The extant literature on the liberal commons takes as granted secure property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of law, all of which have been the exception rather than the rule throughout human history, and therefore fails to explore the origin of the liberal commons (from an illiberal regime). Authoritarianism poses a fundamental challenge to, but also an opportunity to explore the origin of, the liberal commons. This chapter defines the authoritarian commons by examining the tension between authoritarianism and the liberal commons both theoretically and in the specific context of neighborhood governance in urban China.

On 29 July 2014, a little past noon, I arrived at 11 Ashoka Road—the then national headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi. It was well over two months since a landmark victory in the 16th Lok Sabha election propelled the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power, yet the euphoria of the victory was still palpable in the air. The 2014 Lok Sabha election was an election of many firsts. Not only was it the first time in 30 years that a single party managed to win a simple plurality of seats in the Indian parliament, but it was also the first time that a Hindu nationalist government was sworn into power without the need of any coalition partners. The fervent weeks of campaigning leading up to the results were remarkable in their own right and earned the distinction of being India's ‘first social media election’ in the popular press.

The premises at 11 Ashoka Road, originally designed as a sprawling estate in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, functioned as a motley assemblage of offices for party functionaries. Throughout the day, a steady stream of individuals—party workers in search of a ticket, ordinary citizens with grievances and petitions, journalists in search of sound bites—scuttled in and out of the party premises hoping to get an audience with senior politicians. But, in sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle that characterised most of the party headquarters, one part of the estate was marked out by its relative solitude and inconspicuous presence. Safely ensconced behind a large wall that flanked the rightward edge of the party's central courtyard was a block of rooms that were home to the National Digital Operations Centre (NDOC), popularly known as the BJP's IT (Information Technology) Cell.

Not only was the IT Cell physically cut off from the rest of the party offices and discreetly tucked behind a large wall, but the building had been designed to repel casual trespassers like me. Unlike other parts of the BJP office that were open to the public, access to this cell was carefully regulated and limited to only those in possession of a valid ID card that had to be swiped during entry and exit.

RETHINKING ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA IN SOUTH ASIA

On a chilly day in late January 1891, a young man from Ceylon who came to be known as Anagarika Dharmapala had an epiphany while on pilgrimage at the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya. It was at this spot that the Gautama Buddha is said to have attained Enlightenment while meditating under a peepul tree in the 6th century BCE. Since at least the 18th century, the Mahabodhi temple had been inhabited and maintained by a Saivite Giri matha (monastery) under the leadership of their mahant (chief monk) and became part of Gaya's Hindu ritual circuit. In early 1891, Dharmapala made the arduous trip to Gaya along with a Japanese Theravada monk, Kozen Gunaratna. Dharmapala described the moment in his diary,

The narrative that the Mahabodhi temple needed to be saved and cared for by Buddhists and that it was essentially if not exclusively a Buddhist site had been put into motion with the publication of Sir Edwin Arnold's essay on Bodh Gaya in 1885 in the Daily Telegraph and the many colonial archaeological investigations of Buddhist sites during the 19th century. Even Dharmapala's epiphany to this effect was not unique to him. Around the same time, Kripasaran Mahathera, the soon-to-be founder of the Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha (Bengal Buddhist Association), visited the site and came to the same realization—that both Buddhism and the site needed saving and that these tasks would require, at the very least, his complete dedication to the cause.

This is not to say that there was nothing original about Dharmapala's epiphany at the Mahabodhi temple and his subsequent Buddhist activism. Dharmapala's labours in the arena of equating a ‘revived’ and ‘reformed’ Buddhism with Sinhala identity had lasting effects in modern Sri Lanka. He is best remembered there as a Sinhala nationalist and a figurehead of the Sinhala exclusivist movement that took off in the 1950s.

This book begins with a close examination of Cochin’s natural environment. Barring some notable exceptions, histories of port cities have either completely neglected or failed to adequately engage with the coastal environments within which such cities are located. This has been an unfortunate omission since port cities have of course been fundamentally shaped by environmental transformations. In Cochin, the harbour’s very birth is often attributed to a flood that is said to have swept through the coast in the fourteenth century. Memories of this flood have lingered along the volatile coastline as has the fate of its most prominent casualty, the ancient city of Muziris, which is said to have been destroyed by the very same waters that gave birth to Cochin. From the colonial period onwards, therefore, the eventful history of Cochin’s coastline had begun to attract considerable interest and scrutiny. Through a focus on the discussions surrounding the port’s coastline, this chapter will examine how perceptions of the port’s environment intersected with visions for its development over the course of the late nineteenth century.

The history of Sino-American relations since the eighteenth century has been powerfully influenced by a series of ad hoc, one might say grassroots American actors, often only loosely bound to the United States government. This insight is the central theme running through this introductory chapter which seeks to offer a new window onto Sino-American relations. While these ad hoc relationships had a powerful influence on US-China relations since the earliest interactions between the two countries, World War II marked a turning point as these ad hoc actors were subsumed into a larger state-centered system of engagement.

This chapter explores the Japanese colonial origins of Angang between 1915 and 1945. The outbreak of World War I reconfigured the geopolitical balance in East Asia, enabling Japan to develop ironmaking in Anshan. World War I also led to the rise of the Soviet Union, prompting interest in economic planning among many outside Russia, including Japanese researchers in Manchuria. These new developments in the interwar years crystallized in state-directed industrialization in Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Through Soviet-inspired economic policies, the Japanese-sponsored puppet regime of Manchukuo developed Shōwa Steelworks in Anshan to support Japan’s war and imperial expansion. Reflecting the quintessentially colonial nature of Manchukuo, Chinese workers faced various forms of violence and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, increasing the forced labor mobilization of Chinese prisoners of war. Through planning and violence, the Japanese occupation regime turned Manchuria into the largest heavy industrial region on Chinese soil.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

Contrary to the claims of Vietnamese historiography, Chinese settlers had arrived in the water world well before the Viet. Their presence owed much to Cambodia’s focus on maritime trade, its encouragement of multiethnic trading communities, and conflict with Siam over the crucial Gulf of Siam passageway. Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong became the largest demographic group in the kingdom, overseeing foreign trade and forming their own mercenary armies. Their numbers and influence grew further as a result of the dynastic transition from Ming to Qing, competition among armed mercantile organizations for control over the East Asian sea-lanes, and the scramble between Cochinchina and Siam for influence over Cambodia. The enterprising Mo Jiu embodied and exploited these trends in forging his own polity at The Port.

Chapter Two explores the declaration of colonial peace through the amnesty offered to rebels in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. While this document has already piqued the interest of historians and political theorists of liberalism and “indirect rule,” I turn to this document as an instrument of post-conflict resolution. Comparing and contrasting the variety of strategies used by the state to temper forgiveness, this chapter tracks the creation of an uneven hierarchy of colonial subjecthood organized along lines of relative loyalty and disloyalty. In exploring the wider importance of amnesty at this juncture, this chapter examines this offer as a founding political bargain presented to the defeated. This promise of mercy, in this instance, had been contingent on the full surrender of Indian political agency.

This chapter makes the point that there is no need to go as far back as pre-modern Cambodian and pre-modern Vietnamese and Chinese histories to describe the well-documented hostile feelings between the Cambodians and Vietnamese, and that of Vietnam and China. The narrative thus begins during the period in which many of the main protagonists in the Third Indochina War were already active in the arena of the conflict.

This work is an exploratory study of the commemoration of women in cultural spaces during the early colonial period in South Asia. Based on a reading of the rather neglected compendia of women writers composing verses in Urdu and Persian in the varied and multiple pasts of Hindustan, it looks at memories of women's active participation in the literary spaces. Written in the nineteenth century, these compendia (tazkiras) written in Urdu were texts of memorialization, and reproduced memories of the freshness and depth that women poets brought to the literary culture. I read these texts as, following Pierre Nora, ‘sites of memory’ (lieu de memoire), and the life stories and poetic compositions found therein indeed serve to remind us of women's participation in the ‘literary public sphere’. These texts are not acts of recollection, but exercises in construction crucially motivated by significant sociopolitical considerations, one of which was to push for women's literacy within an indigenous frame of reference and to dispel the picture of the culture in Hindustan, found in British imperial writings and policy initiatives, as marked by inertia and stasis, particularly in matters relating to the lives of women.

This study then contests the commonplace assumption that the literary public sphere in the colonial period was markedly homosocial and gender exclusive, and argues instead that female scholars actively participated in shaping the norms of aesthetics and literary expression, and introduced fresh signifiers and linguistic practices to apprehend their emotions, experiences, and world views. Based on a reading of the largely ignored tazkiras of women poets, I suggest here that their compositions could be seen as a form of, in the language of Foucault, ‘erudite’ knowledge in that they enriched the literary space, even as they evoked considerable anxieties, and stood in a paradoxical relationship with the dominant episteme, both reinforcing and challenging its cultural assumptions and truth-claims. Women's poetry was neither antithetical nor excluded from the prevailing episteme and was in circulation in dispersed cultural spaces, such as the salons of the courtesans, the marketplace, household assemblies, and literary meetings. Indeed, in memorializing their voices from such dispersed locations, the authors of women's tazkiras were undertaking a genealogical exercise of recovering the ‘subjugated’ and suppressed voices in literary culture.

Chapter 1 explains the theoretical framework deployed throughout the book, largely drawn from the companion volume, Unearthly Powers. Above all, this means explaining the two forms of religiosity – immanentism and transcendentalism – and how they related to each other. While immanentism is a default or universal strand of human life, transcendentalism defines what is distinctive about the religions of salvation that emerged from the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE. These world religions also contained an immanentist element, however, even as they produced reform movements that insisted on the transcendentalist dimension. These modes also gave rise to two different means by which rulers could be sacralised: divinised kingship (immanentism) and righteous kingship (transcendentalism). The chapter then fleshes out a tripartite model for ruler conversion: (1) religious diplomacy often first induced rulers to favour foreign missionaries; (2) immanent power, or supernatural assistance in this life, tended to be crucial in convincing them to make a change of allegiance, and (3) the Christianisation of their realms was linked to its capacity to enhance their authority. Lastly, the themes of cultural glamour and intellectual appeal are introduced.

This chapter examines how the Chinese and Vietnamese communists’ perceptions of the border, and their priorities and ability to project state power there, changed as they transformed from revolutionary insurrectionists to ruling elites during 1949–1954. As more areas under DRV’s control connected with Chinese territory, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists started to jointly enforce the international boundary, enhance the cohesion of state authorities over the margins of their power, and extract revenues by controlling cross-border flows of goods and people during the First Indochina War. State building by the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists at the border, however, remained asymmetric during this period. Due to the two parties’ different status in their respective countries, the contested social spaces of borderlands posed greater dangers to the Chinese revolutionary state during its political consolidation while offering greater opportunities to the wartime DRV state to obtain material for its struggle against the French colonial troops. During the First Indochina War, the Sino-Vietnamese border was a site of selective coercion. Both the PRC and the DRV steadily expanded their economic functions by extracting taxes and thrusting state-owned trade companies into the existing cross-border commercial networks.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, temples dedicated to Laldas, who was born to Muslim parents, have mushroomed all over north India. Although he is currently mostly worshipped by the Hindu caste of Baniyas (merchants or traders), Laldas was historically known for having a dual religious identity as a Sufi pīr (Islamic mystic or saint) among Muslims and bābā or sant among Hindus. He preached nirgu bhakti (formless devotion) to the Hindu god Ram, lived a married life, combined ‘Islamic’ and ‘Hindu’ religious doctrines and developed a distinct form of religiosity shared by people across religious denominations. The saint taught his followers to observe five rules: to refrain from killing animals and eating meat (particularly beef); to abstain from alcohol consumption; to avoid partaking of any food in their daughter's home; to not cultivate tobacco and sugar cane in the area; and to avoid stealing. The ultimate objective for devotees from diverse socioreligious backgrounds was to continuously chant the name of Ram.

Laldas and his teachings straddled the boundaries of ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’. But his main followers, Hindu Laldasis of the Baniya background and Muslim Laldasis of the Meo Muslim background, began to identify him more closely with either ‘Islam’ or ‘Hinduism’ in the twentieth century. Born into a Meo Muslim family in the sixteenth century (1540 CE) as Lal Khan Meo, the saint is presently more popular under the designation of Baba Laldas. Following his guru Kabir, Laldas not only advocated worshipping ‘God’ in a nirgu bhakti manner but also lived by the values of ‘Islam’ in his personal life. Like Kabir, Laldas, his religious instructions and the Laldasi panth (religious path or way) founded by his followers traditionally did not discriminate on caste and religious levels. The saint considered institutional religious identities as impediments in the path of bhakti (devotion). His teachings are still followed by people of both religions. But the saint's identity and associated religious practices have recently been transformed, indicating a shift from a shared liminal religious entity to an emerging component of north Indian devotional Hinduism.

This book is an attempt to understand historically and anthropologically a changing form of religious culture around the bhakti figure and the religious order of Laldas that has undergone multiple transformations since its inception in the sixteenth century.

Chapter 1 investigates the introduction of knowledge about the conversion of river flows into electricity to China in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Despite the prominence of fossil fuel energy in the industrialized world, certain Chinese intellectuals advocated harnessing the country’s abundant river resources to produce electricity as a means of achieving full national independence. Local elites took the lead in constructing the first set of hydropower stations in southwest China, and afterwards an increasing number of Chinese elites recognized the potential of hydropower in the country. As a result, in the context of a long-term national crisis, hydropower came to be, for many people, synonymous with the strengthening of the Chinese nation.

In 1885, Alan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant and amateur ornithologist, gathered together seventy or so politically active Indian professionals in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) for a conference. They called themselves the Indian National Congress (hereafter, Congress). Hume was no charismatic founder of political movements. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of increasingly assertive political activities by educated professional classes in India, resulting in the formation of various regional political associations. Hume's was just the most successful effort in bringing them together on a single ‘national’ platform. At the time, neither the British nor the Indians saw the birth of the Congress as a major event. However, over the subsequent decades, the Congress would become the largest and the best organized party of the anticolonial cause. By the time of decolonization, most colonies would have their own version of the Congress. These were parties of the urban educated professional classes. In every colony, this class was a miniscule part of the population. So, the party of the professionals had to go in search of a social base. In the colonized world the largest social base was the peasant masses. By the end of the First World War, it became clear to any ambitious nationalist leader that mobilizing these masses was the only path to a successful anticolonial movement. Most anticolonial parties tried, some succeeded. None more so than the Congress which turned itself into a genuinely mass party under the leadership of M. K. Gandhi, eventually becoming the party of the postcolonial government.

In order to know and understand the world of Akshay Dutta, it is imperative to comprehend the complex social and cultural milieu that he inhabited. Many and various discourses had come together in an uneasy confluence to delineate both the quotidian and the intellectual lives of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. As David Kopf writes:

To attempt to write about Akshay Dutta's milieu is to first try and understand, at least in a broad and general way, some of the major strands of intellectual influence that marked the mind of the thinking person in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Between the beginning and the middle of the century, Calcutta had culturally and intellectually become almost as busy as London with the proliferation of printing and publishing establishments, the abundance of western scientific, philosophical, and literary matter, public libraries, English and vernacular newspapers, and cultural, literary, and social associations of various nature and inclination. Contained within the colonial logic itself was a culture of debate and discussion that involved both the ruler and the ruled in a way that was curiously set aside from the general narrative of colonial administration and its major decision-making processes. This is not to say, however, that these debates and discussions had little or no impact on the administrative policies of the colony. The mechanism of colonization was in many ways a symbiotic process, an ‘intercivilizational encounter’, as Kopf would put it. Therefore, there would be frequent interfaces, subtle adjustments, and careful tweaking of policy decisions keeping in mind the cultural, educational, and religious preferences of the native subject, so that the larger structure of colonial governance could remain intact. With the proliferation of printing presses, the increased circulation of newspapers, the general spread of enlightenment education beginning with the primary school, and the coming together of many and different ideological paradigms, the bhadralok class of the city was suitably busy forming and disseminating opinions about every matter of lived experience.

In September 2006, during the field research for my previous book The Festival of Pīrs, I took an early morning bus to Karim Nagar, an urban town famous for the public rituals of Muharram. Almost 200 miles away from the city of Hyderabad, this urban town has a significant Muslim population and was also greatly influenced by the Shi’i Islamic practices of Hyderabad. In Karim Nagar, I met 78-year-old Abdul Quddus Saheb, who began our conversation by talking about the songs of his youth during Muharram, the commemorative event of the martyrdom of the Prophet's family. After a while, he surprisingly took a detour just to talk about the Police Action of 1948. Being a young man of around twenty at the time of this violent event, Quddus Saheb was one of the witnesses of that traumatic era and the consequent divisive politics that partitioned Muslims and Hindus. Many of his memories, as I document here, narrate the story of the new generation of Muslims whose everyday lives and future dreams were brutally shattered by the Police Action of 1948.

According to Quddus Saheb, “It was a nightmare for us, as every Muslim in the Hyderabad state had suddenly become an enemy of the people. We were experiencing the height of every form of hatred and could not even step out of our homes.” Growing up in such a hateful environment, Quddus’ own story offers a lens through which to glimpse both the external and interior struggles of many Muslims during this period. Before this tragedy, Quddus Saheb was known for his mesmerizing performance of the songs of Muharram, both in Telugu and Urdu. When the Police Action was executed between September 13 and September 17, 1948, along with many other traditions, this narrative performance, according to Quddus Saheb, “started fading out” too. He recalled many memories from this period.

Chapter 1 explores vessel-naming practices in the Imperial Japanese Navy and their connections to classical Japanese poetry. This connection linked navy vessels with a past aesthetic rooted linked to the Emperor and rooted in notions of Japan as a divine land.