Despite the expansion of research on South Asian courtesans, there has been no attempt at a critical historiography on courtesans alone. Within this larger gap, the specific connections between travel, mobility, and female performers in South Asia have not been adequately theorised. By making a critical intervention into the historiography of courtesans, we hope to aid in the establishment of what could be termed ‘South Asian courtesan studies’ as a recognised field of scholarship. Foregrounding the historical method for research into courtesans, the articles here show that beyond conventional ethnographic sources, there is a rich textual, visual, and material archive, largely unexplored until recently. They reveal both the transnational and local, and the spectacular and quotidian circuits of female performers’ travels. These include religious sites and participation in rites of passage like weddings but also extend beyond South Asia into the theatre spectacles and exhibitions of Europe. In the context of empire, this volume maps how female performers travelled in local, regional, and transnational contexts, and whether they were able to transcend the hypersexualised colonial trope of the ‘nautch girl’. This special issue offers a sample of the new developments in this growing field to catalyse its further expansion.

A few years after Singapore was founded, Lady Sophia Raffles sponsored a school for girls started by the wife of a London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary. This and several other early attempts at female education by missionary women linked to LMS or the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) were largely forgotten by historians. Then there were girls’ schools operated by the Protestant Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE) in Britian; the secular Singapore Institution founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles; and the Catholic Convent of Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) linked to Sœurs de l’Enfant Jésus-Nicolas Barré (EJNB) in France, followed by others. As there were many pioneering schools and some better-known ones tend to overshadow others, recent studies often contain inconsistent information as to which were the earliest schools, when they started, and who and which organisations were involved. This article uses primary sources from several archives to reconstruct the stories of the first Western-style girls’ schools on the island to hopefully clarify matters and close some knowledge gaps for readers interested in the history of female education in the early decades of colonial Singapore.

This article discusses the official discourse that appeared in Macau’s Portuguese-language media and the documentaries that were shot there by Portuguese filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s, especially focusing on the productions that followed the 123 Incident and which largely functioned as a response to it. These riots occurred in December 1966, when Chinese residents of Macau used Cultural Revolution-like protests to contest what they viewed as an inefficient and unfair Portuguese administration. They had a long-lasting and deep impact, weakening Portuguese colonial rule and increasing the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and local Maoists in Macau. In an attempt to counter the image-damage caused by the incident and legitimise Portuguese sovereignty in the territory during what was its worst crisis in the post-war period, Portuguese official discourse and these films came to promote Macau as a site of ‘miraculous’ development and modernisation that had as its basis Luso-Chinese partnership. Furthermore, Macau was advocated as an exemplary case of good neighbourhood policy towards the PRC and of coexistence at all levels, particularly ethnically and politically. This, it was suggested, made it a unique place and a model for the world in a time of cold war.

Mughal historiography has primarily focused on the lives of royal women vis-à-vis the harem and the imperial court. Looking at the entanglements of power, gender, and social capital, this article attempts to study another group of women—courtesans—as cultural and economic agents in early modern North India. The aim here is to move away from an empire-centric study of women and look closely at non-royal women who normally figure peripherally in official sources. The article locates them within the monetary and non-monetary transactions of the slave trade and explores how it acted as a form of generating social capital for such women. Since possession of slaves was a mark of distinction and affluence, the article argues that a section of courtesans, by being slave owners, belonged to the upper strata of the economic class. Moreover, relaxations in taxes as well as gifts and rewards further show that these courtesans managed to gain a foothold in the socio-political sphere. In this manner, they can be considered liminal actors who belonged to mobile communities, both geographically and socially. Departing from a homogenised narrative, the article shows that courtesans functioned within a patriarchal system that simultaneously empowered and marginalised them.

Scholars of nationalism in the Arab Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have focused mainly on its spokespeople from among state officials, military officers, and intellectuals. These groups were shaped by European colonialism, modernization, the expansion of education, and state formation, and aspired to achieve national independence and constitutionalism. Little attention was paid to religious scholars (ulema) because they were largely perceived as gatekeepers of the traditional imperial order who had, in the modern era, lost their influence and status. Focusing mainly on Egypt and Syria, this article seeks to contest the prevailing paradigm by highlighting the contribution of ulema to the fostering of ethnic identities in premodern times, and re-examining their place in the emerging national discourse in the Arab Middle East.

Focusing on the late eighteenth-century kulliyat by Lutf un-Nisa ‘Imtiyāz’ (1733?–?), arguably the first published Urdu poetess, this article seeks to explore the mobility—primarily metaphorical rather than physical—of a remarkable woman overlooked in historical accounts dominated by the male gaze. This mobility is enacted through her metaphysical, emotional, and literary navigation of time and space, rather than through geographic movement. Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī, functioning as an autobiography, employs time and space metaphors to offer a counter-archive for early women’s writing, providing a unique perspective into early modern feminine subjectivities. The examination underscores Imtiyāz’s agency in shaping her narrative, intertwining religious intercessions, canonical compositions, and literary sophistication. The metaphoric navigation through space and time illustrates the resilience and creativity of this woman, transcending her geographical and temporal constraints. At its core, Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī stands as a testament to her innovation, interwoven with convention through life-writing, crafting a rich narrative tapestry resonating within and beyond South Asian realms.

This article seeks out the spaces and strategies through which hereditary women performers enacted mobility and articulated power in early modern South Asia. The fraught relationship between a Multan-based courtesan, Murad Bakhsh, and a Durrani aristocrat of Dera Ghazi Khan, Muhammad Raza Khan Pupalza’i, is at the heart of Raza’s Persian memoir titled Jaur-o-Jafā, which is written in a distinctive literary style and lavishly illustrated with several miniature paintings. While overtly about the romantic entanglements of Murad and Raza, the story offers us a window into the cultural history of south-western Punjab during the political tumult of the late eighteenth century. It features a range of characters, including Multan’s last Durrani ruler, Muzaffar Khan (1775–1818), and a vast retinue of courtiers, musicians, and messengers embroiled in Raza and Murad’s love–hate story. The article focuses on the many journeys Murad took during her life, highlighting her ‘courtesanly mobility’. Written by her paramour-turned-enemy, we read Jaur-o-Jafā against the grain to amplify the voice of Murad Bakhsh in order to highlight the arc of her mobility, resistance, and agency in defying the limits of both patriarchal honour and the determining social, legal, and political positionalities of women in the region.

This article examines the Tangchaodun bema—a liturgical structure dating to the Gaochang Uyghur Kingdom in Xinjiang—as a regional manifestation of the architectural and theological tradition of the Church of the East, shaped over centuries of transmission and adaptation. Through comparative analysis of archaeological remains and liturgical texts from Syria, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia, the study argues that the Tangchaodun bema follows the ‘eastern-type bema’ model rooted in the East Syrian tradition. Its spatial configuration and ritual function reflect established Mesopotamian patterns, particularly in the mirroring of bema and sanctuary, while also incorporating localised features shaped by visual adaptation and intercultural contact. Bilingual inscriptions and iconographic traces further attest to this integration of tradition and regional context.

Rather than existing in isolation, the Tangchaodun bema forms part of a broader historical development in East Syriac ecclesiastical architecture. By positioning the site within this extended line of transmission, the article shows how sacred space operated as a medium of both theological continuity and cultural dialogue across Asia. In so doing, it offers new perspectives on the role of Christian architecture in the Tang to Yuan Dynasties and contributes to a more integrated understanding of the Church of the East in its easternmost reaches.

Although battles have usually been analysed to study state formation, they can also be examined to understand socio-cultural processes in the empire. The Battle of Dharmat (26 April 1658), which occurred during the famed Mughal War of Succession (1657–1659) that led to the accession of Aurangzeb Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), was a landmark moment in Rajput history and memory. Rajput clans serving in the Mughal army at Dharmat commissioned vernacular literary-historical works to put forward competing claims to martyrdom, bravery, clan, and caste pride. Particularly, Dharmat provided an opportunity for minor clans to establish their fallen leaders, like Ratan Rathor, as heroes, especially after the prominent Rajput king Jaswant Rathor fled the battlefield. The Rajput retellings of the battle deliberated questions surrounding masculinity, loyalty, sacrifice, and qualities underpinning the ideal martial Rajput identity. The contrasting portrayals of the ‘martyr’ and the ‘deserter’ at Dharmat represented a conflict between personal virtue and failure, capturing the chasm between honour and disgrace in the Rajput socio-political and cultural sphere. By drawing on Dingal poetry, Marwari chronicles, Persian literature, and the accounts of foreign travellers, this article unravels how a Mughal battle became a site for rehearsing normative Rajput caste ideals in seventeenth-century India.

This article explores the changing trajectories of tawa’ifs—highly trained female performers of music and dance—in colonial North India, with a focus on their mobility and evolving patronage relationships. As British colonial policies and reformist moral discourses shattered long-standing networks of courtly support, tawa’ifs increasingly travelled between regional centres in search of livelihood and artistic relevance. Focusing on the princely state of Rampur, this study explores the complex interactions, power dynamics, and social hierarchies between Muslim female performers, middlemen, and elite patrons, particularly in the context of public festivals and fairs. Based on handwritten petitions, letters, and poems in Urdu and Persian, as well as vernacular print sources, the article argues that princely patronage was not static but adapted to the pressures of colonial modernity and wider pan-regional transformations. It also shows that post-1857 Lucknow remained a vital hub for recruitment, training, and trade. By tracing female performers across princely and colonial contexts, the article illuminates how their mobility and professional flexibility expanded alongside rising social stigmatisation and the intensifying conflation of courtesans with sex workers.

The Qabus-nama (AD eleventh century) has been translated into Turkish many times by different translators. While one of the Chagatai Turkish translations of the work was completed by Âgehî (1809–1874) and is located in Uzbekistan, the other, by an unknown translator, is in the British Library (BL) (Or. 9661), but its beginning and end are missing. This article evaluates the Lund University Library (LUL) copy of the translation (Jarring Prov. 342), for which, unlike the other copies, the translator and translation date can be identified, as its beginning and end are intact. In this article, introductory information will be provided about Muhammad Siddiq al-Muqallib (Rushdie), the translator of the work, as well as Khoja Kefek Bey, who was instrumental in its translation. Additionally, the BL and LUL copies of the Qabus-nama will be compared using different criteria.

Most literature on tawa’ifs remains confined to specific princely states or cities in colonial India. Making ‘travel’ its central framework, this article tries to bring the movement and mobilities of tawa’ifs into sharper focus. Engaging with the formidable research that has emerged since the publication of Veena Oldenburg’s essay on the Lucknow tawa’ifs in 1990, I propose we approach their travels as itinerant subjects through a nuanced framework that distinguishes between the different types of journeys they undertake. Turning our focus on the trajectories and movements of tawa’ifs, I shall argue, makes room for more embedded and rigorous histories of women performers in late colonial India. A conceptual attempt, this article explores the possibilities of locating performers as subjects within complex networks of travel and mobilities. This peripatetic aspect of tawa’ifs’ lives will hence become visible as distinct types of mobilities—journeys of migration; travel in search of sustenance and patronage; types of displacement; exploitative circuits of exhibitions and displays; and in most cases, a crucial means of identity-making. In this article, tawa’ifs’ travels will thus move between princely courts, towns, cities, and regions, and even across continents.

On both sides of the Mediterranean, the first substantial attempts at distinguishing Salafis from Wahhabis took place in the aftermath of the First World War. Examining why this process occurred and how it unfolded provides valuable historical insights, especially into the initial conceptualisations of Salafism. In post-war Europe, the newly invented notion of a so-called Salafi movement emerged for intellectual and political reasons as a foil to the Wahhabi movement—of which it was supposed to represent the good twin. In Arab societies, it was the popularisation and conceptual expansion of the word ‘Salafi’ that eventually caused some Muslims to distinguish it from ‘Wahhabi’ in the late 1920s and allowed others to use ‘Salafi’ as a synonym for ‘Wahhabi’. In each of these cases, the criteria that past intellectuals employed to demarcate the two categories (or not) help us to infer how they understood Salafism and why they outlined its history or its genealogy in the way that they did.

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.

In 1897, an Indian dancer named Piaree Jehan petitioned the Bombay government seeking justice for her two granddaughters—Begum Jehan and Vajir Jehan—who died and allegedly disappeared, respectively, during their 1895–1896 England tour. As traditional sources of patronage for the performers declined owing to the colonial criminalisation of prostitution and rising anti-nautch sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century, certain groups of Indian women performers started travelling to the British metropole for contractual performances. Despite promises of lucrative salaries and foreign travel, life in the imperial exhibitory spaces proved to be quite precarious. Through a close reading of Piaree’s petition and contemporary British newspaper reports, this article presents a microhistory of Indian women performers’ experience in the racialised and sexualised imperial circuits of performance. It shows how the British imperial government adopted a certain ‘politics of convenience’ to selectively sexualise Indian women performers to erase their contributions as transcultural workers for the empire. By doing so, the empire continued to economically and culturally benefit from the dancers’ labour while avoiding any responsibility towards remedying their working conditions. At the same time, focusing on Piaree’s affective argumentation, the article also demonstrates how the performers used the British legal system to make their voices heard. By writing petitions, demanding unpaid wages, refusing sexual offers, and forging kinship ties, Indian women performers repeatedly foregrounded their identities as professional creative workers. In doing so, they disrupted narratives of passive victimhood, challenged their hypersexualised colonial representations, and brought their overlooked contributions to the late nineteenth-century British stage to the fore.

Following the Sasanian conquest of Bactria-Tukhāristān in the third century CE, Kushan cultic traditions centred on the veneration of anthropomorphic divine images continued to thrive under the new Persian rulers. Rather than imposing aniconic Zoroastrian practices, the Sasanians actively patronised local religious customs, commissioning statues of Persian deities such as Anāhitā while incorporating Bactrian gods into their visual and ritual repertoire. Numismatic and architectural evidence reflects this synthesis: Kushano-Sasanian coinage preserves the Kushan pantheon, with deities depicted in novel forms, including enthroned figures and busts emerging from fire altars, while temples at Surkh Kotal and Dilberjin combined divine statues with the veneration of the sacred fire. The coexistence of Bactrian and Middle Persian in inscriptions suggests a broader process of cultural adaptation. The persistence of these practices under subsequent Hunnic rule, and their later diffusion into Sogdiana, demonstrates their long-term impact on the religious landscape of Central Asia. The Kushano-Sasanian period thus marks the emergence of a distinctive cultic tradition, shaped by the cultic fusion, which continued to influence the region long after the decline of Sasanian rule.

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.

The emergence of female performers in the public sphere from the early twentieth century changed the contours of performance arts in colonial Assam. By studying the lived experiences of female performers in conjunction with their portrayals on-screen and on-stage, questions of mobility and agency are explored with a focus on Aideu Handique, the first heroine of Assamese cinema, along with women performers from selected mobile theatre groups. This article traces the shifts and continuities in the representations of the eponymous female protagonist in the first Assamese talkie, Joymoti (1935) by Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, and the recent stage adaptation, Awahan Theatre’s Joymoti (2021–2022). While mediated images popularised an idea of womanhood that travelled from the colonial to the contemporary stage, the mobility of the female performer enacting the role in the colonial context was severely restricted. Using feminist ethnography, oral history, and archival materials, this article brings the subjective narratives of the travelling female performers to the fore. It reveals the power hierarchies that exist between male and female performers—for instance, how gender affects decision-making processes as well as the modes and destinations of travel—thus highlighting the politics of mobility.