Mao Zedong's historic swim in the Yangtze River on 16 July 1966, which heralded a new phase of the Cultural Revolution, was a carefully staged political performance and a notable example of body politics in Communist China. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao began to broadcast the idea that he was a keen swimmer and to convince the masses to take up swimming. The swim was the climax of those efforts and an integral part of the Mao cult. Swimming in Mao's China offers a useful lens for understanding the close relationship between sports, the body, and politics. Swimming was a means for Mao to mobilize mass support for his political authority and a venue for the masses to practise and perform Maoism. This article examines the constructive process and meanings of Mao's swimming body, and the extent to which the bodies of the populace were regulated through the mass-swimming craze. Drawing on untapped archival materials related to mass swimming in Mao's China, this article argues that swimming both solidified and destabilized the Mao cult and became a venue through which political values were shaped, indoctrinated, contested, and repudiated.

This article presents an ethnography of a contemporary residential madrasa for teenage Muslim girls in a North Indian town undertaken by a team of two researchers. We focused on different aspects of the overall study, with Sanyal conducting participant observation within the madrasa and Farah interviewing a select number of graduates and former students in their home environments. The result is a comprehensive picture of the madrasa's transformative role in the socio-religious lives of its students, which highlights the importance of the connections between the madrasa and the home.

Of significance are the religious and denominational orientation of the madrasa—Barelwi Sunni Muslim—as well as the working-class status of the girls and their parents’ low level of education. With limited resources, the madrasa inculcates in the students, and by extension their neighbourhoods and wider communities, a new awareness of religious duties and mutual obligations, and gives its students confidence and a voice within both their families and communities. The long-term potential impact of madrasas such as this one appears to be significant in contemporary North India.

This article addresses how wilderness—through its qualities of remoteness and wildness—plays an essential role in the production of a vital religious centre in Tibet. By drawing on in-depth ethnographic observations in Yachen Gar, a mega-sized Buddhist encampment in the nomadic grasslands of China's northwestern Sichuan province, I examine the spatial and material features of the encampment, how various agents utilize these features to produce specific relations with it, and how, in this process, Yachen has become a centre of the Buddhist revival in Kham Tibet. I will present three ethnographic accounts—which focus on a Tibetan nun from the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), Chinese pilgrims, and reactions to the spread of electricity in Yachen—to address the ways in which Yachen is emplaced within the spatial and material tensions implemented and imagined by different participants. These accounts ultimately show how materiality plays a crucial role in forging the various contesting relations, actions, and meanings that constitute a social space.

The demand for the creation of Pakistan was based on a historical narrative built around the centrality of the Muslim community in India and its distinctiveness in terms of religious beliefs, cultural traits, and historical traditions. A particular understanding of the past was, in other words, central to the idea of Pakistan. As a result, soon after independence in 1947, a group of eminent historians got together to set up the All Pakistan History Conference. It received official support and patronage as the new state was eager to shape a historical narrative that could strengthen the argument for a distinct Muslim identity. This article looks at the development of this historiography in Pakistan. Unlike existing studies on this topic, which simply point out the ‘flaws’ in the history textbooks used in Pakistan, I will argue that the dominant historical narrative to be found in these textbooks—or even in many scholarly works produced in Pakistan—is a form of master narrative that has a longer history that dates back to the colonial period. Drawing upon such sources as historical texts produced in Pakistan, recently declassified documents of the Cabinet Division, and proceedings of the All Pakistan History Conference, I will delineate the features of this master narrative, the intellectual history of ideas that shaped it from the colonial to the post-colonial period, and the political exegesis whereby it gained structural dominance in Pakistan that was replicated for intellectual, ideological, and statist projects.

This article unearths two Jawi manuscripts pertaining to Muslim miracle-workers, or pawangs, who were key intermediaries of agrarian change in the interior of modern Malaya. These compendia of frontier patois are analysed to recount a history of rice worlds and environments wherein forest clearing and rice cultivation were directly associated with the Islamic esoteric science (ilmu) of pawangs. As professional miracle-workers, pawangs were employed to spearhead a broad range of socio-economic activities in western Malaya. As pivots of cults joined by Malay peasants, pawangs were venerated as heirs of agrarian prophets and saints from earlier Islamic periods, and esteemed for their fertility rituals and miracles in contemporary forests and ricefields. This article analyses the elaborate Islamic genealogies of pawangs and popular historical traditions that were recorded in these texts, and investigates how these documents were informative about the religio-economic sensibilities of cultivators. This article also pays particular attention to how pawangs negotiated with a variety of Islamic and African spirits in Malayan forests, to lead forest clearing and rice production and to mobilize labourers. It further presents explorations into the social and spiritual cosmopolitanism of pawangs and peasants upon the modern Malay frontier, whose labour and connected histories are yet to be written.

For over two centuries, prominent officials, literary figures, and intellectuals in China have paid special attention to the legacy of Shi Lang. Compared to many other historical figures, Shi Lang remains essential to our understanding of the cross-strait tension and the murky outlook for its future. Although the image of Shi Lang continues to mean different things to different individuals, to some degree, his significance to one particular community is also communicated to other communities. By analysing most of the previous appraisals and examinations of Shi Lang, we can reveal the historical narratives of this man as being continually under construction in a shifting and mutually reinforcing process. This article aims to examine the ways in which the legacy of Shi Lang has percolated throughout Chinese history, since the Qing dynasty, and also how it continues to function in the present day. It is fascinating to not only delineate how the story of Shi Lang has evolved as a legacy, but also to explore the rich variety of ways in which an individual or a community has adapted the narratives that make up the story of Shi Lang to suit the demands of different historical settings and perspectives.

This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary—the India-Bangladesh border—I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban or border scholars. I argue that reciprocal webs of exchange brought Garo matrilineal kinship and Christian religiosity into relations with seemingly impersonal worlds of state control and border rule. The exchange of valued domestic objects, and the broader set of political and gendered affinities that surrounded these, are evidence of the border's changing role and temporality in mitigating difference and danger. Although these relations are embedded in the history of border-making in the Garo Hills, recent national security measures and border infrastructures have disrupted prior exchanges. These have disembedded the troops from their immediate rural environment in attempts to contain trans-border relationships.

This article explores the background to and consequences of the resignation of B. R. Sreenivasan as the vice-chancellor of the University of Singapore in October 1963, after a public clash with the People's Action Party state government, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Sreenivasan's resignation has been the subject of radically different historical interpretations. It has been celebrated by some nationalist historians as part of a process of cultural decolonization, but criticized by others as precipitating a two-decades long erosion of academic freedom in Singapore. Careful attention to the event and its context, however, offers a powerful heuristic concerning the place of higher education in the process of decolonization, and the manner in which colonial universities came to be symbolic repositories of nationalism that enjoyed some degree of autonomy from the state. Debates on the role of the university that arose in Singapore after the resignation were plural, and diverse, and have much to teach us not only about the past, but also about a future in which international research universities such as the National University of Singapore embrace contradictory roles and yet still strive for new forms of academic autonomy.

This article presents methodologies towards a multilingual literary history of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century by examining multilingual encounters or cultures through places, people, and institutions. Massey's concept of plural space underpins the study and gives rise to various strategies to build a multilingual literary history. The guiding research questions are: How do we construct multilingual literary histories in the context of language-based conflict? What can conflict environments teach us about approaches to multilingual literary histories and spheres? In addition to discovering future directions for intra-national comparative literary studies and documenting multilingual cultures and sites, I also focus on the changing geography of multilingualism in the twentieth century. As ideological separation of language spheres turned to real-world segregation through a series of policy shifts and institutional changes, we see that the pursuit of multilingual research takes us from organic, or naturally occurring, sites of multilingualism to orchestrated, or purposefully created, sites. Orchestrated sites work to counterbalance the decreasing opportunity for organic multilingual encounters in the context of ethnolinguistic conflict.

In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address.

This article interrogates the urbanization of Puri at the time of the cholera epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the epidemic the colonial state took serious steps to reorder the urban landscape of the pilgrim town in general and Puri in particular. However, in Puri the narrative of infrastructural development is slightly complicated by the presence of the temple of Jagannath which acted as an alternative public body. Thus, on every occasion the colonial state had to negotiate with the temple in order to facilitate urban governance in Puri. As a result, I argue, Puri's urban landscape could only develop through interaction and negotiation between the temple and the state.

This article explores the joking relations that constitute conviviality in one of the largest marginal bazaars in Moscow. The marketplace is known as a hub for migrant workers and traders, and is often stigmatized in the media. It remains one of the largest commercial nodes in the bazaar network that stretches across and beyond much of ex-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of conviviality have often claimed that convivial living represents more than hilarity and laughter; exactly how laughter actually happens and what sets of relations and interactions make it possible have been largely left out of the discussion. I will explore how a certain joking repertoire both connects Russian customers with migrant sellers and traders from Central Asia, Vietnam, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and animates relations between sellers themselves. I argue that these relations are characterized by volatility, which incorporates play and improvisation within different registers of uncertainty, conflict, enjoyment, proximity, and—ultimately—virtuality.

Focusing on Chinese elite women who gravitated towards national affairs in the pre-war urban sites of eastern China and who migrated to Wuhan after the outbreak of the War of Resistance (1937–1945), this article analyses the emergence, development, and integration of their sociopolitical networks for the purpose of promoting women's participation in national salvation, against a backdrop of the deepening national crisis in the 1930s. I argue that two years before the Second Kuomintang-Chinese Communist Party (KMT-CCP) United Front was officially formed, these elite women, hailing from diverse social and political backgrounds and different professions, had already established their own leadership during the national salvation movement and called for a women's united front. Therefore, rather than being simply political rhetoric enhanced under the auspices of the KMT-CCP alliance, the women's united front served as an important institution with which Chinese elite women identified and through which they empowered themselves at a local and then national level, across and beyond geopolitical boundaries. I conclude that the birth and evolution of this women's united front, which have been neglected in the historiography of China's War of Resistance, are crucial to an understanding of unsettling negotiations, communication, and cooperation between the various forces signed up to the cause of national salvation in the 1930s, and to the interpretation of popular resistance before the war.

This article explores the entwined history of early colonial urbanism and the articulation of legal subjectivity under East India Company rule in South India. More specifically, it looks at petitions from outcaste labouring groups to the Madras government in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although early colonial petitions were unequivocally products of colonial rule, which derived their distinctive form and language from colonial law, a reading of the petition archive is one of the only ways to achieve a historical understanding of the city of Madras as it was experienced by its less privileged inhabitants. This article looks at the delineation of the communal selfhood of subaltern urban communities through petition narratives, arguing that the variety and innovativeness displayed by petition writers is testament both to the acceptance of colonial legality and to the agency of native subjects in negotiating with, and appropriating the language and rationale of, the colonial legal regime.

This article studies borders and border crossers in the area that became Burma, India, and Pakistan from the colonial period through to the immediate post-independence years in the mid-twentieth century. At independence, the new states’ borders not only confused vast sections of their populations by their imprecision but deprived them of their traditional practices of traversing forests, lands, and rivers to use those resources or visit kin. Border crossers’ complaints about the loss of customary access were largely ignored by the states, which tended to view crossers as illegal interlopers or plotters sent over by neighbouring polities. The states redoubled efforts to control such movement by strictly defining citizenship and foreignness, and by militarizing the border police. In addition, the introduction of boundaries between India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar caused conflict between diverse groups within the borderlands and between those groups and the state, often on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which persist to this day and has resulted in the displacement of thousands of people across the borders. An examination of states’ actions and popular reactions shows the evolution of states’ citizenship criteria, their implementation, and challenges to them by mundane or violent ‘transgressions’ of borderlanders. In doing so, it clarifies the mechanics—and the breakdowns—of state-making.

UNESCO's founding in 1946 coincided with the resumption of hostilities between China's ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) and their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rivals for power. The new international organization's officials in Paris and its representatives on the ground in China were thus forced to navigate a fractious and fluid set of national circumstances that would result in an ambiguous outcome in 1949, with regimes on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan both claiming to represent ‘China’. Although the KMT-led Republic of China continued to claim membership in UNESCO until the 1970s, the international organization nevertheless continued to operate within the People's Republic of China (PRC) for a number of years. Exploring the relationship between the issue of Chinese representation in UNESCO and the organization's on-the-ground presence from the mid-1940s through to the early 1950s, this article argues that domestic and international factors were inescapably intertwined in shaping the trajectory of Chinese relations with international organizations during this period. While CCP officials demonstrated a mixture of ideology and pragmatism, similar to their handling of foreign entities and groups present in the PRC after its founding, engagement with UNESCO was significantly shaped by the complexity and depth of the KMT's engagement with the international organization from its inception onwards. The CCP's relations with UNESCO underscore the extent to which the emerging Cold War—and China's place within it—was ultimately characterized by complexity and contingency.

The decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.

Bombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.

What kinds of governance agendas emerge at frontiers of commercial expansion, where routine economic relations traverse differences of ethnicity and degrees of formality? In the Balim Valley in the highlands of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province, mobilities and trade intersect at adjoining peri-urban markets and minivan terminals. The ‘terminal economy’ at the edges of Wamena, the region's bustling hub, is a threshold between rural and urban life, where indigenous livelihoods are subordinated to Indonesia's expanding commercial networks. Here, a cosmopolitan population—including indigenous Papuan highlanders and newcomer merchants from distant Indonesian regions—gathers to buy and sell local horticultural produce and imported commodities, transit between modes of transportation, and engage in a variety of formal and informal economic activities. This article traces the emergence of a multifaceted commercial regulation agenda, in the wake of demands for the recognition of indigenous contributions to the regional economy. It considers recent indigenous-formulated regulation policies in the context of the region's commercial history, one that is marked by a colonial devaluation of indigenous economic life and, more recently, by uprisings, inter-ethnic tensions, and government attempts to control and contain informal vending. The article conceptualizes commercial regulation as a convergence between efforts to contain disruption and demands for the revaluation of marginalized economic practices. It argues that commercial regulation is especially salient in regions that have been relegated to an end-point position in national and global commodity distribution paths.

In April 2014, the Cellular Jail, Andaman Islands, was submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Tentative List for India. The image of the colonial jail, depicted on coins, stamps, and first day covers, symbolizes both the suffering and heroic struggle of India's freedom fighters. Considering how international, national, and local state forces have attempted to ‘freeze’ the meaning of the Cellular Jail, this article questions what has been excluded or obscured from collective memory. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between contending political wills and the symbol of the Cellular Jail through a particular focus on recent struggles between Hindu and secular nationalists over its appropriation. By considering the production of the symbol of the Cellular Jail, this article challenges the narratives at the heart of modern nation-building and demonstrates their intrinsic instability.