism could combine to provide a path for the creation of a specifically Muslim state on the Indian subcontinent is often traced to the rhetoric of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But debate among Muslim League leaders specifically on the relationship of religious nationalism with secularism—and indeed on the nature of the Pakistani state itself—was limited in the years before partition in 1947. Nevertheless, using aspects of Jinnah's rhetoric and holding out the promise of secularism's redemptive power, a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, was able to secure international legitimacy and support for almost a decade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the origins, establishment, and history of the New Life Movement (NLM) in Jiangxi Province, China between 1934 and 1938. Some of the subjects explored by the author include the Nationalist Party, anti-communism, Christianity, state-sponsored Confucianism, social movements, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. The author considers the interrelationship between the Nationalist Party and the NLM, the impact of the NLM on Chinese ideas of citizenship and national identity, and social mobilization.

The article presents an exploration into the political history of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) political party of Sri Lanka from 1994 to 2004. Discussion is given discussing how it reformed to become a mainstream parliamentary body, opposed the market reforms of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe, and contributed to the failures of the 2001-2004 internal peace negotiations. Focus is particularly given to the party's balance and combination of Marxist ideologies with its Sinhala nationalist doctrines.

This paper examines themes related to cooking, food, nutrition, and the relationship between dietary practice and health in late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Bengal, and argues that food and cuisine represented a vibrant site on which a complex rhetorical struggle between colonialism and nationalism was played out. Insofar as they carried symbolic meanings and 'civilisational attributes', cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content. The Bengali/Indian kitchen, so strongly reviled in European colonialist discourses as a veritable purgatory, became a critically important symbolic space in the emerging ideology of domesticity during the colonial period. The gastronomic excesses of gluttonous British officials--crucial in asserting the physical superiority of a 'masculine' Raj--became an object of ridicule in Bengali culinary texts, signifying the grossness of a materialistic . The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the social and economic behaviors of colonial India during the Interwar period of the 20th-century, noting policies strongly in favor of economic nationalism by Indian big business organizations and questioning the underlying motivation of the process. Comparisons are made between the social and commercial aspects of the nationalistic behaviors, citing either the rise in a business social class with a national agenda or business-minded policies which utilized nationalist sentiment for its own gains. Through examination of individual business collectives, the characteristics of Indian big business of the era are described.

The article examines the role of the Hunanese in the development of modern China. Particular attention is given to reform and revolution in Hunan, China. The article focuses on what three generations of Hunanese did to put the Hunan province in the national spotlight. The Hunanese were at the forefront of political activity in China from the 1850s to the 1980s. According to the author they were patriotic. The author examines whether the Communist Revolution would have been so violent had liberals or those with no military experience been in control.