This article reconsiders late Qing state building through the underexamined lens of ecological governance, moving beyond teleological narratives of imperial decline to reassess the regime’s resilience and institutional adaptability under conditions of mounting environmental, fiscal, and geopolitical strain. Drawing on a transregional synthesis of ecological, social, political, and economic historiography, it argues that the crises confronting the Qing in the nineteenth century stemmed less from institutional stagnation or state decay than from a profound mismatch between inherited governing capacities and intensifying socio-ecological pressures generated by population growth, commercialization, and environmental degradation. Employing R. Bin Wong’s analytical framework of Challenges, Capacities, Commitments, and Claims, the article traces how the Qing state recalibrated its governing priorities in response to these challenges and constraints. Through six case studies spanning agrarian cores and imperial borderlands, it shows how ecological governance took multiple, regionally differentiated forms. Across these settings, the state selectively retreated from labour-intensive, resource-consuming paternalistic commitments while expanding extractive, coercive, and territorial strategies aimed at dynastic survival. Rather than signalling simple state decline, these uneven and survival-oriented adaptations constituted a process of governing recalibration shaped by negotiation among state authorities, local actors, and non-human forces such as water, soil, and forests. By foregrounding the agency of ecological dynamics, this article situates the late Qing within broader debates on empire, sustainability, and state capacity, offering a comparative framework for understanding how premodern and modern states confronted environmental limits in moments of systemic crisis.

This article examines the ideological and organizational evolution of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world’s largest Hindu Nationalist organization, in response to the challenges posed by the anti-caste politics in post-Independent India. Focusing on the leadership of Balasaheb Deoras (1915–1996), the third sarsańghacālak of the RSS, it situates the period between 1973 and 1990 as a critical yet understudied period in the history of the Sangh, marked by a significant departure from the organization’s earlier defence of caste hierarchy. Unlike his predecessors, Deoras publicly rejected the caste system in the early 1970s and paved the way for the Sangh to adopt the rhetoric of Sāmājik Samarastā (Social Harmony), which became the central pillar of the Sangh’s engagement with the question of caste in its bid to create a wider Hindu community which posed itself as caste-neutral and caste-assimilative. The article argues that the Sangh’s engagement with caste was neither superficial nor a new feature of its post-2014 avatar. Samarastā helped the Sangh develop a conservative model of caste reform, one that invoked the language of social change without challenging the Brahmanical ideas inherent to its Hindu Nationalism.

‘Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question’, the much-celebrated aphorism from Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ (1928), conflates literature and cannibalism, offering Brazilian modernists a means of creatively ingesting the culture of the colonizer and liberating themselves from oppression. This article extends de Andrade’s emancipatory notion to a new context through a critical analysis of the (anti-)colonial discourses of Chinese cannibalism in the Japanese empire. Although cannibalism functioned as a recurring calumny in Western colonial practices of ‘othering’, the figure of the Chinese man-eater circulating in Japanese imperial discourse from the Meiji (1868–1912) to the Taishō eras (1912–1926) has received scant scholarly attention. Two contrasting engagements with the subject of Chinese cannibalism are read contrapuntally: Kuwabara Jitsuzō’s seminal Sinological study, ‘The Custom of Eating Human Flesh Among the Chinese’ (1924), and the counter-discursive essays of the Hong Kong writer Ye Lingfeng, published during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945). Ye’s anti-colonial discourse is analysed through the lens of ‘writing back’ or, more precisely, ‘literary cannibalism’, a post-colonial strategy that rewrites canonical texts as a form of subversion. Similar to, yet distinct from, ‘writing back’ in Anglophone and Francophone post-colonial literatures, Ye’s rewritings constitute a form of ‘literary restoration’ aimed at reversing the colonial distortion of Chinese cultural heritage under Japanese imperial rule. Ultimately, this article proposes literary cannibalism as a critical framework for (re)discovering marginalized voices and bodies of knowledge at the periphery of empire throughout the course of Japanese and Western colonization in modern East Asia.

This article examines the fate of the Soviet community in North Korea, arguing that its trajectory closely mirrored the evolving relationship between the Soviet Union and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Between the 1940s and the 1990s, Moscow-Pyongyang relations transformed from quasi-colonial Soviet dominance in the late 1940s to Pyongyang’s successful assertion of political independence in the mid-1950s, followed by antagonism in the 1960s and 1970s, a thaw in the mid-1980s, and, finally, a decline into insignificance from the 1990s to the early 2020s. Similarly, the Soviet community shifted from a position of political influence to a marginalized group that eventually disappeared altogether.

The narrative begins with the community’s formation following the Soviet occupation of North Korea in 1945 and traces its evolution through the shifting geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. The article explores the roles of various subgroups within the community—Soviet administrators, ethnic Koreans with Soviet citizenship, and ordinary Soviet citizens—highlighting the unique social and political challenges each faced under the Kim regime. It examines the community’s decline in the late 1950s as Kim Il-sung consolidated power, expelling Soviet advisers and enforcing naturalization policies that compelled most members of this group to abandon their Soviet ties or endure severe discrimination.

Drawing on recently declassified Russian archival documents, the article provides a fresh empirical perspective and offers a periodization of the community’s history. In doing so, it sheds light on a little-known aspect of Soviet-North Korean relations and the broader dynamics of post-colonial transitions.

This article examines the kidnapping and forced marriages of women under the Peshwas, investigating whether the state prioritized justice for victims or its Brahmanical credentials, given that the annulment of fully performed marriages was prohibited under the Shastras. Far from passively upholding the inherited order, the Peshwa regime actively leveraged intersectional dynamics of gender, caste, and religion to transform that order into a consolidated patriarchal Brahmanical system, reinforcing and totalizing caste-based customs, hierarchies, and governance through judicial and administrative interventions. The article also reveals a binary governance model, highlighting distinctive modes of justice between the capital city of Pune and the countryside. The article interrogates the ambiguity and fluidity of categories used to denote abduction, as well as the associated normative frameworks and penalties, showing how the discursive deployment of familial, communal, caste, ritual, pride, and political dynamics denied women’s agency and subsumed alternative narratives, such as elopement and/or consensual cohabitation. It demonstrates how coercion against women as well as women’s agency were viewed and conceptualized. Moreover, the government’s adherence to patriarchal Brahmanical ideology, derived from the Shastras, not only shaped legal responses but also actively contributed to the ongoing perpetuation of abductions and forced marriages.

This article explores the underlying rationale of Gandhi’s ‘sudden’ decision to suspend the Non-Cooperation Movement following the Chauri Chaura incident through the lens of his experiments with brahmacarya (celibate self-control). Although existing scholarship has extensively studied the incident, a crucial paradox remains unexplained: Gandhi halted the movement after Chauri Chaura with its 22 deaths, yet remained ‘silent’ about other mass violence, including the devastating Malabar Rebellion which reportedly claimed 10,000 lives. This article reveals that Gandhi’s practice of vīryasaṅgrah (semen concentration), previously overlooked in historical analyses, holds a key to understanding this decision. Within his corporeal cosmology, mastery over sensual desires manifested as ‘peace (śānti)’ and generated the ‘power (baḷ, śakti)’ of non-violence. Conversely, failure in sexual self-control materialized in ‘violence (hiṃsā)’, disrupting individual and social harmony. Through this embodied spiritual framework, Gandhi ultimately interpreted Chauri Chaura as a manifestation of his failed inner experiments, compelling him to suspend the movement.

Maternity benefits are historically envisioned as a means to promote maternal and infant health in India. It was a major rationale for the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961. However, maternity benefits also came to be increasingly questioned in the mid-1960s for allegedly leading to more births and ‘derailing’ the national family planning programme. Limiting maternity benefits as a disincentive strategy for population control was proposed through various platforms. This article examines one such attempt in the Indian Parliament. During the discussion on the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill of 1965, Shakuntala Paranjpye, a renowned advocate for birth control, sought to add a restrictive clause limiting maternity benefits to the first two deliveries. Despite leading to an intense debate among the legislators, the amendment was voted down. Nevertheless, the debates are worth exploring to understand the prevailing notions about reproductive behaviour, differential fertility, and alleged ignorance of the working-class women. Primarily drawing on the legislative debates on the Maternity Benefit Act, this article shows how maternity benefits became a distinctive site for negotiating population control. By limiting maternity benefits, this article argues, the amendment sought to regulate the reproductive behaviour of the working class and promote a limited and ‘quality’ population.

Situated at the intersection of the history of science and medicine and the history of bodies, this article investigates the lives of the dead in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. By the late nineteenth century, the dead moved into the socio-material landscape of the ‘sanitary city’ of Calcutta via crematoriums, burning ghats, dissecting theatres, and anatomy labs. Subsequently, one notices two new developments. On the one hand, Calcutta witnessed the rise of pathological anatomy, whereby the dead drifted into biology. On the other hand, massive mortalities triggered by disease and the paranoia of death in rural Bengal spurred the proliferation of ghost stories. In understanding attitudes toward death, occult, spiritualism, mesmerism, and the unexplained, can ‘unreason’ be a useful framework to comprehend the past? Drawing on the colonial archive of municipal reports and vernacular archive of fiction to the activities of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the Theosophical Society in Adyar, I examine how the two stories—the urban, anatomical, reasoned science and the spectral ‘irrational’ fantasies—often coexisted as the dead moved from hospital beds to dissecting tables to spiritualist awakenings and horror tales. I argue that in this web of entanglement between the living and the dead, between ‘scientific’ culture and the phantasmagorical ethos, and in the liminal boundaries between positivism/passion, and surgery/mesmerism, we witness the birth of a new affect-laden sensibility in British Bengal.

In 1936, one of the largest mass disrobings of Buddhist monks and novices in modern history took place in northern Thailand. Around 1,000 monks and novices were disrobed, with some estimates as high as 2,000. The disrobed monastic clergy were members of the ‘Tiger Order’. The movement took its name from its leader, Khruba Srivichai (1878–1939), who was born in the Year of the Tiger. The arrest of Srivichai and the subsequent mass disrobing were crucial turning points in the formation of the modern nation-state of Thailand. Nonetheless, this extraordinary mass disrobing has been virtually erased from historical memory. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories conducted with over 200 northern monks and villagers, this article seeks both to highlight the historical fact of the mass disrobing and analyse the process of its erasure from memory. Analysing four phases in the chronopolitics of erasure, this article shows how processes of remembering and forgetting underlie the paradox of both the maintenance of memories of Srivichai and the disappearance of memories of the widespread disrobing.

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.

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.

This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.

The Korean writer Chang Hyŏkju, who first rose to fame in 1930s Tokyo, sparked interest, translation, critique, and controversy among intellectuals throughout East Asia. Recent scholarship has conducted comparative studies of the perception of Chang Hyŏkju in Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, and his native Korea, respectively. The present study brings one more dimension to research on Chang by discussing Chinese translations of his works that appeared in the puppet state Manchukuo (1931–1945). I place these texts in conversation with other local Chinese translations of Korean writing. Central to this story is a debate that surfaced among Chinese writers in Manchuria about what should constitute the literature of the region. Within this debate, the act of translating Korean writing became a space to work out the kinds of narratives that mattered, yet it was inexorably linked with the power struggles inherent to Manchukuo’s racial (dis)harmony as well. The texts discussed throughout this study reveal the value of Chinese and Korean textual exchange in Manchukuo and, by extension, how these intellectuals viewed the purpose of literature vis-à-vis modern nation-building. Such a reading allows for a nuanced understanding of the interplay between ethnic nationalism and cultural production. In the story told here, the Chinese and Korean ethnicities take on distinct political and cultural meanings depending on interlocutor and context, belying post-war narratives of inevitable ethno-nationalist triumph over the Japanese empire.

This article rethinks how colonial presence and foreign settlements reconfigured urban spaces beyond the treaty-port system by examining Chengdu, an inland, non-treaty-port city. Focusing on the 1930 boundary-wall controversy at West China Union University, a missionary college, it shows that anti-imperialism was refracted through local expectations of access to space and how everyday spatial practices had blurred the line between foreign enclave and local community. In the absence of colonial infrastructures, WCUU pursued indigenizing strategies to embed themselves in urban life; its later move to enclose the campus with walls was criticized as imperialist encroachment. Occurring amid heightened nationalism, the controversy drew force both from nationalist idioms and from ordinary residents’ everyday grievances—economic strain, insecurity, and disruptions to daily routines—in a notably turbulent interwar Chengdu. The conflict brought to the fore two visions of Chengdu’s urban identity: one championed by Western-educated local elites and another articulated by local people defending what they understood as public space. Moreover, I demonstrate how missionary institutions in less overtly colonial settings grappled with the contradictions inherent in their liminal status—simultaneously functioning as colonial enclaves and aspiring to integrate into local society.

This article considers British early nineteenth century attempts to reclaim Sagar Island, at the southwestern extremity of the Bengal delta, by clearing the island of jungle and settling and cultivating it—a project led first by colonial authorities at Calcutta and then by a joint-stock company established for the purpose, the Sagar Island Society. It considers the motivations behind the reclamation attempts, what they involved, and why they failed. The consequences – economic, human, and ecological—of the reclamation attempts are examined. The article reconstructs the almost entirely unknown history of events on Sagar Island from 1810 to 1833 through extensive new archival research and the study of rarely consulted publications from the period, before exploring their implications. In doing so, it sheds new light on the nature of British colonial capitalism and the environmental impact of British colonial interventions in South Asia, contributing to our understanding of the economic and environmental history of colonial Bengal and of the wider British imperial world. The article contends that events on Sagar Island offer a cautionary lesson about public and private initiatives to extend the frontiers of revenue extraction, and about the hubris of human efforts to ‘improve’ natural environments through large-scale projects of transformation. New insights are offered into the collusion between government and capital in British Bengal between the East India Company charter acts of 1813 and 1833, and into the colonial and capitalist origins of the Anthropocene.

Many of Yi In-sŏng’s works, including On an Autumn Day and Room in Summer, depict tropical plants and exotic vegetation. Although the specific types of foliage he portrayed remain unclear, Yi’s use of foreign foliage clearly conveys the allure of exotic scenery. Beginning in the 1930s, coinciding with Japan’s expansion into the South Sea region, images of palm trees and exotic plants found their way into colonial Korean homes. This article investigates the emergence of the practice of portraying ‘others’ in colonial Korea, with a particular focus on the artworks of Yi In-sŏng. Yi was a renowned Western-style painter during the colonial period in Korea, celebrated for his depictions of exotic landscapes and vibrant foreign flora. While Yi’s work is often characterized as an expression of Korean ‘local colour’, this article, instead, explores Yi as an urban bourgeois and delves into his appreciation for exotic elements in his work. By contextualizing the depiction of diverse rural flora and exotic interior decorations in Yi’s urban intellectual cosmopolitanism, this article discusses how the practice of imagining ‘others’ emerged in colonial Korea during the 1930s.

In this article, the ubiquitous visibility of Indian nationalist authors in the public sphere and academic scholarship is contrasted to the conspicuous invisibilization of authors in those domains who took critical and contrary stances on the Indian nationalist movement and ideology. S. Natarajan, also known as ‘Sarada’, was a Tamil migrant hotel worker who fashioned himself into a prodigious fiction writer in the Telugu public sphere during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even in a brutally exploitative condition, he managed to engage in literary activity. His singularly important realist novel was Manchi-Chedu (literal English translation Good-Evil, serialized in 1954). Written in Telugu, it narrates the entangled life journeys of three ordinary individuals. It also engages with the immensely violent and tragic dimensions of problematic aspects of modern societies, such as destitution and prostitution.

The tragedy of the protagonists indicates the exploitative conditions under which Sarada wrote and his disillusionment with the newly independent India. The novel articulates a brutally exploited worker’s perspective of a triumphant Indian nationalism at ‘the moment of arrival’ and its meaning for the dispossessed. While realist aesthetics is always associated with the concerns and anxieties of Indian nationalism in post-colonial critical discourse, Sarada’s realism proposes an ideological critique of Indian nationalist discourse. Manchi-Chedu is a 1950s novel that belongs to a period in which India was transitioning from a colony of the British empire to an independent nation-state. By portraying the aspirations, struggles, and travails of ordinary individuals, Manchi-Chedu interrogates the dominant representation of women in the Indian nationalist novel and discourse. The novel, which achieved spectacular success and reception in the Telugu public sphere, shows the different kinds of imagination (about the nation) in regional literature.

This article traces how and why the ‘competition’ of marriage culminated in the rise of the matrimonial advertisement across early twentieth-century India. It examines how the matrimonial, as a systematized textual schema, became a constitutive component of a reforming marriage market and integral to how the gendered body was imagined within transforming familial norms. The article draws on the extensive scholarship on labour and marriage in colonial Bengal to argue for the development of an ‘All-India’ middle-class marital marketplace as new forms of networking and work emerged. It does this by undertaking a cross-regional comparative analysis of matrimonials between 1915 and 1950 across urban India—alongside memoirs, colonial ethnographies, and periodicals—to extrapolate strategies of status-making and explore how discourses on conjugality ceded into legislative debates around customary law and property. The article begins by considering the placement and composition of matrimonials before delving into how matches were assessed, arguing that they expressed shifting marital norms, conjugal capital, and caste consolidation which led to the commodification of an expansive marital marketplace. It then examines debates around monetary marriage exchanges (like dowry) as a form of capital accumulation, disentangling how requests were articulated within the matrimonial advertisement through the complex textual grammars of signalling wealth.

This article explores the condition of Indian indentured women labourers on the colonial plantations of Fiji and Natal (now in South Africa) in order to understand the complexities of life in a radically different society and production regime. Opposed to the sources used by scholars to document the women under indenture, such as colonial documents, official reports, and writings of reporters, which have limitations of objective portrayal, this article uses the labourers’ petitions, depositions, and letters written largely in Indian languages either by women or men, individually or collectively, to different authorities. This is a source that has rarely been used hitherto to understand the plantation regime in terms of gender violence, sexuality, and patriarchy. Through a close reading of these letters and petitions and an examination of the conditions of their production and their reception by the colonial authorities, the article argues that plantations, as a radically different space, became a site of the violent struggle between women’s agency and Indian patriarchy in the process of reproduction of cultural selves away from the ‘home’. It further argues that by facilitating both women’s agency and male control, rather than taking an outright side, the colonial state created a space where both freedom and oppression coexisted, often leading to violent outcomes.