The third chapter treats the geography of collective Shiʿite self and other and the question of its global contexts. It reassesses ʿĀshurā ritual to trans-European backgrounds of Shiʿite blood donation and charts the transnational evolution of the Twelver Khojas. While the first chapter presents it as local civic integration, blood donation is also a global practice supported by high religious authorities. Thus, blood donation involves cultural exchange on religious terms that both incorporates Shiʿites within national contexts of secular diversity and integrates the latter into Shiʿism’s orbit. Among Twelver Khojas, European settlement gave rise to globalized religious identity, political solidarity, or communal organization. Away from the Africa Federation in Britain, the Shia Ithnaʿashari Community of Middlesex broke open the caste mould, lowering the threshold for extramural relations while rebalancing communal self religiously. This involved strengthened transnational Shiʿite solidarity and a predilection for Middle East-centred, anti-Western Islamism. The World Federation of Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri Muslim Communities emerged post-migration as a Britain-oriented body that evolved into the community’s global agent. Its international relations sectarianized and amplified the Twelver Khojas’ proto-statal functions on a world scale. In sum, the chapter demonstrates European transformations of Shiʿite identity in global religious contexts shaping trans-European selves.

In late 1914 Lawrence wrote ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, a set of pseudo-philosophical essays. He performs soaring, sage-like meditations on individuality and its impediments: the state, work and money. As art history and Hardy’s novels start to provide resistants to Lawrence’s psychological projections of body and spirit, and of male and female, a freshness and fertility of invention provoke scintillating accounts, almost rewritings, of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the projection of a grand historiography of Europe, with Renaissance art as its pivot point. Empowered by Nietzsche’s daring example, this intellectual experiment is performed on the page without benefit of the truth-restraints of professional criticism. The Rainbow, a novel whose final version he would bring to completion only a few months later, benefited from Lawrence’s new, overweening confidence in rendering the subconscious. His inhabiting of emotions-on-the-page was now intimate and unbounded. Yet the three-generational family-saga form that Lawrence expanded in the final version could not readily accommodate the resulting extremes of emotion within a synthesising intellectual structure.

This chapter describes how dependence on coffee and other primary commodities exacerbated foreign dependency, especially during fluctuations in global primary commodity prices. The chapter discusses the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) origins, including the key paradigmatic ideological foundations of the party while discussing the civil war and the 1994 genocide. The chapter ends by outlining three periods of the evolution of political settlement under RPF rule. Between 1994 and 2000, RPF loyalists were rewarded, while there was increased concentration of power among Tutsi RPF members. In the 2000s, until the early 2010s, RPF leadership centralised control among a smaller clique within the RPF, with increasing elite fragmentation characterising this period. In the third phase after the early 2010s, there has been increased external reliance, and the visible threat of transnational coalitions, comprising RPF dissidents and disenchanted domestic elites, has emerged but been contained.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the ‘non-royal’ (or ‘private’) charter corpus – that is, documents that were issued by individuals other than kings – from Kent, Mercia and Wessex between the 830s and 880s. The chapter provides an overview of this material’s content and its production contexts and processes. Canterbury dominates, since this is where a large majority of the surviving documents comes from, though there are glimpses of other settings too. A significant portion of the material from Canterbury relates to two particular ealdormannic families, though other documents demonstrate that lay and ecclesiastic people of lesser social standing also participated in documentary activity. The picture that emerges is diverse; varying practices and contexts, and different motivations for codification, reflect the richness of contemporary documentary culture. The following important themes are considered too: female participation, the relationship between royal and non-royal documentation, and the varied uses of Latin and Old English.

This excerpt is from a testimony recalled by an eyewitness, who claimed to have seen four Naxalites being killed in an ‘encounter’ by the police in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It appears in the interim report of the Civil Rights Committee (an unofficial, voluntary committee set up to investigate several ‘encounter’ killings of Naxalite prisoners) released in 1977. The committee was comprised of prominent civil society figures, lawyers, activists and journalists. The report claimed that the police ‘encounters’ they investigated were, in fact, extra-judicial killings. This claim anticipated what is today widely recognised in the public sphere, namely, that ‘encounters’ by the police or armed forces are often staged. The report was submitted to the prime minister of India and released to the press. The opposition raised questions in parliament regarding the claims of the report and a judicial commission of inquiry under Justice V. Bhargava was set up by the Andhra Pradesh government to conduct public hearings on the alleged encounters of Naxalites during and after the Emergency.

The report was a result of a fact-finding investigation. Fact-finding investigations are the predominant mode of activism for civil liberties groups in India. In a typical fact-finding investigation, an inquiry team is established on a one-off basis. The team visits the scene or site of the case, ascertains facts, identifies those who are culpable and makes demands or recommendations.

This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Background

The first legal code of modern Nepal, the Muluki Ain, promulgated in 1854 by Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana, systematized every aspect of Nepalese society, from criminal and religious law to the caste system and property rights, reinforcing existing social structures that benefitted the dominant caste-Hindu elites. Largely influenced by ancient Sanskrit treatises and Brahminical social ideas and practices, the Muluki Ain labeled Nepal's Tamang community, along with several other lower-caste and Indigenous groups, as masinya matwali (enslavable alcohol-drinker) and murmi-bhotiya (people from the border [P. Tamang 2018: 45–46]). This categorization further deteriorated their social status, legally sanctioning their oppression, domination, and strategic exclusion in Nepal. They were converted into mere slaves or bonded laborers and subjected to compulsory labor (rakam) and porterage (Holmberg and March 1999: 6). The Tamang community had to bear the terrible sense of loss of their caste status and remained identity-less almost a century because of the exploitative and exclusionary attitude of the Nepali state toward them. The Tamangs had to wait till 1932, nearly 80 years after the promulgation of the Muluki Ain, to get back their caste status and ethnic recognition. In this regard, A. Hofer (2004) reminds us, “A decree signed by King Tribhuvan and the then Rana Prime Minister Bhim Samser lays down that, instead of the hitherto employed designations Lama and Bhote, henceforth the designation Tamang may be used officially” (Hofer 2004: 125). Although this allowed the Tamangs the permission to write their surname – “Tamang” – and be recognized as an ethnic group with their distinct culture and history, it was only the beginning of a long struggle for equal rights (P. Tamang 2018: 55).

Lawrence’s rewriting of the third generation of The Rainbow created strains that were heightened in his revision of its typescript; they are supposed to be reconciled by the rainbow that Ursula sees at the end of the novel. Lawrence’s revision of the proofs introduced into the willed optimism of Ursula’s recovery from her injury, and the loss of her unborn child, an elevated language of eternity. Lawrence took this up from late July 1915 in rewriting his Italian travel sketches of 1912–13 for Twilight in Italy. The most striking additions are evocations of extreme states of being, deployed as diagnoses of how the war had come about. A major shift in his thinking, rejecting the language of eternity, can be located in a heavily overwritten two-page typescript fragment of ‘The Lemon Gardens’. The shift was inspired by John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, especially by Empedocles’ embrace of opposing principles as explanations of change, thus (for Lawrence) undermining the subject–object divide fundamental to subsequent Western epistemology. ‘The Crown’, written almost in tandem with the travel book, took this further, but elusively.