The military revolt and widespread rebellion that overtook north India in 1857 was, arguably, the most significant challenge to the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Given the global historical significance of 1857, it is not surprising that the events of that year have been subjected to intense scrutiny by historians – especially as that fateful year began to loom large after 1900 as “India’s First War of Independence.” Historians have long noted that the first serious blood spilled in 1857 occurred in the military garrison town of Meerut, north of Delhi. And historians almost always point to the catalyzing role of local women – usually described as “prostitutes” – of the cantonment bazaar, who were said to have provided the spark that set the cantonment on fire. But who were these women? Surprisingly, despite 170 years of historiography, this question has not been asked till now. It is at the heart of the present study.

Dehlvi’s 1914 memoir raises the possibility that the women of the Meerut were not bazaar prostitutes but “women whose men had been imprisoned” – “respectable” women, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Building on this clue, this chapter asks who were these women, why were they at the cantonment, and how did they regard the British? For answers, this chapter turns to “family pension” records from the 1850s. What emerges are soldiers’ family relationships and, from the British point of view, their scandalous nature. British “Pension Paymasters” came to argue that many bereaved women receiving pensions were not what they claimed to be, namely, war widows. Official distrust of such women grew dramatically in the mid-1850s, largely based on a narrowing definition in the official mind of what constituted legitimate marriage. The result was the denial of pensions to these women and, not infrequently, their criminal prosecution, especially in the region of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, whose marriages were deemed insufficiently legitimate. Pension fraud investigations also revealed, in the western reaches around Delhi, the Punjab, and Afghanistan, secondary marriages to younger women.

Chapter 2 illustrates the ideologies and worldviews of the South Korean right. I specifically analyze the processes through which liberal democracy became a core ideological principle for the South Korean right and the ways in which the concepts of liberal democracy and freedom have been used by them. Tracing narratives and counternarratives about liberal democracy over time, I argue that the core ideas of liberal democracy championed by the South Korean right – as a defense against communism, North Korea, and the radical left – have not changed substantively. While liberal democracy, as used by the right, was merely political rhetoric intended to disguise political repression and legitimize authoritarian rule in the period before democratization, liberal democracy is currently used in a democratized context as the opposite of direct and participatory democracy and left populism. The right’s idea of liberal democracy in South Korea, with its fixation on anticommunism and the glorification of former authoritarian leaders, fundamentally distorts the meaning of democracy.

Starting with President Yoon Suk-yeol’s sudden martial law declaration on December 3, 2024, the introductory chapter presents a puzzle: Why did Yoon’s action gain substantial support from the ruling People Power Party and many citizens, and why is Korean society witnessing large-scale reactionary movements that fervently support the antidemocratic president and martial law? What are the larger structural conditions that have produced the current outcome? Emphasizing the roles of the far right in shaping post-authoritarian South Korean politics, the chapter introduces who belongs to the South Korean right wing and what their characteristics are. By locating the South Korean case in a larger global perspective, the introduction demonstrates how the particular historical and geopolitical conditions of the Korean War, national division, and authoritarianism have shaped the right-wing politics of South Korea in ways that are distinctive from their Western counterparts. Putting the interactions between historical legacies, right-wing infrastructures, and political actors on the right at the center of the analysis, the chapter builds a theoretical framework for the book. Then, I describe the methodology adopted in the book and provide an overview of each chapter.

This chapter introduces the central contextual and theoretical framework of this book. It provides a historical overview of the PRC’s development from the Mao era to the present, highlighting the formation and intensification of the urban-rural divide during a condensed period of urban-biased modernization. It then discusses how xiangchou is used and understood in this book within this developmental context as both a ‘structure of feeling’ and a form of affective governance. Literary and cultural analysis demonstrates how xiangchou can be understood akin to the nostalgic structure of feeling, whereas a discursive analysis of the term’s use in both state and academic discourses since the mid-2000s demonstrates its salience as both an emotionally affective and politically effective term. The language of xiangchou can blur the distinction between public and private desires, local and national imperatives, highlighting nodes of intersection between statecraft and the ordinary lives of citizens in villages like Heyang.

The epilogue provides a reflection on the experience of writing this book and it uses an anecdote surrounding the construction of a pond in Heyang village as a way to provide an update on the changes and developments in village life since the primary research for this book was conducted in 2017-2022.

Tracing the historical forces that have shaped the contemporary political landscape and ideological terrain in South Korea, Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the “right” and “left” have been constituted and understood. The definitions of ideological and political categories in Western milieus cannot be directly applied to the South Korean context, because the ways in which the left and right are understood are historical and social constructs that vary across time and geography. The unique historical and geopolitical context of the Korean peninsula – the division of the two Koreas and the Korean War, followed by three decades of authoritarianism – made anticommunism hegemonic and produced an extremely limited ideological setting for South Korean politics. This chapter argues that, due to the conservative hegemony and the right-leaning political environment in South Korea, the far right has been understood as representing mainstream conservatism, and centrists have been cast as the radical left. Thus, the distinction between the far right and mainstream conservativism within the right is blurred in South Korea.

Illuminating the collectively held sentiments and widely shared narratives of citizens in the Taegu-Kyǒngbuk and Gangnam regions, this chapter analyzes why these citizens have unwaveringly supported the conservative party and explains the spatial and popular basis of the right in South Korea. I argue that these citizens’ conservative political orientation and voting behaviors are shaped by the places where they interact daily with other members in their communities and cultivate a shared political identity. Using the two terms nostalgic loyalists and privileged materialists, I compare two primary conservative constituencies. The former share strong pride of place in Taegu-Kyǒngbuk as the hometown of the national modernizer Park Chung Hee and as the engine of rapid economic development during the Park Chung Hee regime, while the latter enjoy a sense of superiority and exclusivity deriving from living in Gangnam, a neighborhood that symbolizes wealth and cultured lifestyles.

In 1914 a new account of the revolt at Meerut appeared, authored by the erstwhile Mughal courtier Zahir Dehlvi. Dehlvi’s account, in Urdu, described a heated conversation between the rebel cavalrymen, fresh from Meerut, and the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar – whom the cavalrymen wished to elevate as the symbolic leader of their revolt. According to Dehlvi, the emperor, appalled at the reports of indiscriminate killing of the British at Meerut, asked what had possessed the men to behave in such a barbaric manner. The soldiers told the emperor about the offensive cartridge episode and the subsequent court-martial and imprisonment of their brethren. They pointed in particular to the “reckless” gender-inversion taunts of local women, which acted like fuel on fire and drove the cavalrymen mad with a desire for manly revenge. Significantly, Dehlvi described the women not as prostitutes of the bazaar but as “the women whose men had been imprisoned.” The chapter also examines the process of Dehlvi’s coming into possession of the story and, further, describes his escape from Dehli and years of wandering before ultimately settling in Hyderabad in the Deccan.

Chapter 2 introduces the field site. It provides a historic overview of Heyang village and provides “a ‘guided tour’” of the village’s principal tourist area, the ancient heritage dwellings complex, guminju, a nationally recognized and protected heritage site. It takes a brief detour into the village’s history, stretching as far back as the Five Dynasties era (AD 907-960), the period in which the village was supposedly ‘founded’ by Zhu Qingyuan, a high-ranking gentry who fled the imperial court to avoid being embroiled in war. Revered as the apical ancestor of the Heyang Zhu Clan, the discussion of Zhu rejoins the twenty-first century, where these historic tales of ‘origins’ are told and sold as part of the ‘xiangchou Heyang’ tourism brand. The development of Heyang’s tourism industry is discussed to highlight its transformation from its fledgling grassroots iteration in the mid-1990s, to becoming a developmental priority for the county government in the 2010s.

Chapter 4 describes Heyang as a migrant sending community, built upon and even sustained by migrants’ homesickness. These migration patterns are deeply entangled with the local duck farming industry, and ’duck tales’ told by locals who have personally engaged in the industry at various stages of their lives are highlighted. Informants’ reflections on the significance of duck breeding reinforces the importance of cyclical migration through different stages of a rapidly transforming China. However, four recent ’returnees’ explain how this industry was proving to be unsustainable because of local, national, and global processes of change by the mid-2010s. They each returned to Heyang to work in the ‘Xiangchou Tourism’ industry as tour guides and security guards. Their stories provide insight into the complex emotions that underscore their respective returns to the hometown, ranging from comfort and familiarity to perpetual feelings of precarity due to lingering debts, unstable livelihoods, and uncertain futures.

Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that prostitutes not only had a significant presence in the north Indian military cantonment, especially in the hybrid space of the sadr bazaar, but exercised an outsized degree of social influence. This is confirmed by police records from north Indian cantonment towns, including Meerut, examined in this chapter. While the historical literature on colonial India to date has emphasized the official subjection, suppression, and immiseration of prostitutes, especially in the wake of the contagious disease acts of the 1860s, a survey of police records from the 1850s suggest that prostitutes possessed a secure place in the cantonment, and in the official mind, and were even deemed worthy of official protection from criminal persecution. These points are situated in the context of violent crime against women generally, in which the state took an active interest, as well as the officially disfavored slave traffic in girls and young women. The 1850s emerges as an extended moment of transition between the early-modern figure of the urbane tawāif (courtesan) and the marginalized, scandalous figure of the cantonment kasbi (prostitute).