From the 1870s through the 1930s, Parsi entrepreneurs based in Bombay financed large professional theatre companies. Their extensive tours brought live stage entertainment to all parts of the subcontinent. Female performers were one of Parsi theatre’s chief attractions. This article focuses on three celebrated women whose trajectories took them in different directions. Jamila Begam came from Iraq to India but achieved her ambition of running a theatre company in colonial Burma. Mary Fenton, ‘the English actress’, was born in India and escaped poverty by performing in Urdu and Gujarati on stages across North India. Nanhi Jan worked in Parsi theatre, recorded art music on phonographs, and yet was best known for her postcard image as a quintessential ‘nautch girl’. Each actress can be verified from memoirs, newspaper ads, official records, or photographs. Their experiences underscore the hazards of mobility as well as the ways in which travel enabled performing women to occupy a larger world professionally, socially, and economically.

In June 1838, five female dancers and three male musicians left Pondicherry for France, from where they travelled onwards to England, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. As they travelled, the dancers became bayadères, a European hegemonic construct that shaped Indian women as both sexual property and morally debauched. Through this racialised construct, Europeans, in particular the British and French, became positioned as morally superior to India and therefore legitimate imperialists. Within this context, I am interested in how images of the languid arms of the Indian temple dancers function as a site of archival resistance to their co-optation as the bayadère. I suggest that a close reading of the newspaper illustrations and affiliated articles, noticing details and making connections, undercuts the dancers’ repeated sexualisation and their refusal to be confined to the space demarcated for them in European hegemonic narratives. I argue that this archival resistance also counters the later dominant caste appropriation and embodiment of the temple dancer’s artistic practice as a form of Indian classical dance.

This research reconsiders the true nature of Japanese military comfort stations and comfort women. To summarize the discussion in this paper, comfort stations were military facilities, and comfort women were the third unit of the Japanese military, after soldiers and direct civilian employees of the Army and Navy. The Japanese military recognized the comfort stations as an essential element of military operations, and institutionalized and formalized their comfort stations by incorporating them into innumerable detailed regulations.

This article examines case studies and anecdotal narratives in which murderers used poisoned food as a weapon, and government officials used their epistemic authority to solve these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice. Drawn from Zheng Ke’s 鄭克 (fl. 1124–1149) legal compendium Tortoise and Mirror for Judging Cases (Zheyu guijian 折獄龜鑑) and Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) anecdote collection Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), these narratives reflected the violent threat that poisoners posed to the preservation of gender, familial, social, and political hierarchies. In the Mirror’s legal realm, astute officials used abductive reasoning to expose poisoning plots, thereby restoring the moral fabric of society; in Hong Mai’s Record poisoners are punished by imperial judges as well as by retributive mechanisms of cosmic justice. These six selected case narratives illustrate the permeability of the boundaries that divide the conceptual categories of food, medicine, and poison, and the connections amongst medical, legal, and socio-moral systems of knowledge.

Public opinion surveys are an indispensable tool for studying politics in Southeast Asia. But publicly available data are often in short supply in the region. To this end, we introduce SIKAP, a harmonized and open-access dataset of 58 weekly surveys (N = 95, 923) conducted in advance of, during, and in the aftermath of the 2024 Indonesian general election. We describe the data collection procedures and assess the quality of the sample. We demonstrate its utility by analyzing the effects of two political events on Indonesian voters’ attitudes in almost real time. First, we show that a constitutional crisis in August 2024 where the coalition of then President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) defied the Constitutional Court’s rulings led to a sharp but ultimately temporary decline in the public’s approval of Jokowi. Second, we show that voters who supported candidates other than Prabowo Subianto in the general election report large and persistent declines in support for democracy in the aftermath.

This article examines the replication of the Statue of Peace as a form of civic resistance and re-commemoration in response to the Japanese government’s efforts at de-commemoration. It advances three central arguments. First, replication functions as re-commemoration that resists state-led erasure of the “comfort women” memory. Second, this process constitutes a hauntological cycle, in which attempts to suppress unresolved memories only intensify their return. Third, both state and civic actors must embrace these haunting memories as enduring presences. The study draws on Derridean hauntology and case studies to support this framework.

Through a discussion of three recent episodes – the Kartarpur Sahib Corridor linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur in Pakistan and Dera Baba Nanak in India, author Haroon Khalid’s book Walking With Nanak, and a recent dispute involving the Sindhi community’s religious practices in Indore, India – this article comments on the present-day experiences and expressions of shared reverence post-1947 with a particular focus on the Sikh community.

“Labor” as a specific domain of embodied experience and a source of imagery and figurative language in early China remains understudied. The study invites critical attention to this topic, focusing on four types of imagery of labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—which constituted an interpenetrated rhetorical body sustaining varying socio-political and intellectual agendas. Either foregrounded with expressive rhetorical figures like metaphor and allegory or sedimented in commonplace language, the four types of labor imagery emerged and proliferated to present a constellation of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values toward the characterization of specific practices of ruling, learning, speaking, and writing, as well as the intellectual agency thereof. This rhetorical phenomenon emerged in pre-imperial China and gained new prominence during Han times. Especially since the first century bce, the four tropes of labor were made particularly useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production in a manner of self-oriented accumulation and manifestation. This change worked in concert with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture, as well as its embedded scholarly aesthetics and ideology.

This study seeks to elucidate the historical development and transmission of the traditions associated with the ‘Seven Sets’ through a cross-textual analysis of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Gāndhārī sources. The Seven Sets comprise the four establishings of mindfulness, the four right endeavors/abandonings, the four bases of success, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven factors of awakening, and the noble eightfold path. The Eight-Set tradition emerged alongside the Seven-Set tradition by the second century, followed by the forty-one and forty-three dharmas contributing to awakening (bodhipakkhiya/bodhipakṣya) by the fifth century. However, the Seven Sets became the most dominant. Both the Vaibhāṣika and Mahāvihāra schools upheld the Seven Sets as the definitive framework for the dharmas contributing to awakening, rejecting any additional items. The Vaibhāṣika dismissed the forty-one dharmas as heretical, whereas the Mahāvihāra excluded the four meditations incorporated into the Eight Sets. After the sixth century, the Eight-Set tradition was subsumed by the Seven-Set tradition. No evidence supports the long-term survival of the other two traditions. The dominance of the Seven Sets reflects the transition in South Asian Buddhism from pluralism to doctrinal unity.

This paper examines how tourism served as a vehicle for informal political propaganda in postwar Taiwan under Guomindang (GMD) rule. Following the Second World War, when the GMD began governing Taiwan, the government recognized tourism’s potential for ideological projection and national legitimation. Through analysis of tourism promotional materials, policy documents, and news reports from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, this paper demonstrates how Taiwan deliberately positioned itself as the authentic guardian of ‘Cultural China’ within a competitive regional context. The GMD government strategically deployed Chinese cultural traditions and landmarks as tourism attractions to establish Taiwan’s cultural legitimacy, particularly targeting overseas Chinese communities through ‘returning home tourism’ initiatives that framed Taiwan as the authentic homeland for all ethnic Chinese. Significantly, while Hong Kong promoted itself under the banner ‘The Orient is Hong Kong’ primarily to Western tourists, Taiwan’s dual strategy sought to attract both international visitors interested in experiencing ‘mysterious China’ and overseas Chinese through tourism experiences that showcased ‘Free China’ or ‘Cultural China’. This approach constituted a systematic attempt to legitimize Taiwan’s claim to represent China proper, even as its formal diplomatic position deteriorated in the 1970s. The paper argues that Taiwan’s tourism strategy represented a deliberate political calculation that transcended economic objectives, transforming cultural tourism into a powerful tool for asserting sovereignty and maintaining international relevance despite growing diplomatic isolation.

The Indigenous pottery of Nagaland is handmade, a tradition passed down through generations. It remains a key part of social and religious life, serving as a means of expression. Modern indigenous pottery practices involve taboos and beliefs from the clay extraction to the firing of the pots. This paper examines the ethnographic aspects of pottery making, the tradition, and the operational chain. It reviews the beliefs, taboos, and rituals observed during clay mining and firing to evaluate their connection to pottery production from a socio-cultural and socio-religious perspective.