This article discusses the activities of three Buddhist monks: the Japanese Fujii Sōsen (1896–1971) and Kanda Eun (1901–1948), as well as the Chinese Daxing (1900–1952) in Second World War-era China and how their paths intersected. Daxing, who remained in the area occupied by Japan, has been accused of having been too accommodating towards the Japanese forces. However, while Daxing did indeed interact with pro-Japanese Buddhist organizations, his actual relationship with the occupation was a lot more ambiguous, as shown by his lacklustre involvement with Japanese-sponsored initiatives. Fujii and Kanda were deeply involved in Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchange from the late 1920s and were two of the few Japanese Buddhists who also became fluent in Chinese. While they remained highly sympathetic to the plight of the Chinese people, they also continued to work with the Japanese occupiers. Thus, the space occupied by Daxing, Fujii, and Kanda is not easily covered by either ‘resistance’ or ‘collaboration’, but falls uneasily between the two. The article uses the example of these three figures to delineate this ambiguous space and examine how Buddhists sought to navigate the treacherous terrain of occupied China.

This article examines Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) and the memory of his ‘collaboration’ with Japan during the Second World War. A Taiwanese-born writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years, his drifting identity was full of ambiguities. Although he was one of the key intellectuals behind Taiwan’s New-Old Literatures Debate and responsible for introducing many May Fourth ideas to Taiwan, he also played an important role in bringing Japanese literature and thought into Chinese discourse during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During the war, he continued to teach in Beijing and travelled to Japan to attend the Greater East Asia Writers’ conferences. Some of his works from this period call for the Chinese people to support the empire and eradicate Western culture and literature from Asia, but many of his writings also indicate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism.

This article considers the memories of Zhang, his various intellectual contributions, and his oeuvre, arguing that his collaboration must be understood and contextualized within his intellectual landscape through a research methodology that examines continuities and change across decades of his life and work.

This article uses techniques of microhistory to explore how Janbai, the third wife of Sir Tharia Topan, exerted economic, religious, and social influence in Indian Ocean networks. An Ismaili woman from a Gujarati trading family who lived in East Africa, Janbai lies outside of the social worlds that have dominated studies of Muslim modernity in South Asia, which centre on Sunni male professionals from North India. Janbai was illiterate and largely disconnected from textual debates about modernity. In fact, she was just the sort of woman that reformers castigated for their supposed attachment to religious superstitions and customary practices. In contrast, studying Janbai through an alternative frame of ‘material modernity’ reveals the complex biography of a women who neither conformed to the idealized ‘new’ woman, nor simply reproduced inherited practices. Instead, she navigated rapid social mobility, shifting geographies, and new technologies and institutions, particularly colonial law courts, in ways that echoed and departed from how women had long exercised agency. The article argues that scholars, by foregrounding textual archives and discursive analysis, have tended to reproduce the marginalization of women like Janbai. In contrast, looking to sources such as jewellery and photographs, and reading textual archives with greater attention to gendered patterns of consumption and investment, brings Janbai from the margins to the centre of our understanding of modernity. In addition to enriching our understanding of the lives of women, increased attention to materiality and visuality opens up critical new avenues for writing a more variegated history of Muslim modernity.

This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

The last 15–20 years have seen the emergence of a new trajectory of ‘Muslim feminism’ in India which has grounded Muslim women’s rights discourse both in the direct interpretation of Islamic scriptures and also in principles derived from the Indian Constitution. Examining two prominent Muslim women’s organizations—the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan—this article examines how this form of Muslim feminism has become a central repository of Islamic modernist thought in India in light of its perceived failure in some other sections of Muslim public life. Based on writings and educational materials produced by these organizations, this article discusses their methods of harnessing the teachings of the Quran, their application of ‘Islamic feminist’ methodology to interpret Islamic family laws, their identification of equivalence between Islamic and constitutional values, and their attempts to engage the state in their efforts to promote the modernization of Muslim Personal Law.

Development promises change. It is fundamental to the word both in English and in Lao: an improvement towards a pre-determined goal, but it is a process that is never entirely complete. In the Lao-speaking parts of Thailand, promises of development have formed the key commitments of particular regimes: military and monarchical, neoliberal and capitalist. Each presents a future that is nationally focused, guided by a paternalistic hand, be it that of a general, monarch, or tycoon. Spirits, too, play into such regimes, ensuring that development projects will fulfil their promises and that more such projects will come.

But what happens when these goals shift towards distant centres of power? Here, I examine the magico-religious aspect of these promises. As large-scale hydropower on the Mekong, part of Chinese infrastructure projects, throws the river into chaos, new regimes of development arise. In the realm of popular religion, the link between spirits and development, too, has altered, with old powers’ promises growing stale, and new ones yet to appear.

And between these two conflicting orders of power—orders that collapse state and religious dimensions—emerge different pathways towards navigating the uncertain world: an appeal towards other sources of monarchical authority, a search for survival in a newly shifting and globalized realm, and a waiting for a future as yet unrevealed.

The Japanese empire’s occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and ‘bottom-up’ wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as ‘bogus students’ who supposedly received Japanese ‘enslavement education’ from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history.

The first printing press landed on the western coast of India in the mid-sixteenth century. The introduction of printing technology did not immediately lead to a flourishing print culture, and the oral and scribal traditions continued to thrive for at least three more centuries. This article examines the emergence of print culture in nineteenth-century western India by surveying the literary sources in the Marathi language. It argues that the book was regarded as a sacred object in the pre-print era and reading was considered a ritualistic activity. Print, on the other hand, was seen as defiling and therefore orthodox Brahmins hesitated to embrace the technology of printing. They were also threatened by the democratizing potential of printing. As the print culture bourgeoned, the sacredness of the book declined and it turned into a profane commodity. A market for vernacular books and periodicals started emerging gradually. However, pre-modern notions of literary patronage did not wither away as authors and publishers continued to bank on state patronage.

This article discusses the activities of the Sino-Japanese Society of the Study of Esoteric Buddhism, which was active in North China from the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War. The organization was founded by Yoshii Hōjun, a young priest of the Japanese Shingon sect. It attracted the support of a wide range of actors, including a range of former Beiyang government politicians, Japanese diplomats, as well as prominent members of the Japanese community in North China. It had contacts in the Japanese military that have garnered the Society the reputation of having been a front for Japanese intelligence operations. This article critically investigates these claims and seeks to understand the relationship between religion and politics manifested in the Study Society for Esoteric Buddhism. Its history reflects the fraught relations between the two nations as well as between the various interest groups on both sides and thus provides a window into the complexities of pre-war North China in the 1930s.

Since 1930s scholarship, the historiography of Kitan Liao has increasingly interpreted ethnicity as a factor in polity and policy, an interpretation that has depended upon retrospective constructions of Liao and Jin by, largely, the Qing imperial court of the eighteenth century. Archaeological evidence now demonstrates that the documentation itself was fragmentary and in all likelihood unrepresentative of the identity concepts that prevailed at various class strata of the Kitan Liao empire. On the ground, prominent aristocrats, including many from the lineage of Han Derang (or the Han of Jizhou), are shown to be derived from the status and wealth of each man in his own time. Identities drawn from ancestry, language, place of origin, or folk customs were characteristic of dependent populations, not of aristocrats. Stratified identities, by horizontal rank and not partitioned vertically by imputed ethnicity, appear to be evident in many histories of northeast Asian regimes from Northern Wei to the very early Qing. They were characterized by a continuous cultural tradition with complex elements, consistent among them reading and writing multiple languages and literatures, horse training and hunting pastimes, and shamanic religious and political practices. Because these elements are associated in modern discourse with distinct language and cultural traditions, this aristocratic culture tends to be seen as variegated and ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than as coherent and continuous.

This article explores the practice of the sport of tiger hunting among the Wodeyars, the maharajas of Mysore, through an examination of art, archival records, state gazetteers, and a tour diary of Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV. It argues that the Wodeyars only adopted the sport as an expression of kingship in the late nineteenth century, under British influence. This, I posit, was part of their larger attempt to align their kingship to more popular Indian modes, specifically the Rajputs. By reading accounts of the sport in Krishnaraja Wodeyar’s tour diary, along with examining the Wodeyars’ attempts at forging kinship relations with the Rajputs, the article demonstrates how the sport became crucial to the Wodeyars’ assertion of a Rajput identity and to attempts to obtain a higher position in the princely hierarchy of the colonial period. The recognition that the success of tiger hunts was significant to Rajput kingship and identity, along with rising concern over the diminishing tiger population, led the Wodeyars to enclose forests, establish private hunting preserves and a shikar department, and classify tiger as game in an attempt to improve the sport and make it exclusive.

How do ‘communist’ Chinese state companies handle sacredness and religions? What role do religions and sacredness play in infrastructural conflicts? Debates on Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) often highlight the failure of China’s largest-ever hydropower project overseas—the Myitsone Dam, located in war-torn Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in an ethnic Kachin Christian area. Public outcry against this mega-development led the Burmese regime to halt construction in 2011, shocking Beijing and causing an international scandal. This article explores this infrastructural conflict’s religious, sacred, and more-than-human dimensions. Based on interviews, Chinese media analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork among Kachin people since 2010, the article focuses on the project site—the famous Myitsone confluence, birthplace of the Irrawaddy River. There, local village church leaders helped lead and shelter the very earliest anti-dam resistance, despite military state repression. There also, Chinese state-owned companies encountered Catholicism, Baptism, Theravada Buddhism, and indigenous animist worlds, and described these foreign, rural religious worlds for China’s domestic audiences. Kachin dragon-kin deities, anti-dam activists, and the more-than-human charms of the local natural landscape helped create a sacredness, which the Chinese dam developers could not easily disprove. Throughout, sacred politics shaped this international infrastructure conflict.

This article examines a transnational network of advocates for Kampō (traditional) medicine in Japan, occupied China, and Manchukuo during the Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945), shedding new light on collaborationism, Asianism, and the modernization of traditional medicine in East Asia. In the 1930s, despite deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations, the Kampō revival movement in Japan joined forces with the struggle to preserve traditional medicine in China. In 1938, the Association of East Asian Medicine was founded in Japan, gathering together Chinese, Korean, and Japanese advocates under the banner of ‘East Asian medicine’. This article delineates the evolution of what I call ‘medical Asianism’ and how it was institutionalized in different parts of the Japanese empire. Participants in this network differed in their priorities and ideological commitments, yet they tactfully utilized the Japanese imperial infrastructure and wartime circumstances to promote traditional medicine. Their work laid important intellectual and institutional foundations for the postwar development of traditional medicine across East Asia. This study also contributes to a more nuanced understandings of collaborationism. The type of collaboration examined in this article was preceded by a long history of intellectual exchange, based on a shared body of knowledge and morals, motivated by mutual empathy, and for a cause that was much valued in postwar Asia. As a result, unlike most Chinese collaborators who were prosecuted as ‘traitors’, protagonists in this study continued to prosper professionally and became valuable assets in the postwar rebuilding of Sino-Japanese relations.

This article examines the activities of the Japanese Buddhist priest Ueda Tenzui (1899–1974) in wartime Thailand and Burma. Ueda initially went to Southeast Asia to pursue his studies of Buddhist precepts. During the war, he joined a pacification team of the Japanese military in occupied Burma and, as part of this role, became the headteacher of a Japanese language school. He was later ordained and served for some time as a monk in the Burmese Theravada tradition. Since the 1970s, research on Japanese Buddhist involvement in Japan’s wars has focused on criticizing those who cooperated with the war effort and praising those who resisted. In this regard, Ueda is unquestionably a ‘collaborator’. Yet, his case demonstrates the importance of the concept of the ‘grey zone’ between the two extremes of collaboration and resistance. While we have to acknowledge that Ueda acted in support of the war effort at the request of the military, he was also a scholar and a practitioner who deepened his understanding of Theravada Buddhism through personal experience. Ueda criticized the war after Japan’s defeat and also came to actively appreciate Burmese Buddhism’s strict adherence to the precepts. At the same time, he never showed a critical attitude towards Japanese Buddhism. Ueda’s thinking is characterized by his ability to find commonalities between Burmese and Japanese Buddhism without ranking them according to some hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, while also recognizing the differences that exist between these two branches of Buddhism.

The Bolsheviks’ world revolution encountered setbacks in the 1920s. Among the bloodiest of these was the massacre of 1927 when the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) entire central leadership was killed in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (GMD) coup. Existing explanations highlight Moscow’s miscalculation, infighting within the Kremlin, Soviet advisers’ information dilemma, and the CCP leaders’ political inexperience. This article compares the opening stages of the Bolshevik (or Russian) and Chinese Communist Party revolutions to explain why the 1927 setback became a catastrophe. It argues that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 caused fundamental changes, which thwarted any attempt to replicate the 1917 victory in the post-1917 world. The CCP in 1927 faced three disadvantages that the Bolshevik Revolution had engendered: a misleading myth about the October Revolution, a Bolshevized system of repression created by Soviet advisers to the GMD, and the ‘red scare’ in Japan and British Southeast Asia, which blocked members of the CCP from escaping overseas. This article draws on leaders’ biographical materials to compare the two parties’ learning from foreign revolutions, records in suffering repression, and experiences as overseas refugees. The comparison shows that the Bolsheviks did not face these three disadvantages before 1917.

Throughout Shanghai’s treaty-port era, divergent understandings of the extraterritorial regime and the conflicts between the foreign community’s ‘natural and lawful’ pursuit of additional space and the Chinese rights recovery movement prevented clear demarcations between the city’s foreign settlements and the Chinese sphere. Instead, these controversies produced an expansive boundary zone in the form of extra-settlement roads (ESR), a contested and negotiated space where the projection of foreign power, the exercise of extraterritorial privileges, and the fabric of local Chinese lives were all conditioned by an array of quotidian elements such as public utilities, police protection, tax duties, and urban spatial characteristics. By the 1930s, developments in local, national, and imperial politics—such as the advent of the Guomindang regime, British accommodation of Chinese nationalism, and the dwindling authority of the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC)—prompted discussions of formal joint Sino-foreign administration of ESR areas. However, this reconfiguration met with vehement resistance from the local Japanese community, which distrusted the British-controlled SMC yet relied on the treaty port’s existing administrative framework as a shield against Chinese threats. The ascendance of mass politics in the 1930s, via Chinese public outcries against imperial encroachment and Japanese settlers’ defence of their treaty rights, challenged the traditional paradigm of boundary-making and made ESR negotiations devolve into secret diplomacy that eventually reached a dead end. Examining ESR dynamics sheds new light on the intricate interplay of national sovereignty, colonial settlement, and imperial domination, while offering a fresh perspective on the shifting power landscapes in treaty-port Shanghai.

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

This article considers the ways in which the material infrastructures of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect with other infrastructural formations, and how the resulting overlaps can trigger processes of what I call ‘infrastructural splintering’. These processes cause infrastructure to be experienced in differentiating ways, creating divisive politics where once there might have been unity. Embracing these politics as an analytical starting point undermines the techno-material stability of the BRI and reveals its more-than-material affects. I illustrate these ideas by developing a case study of the impacts of the China-backed Colombo Port City project on Catholic fishing communities that are dependent upon the aquatic commons for survival. The construction of the Port City has brought about significant aquatic pollution and ecosystem destruction, and public erasure by Colombo’s political elites. Complicating matters is the dominance of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, which has become divided by a universalist politico-ecological consciousness imposed by the Vatican, a corruptible local hierarchy, and environmental activists who engage communities via the Church’s sacred infrastructures. By working through these processes of infrastructural splintering, I consider how the BRI has caused Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces to face increasingly fractious futures.

Dominant historiography in Singapore celebrates Sinnathamby Rajaratnam as one of the city-state’s founding national fathers, and the intellectual superintendent of state-sponsored multiculturalism in what has been characterized as an ‘illiberal democracy’. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extensive periods of Rajaratnam’s life in which he was not in governance with the People’s Action Party, and thus had considerable intellectual autonomy. This article examines the first of these periods—his sojourn in London from 1935 to 1947—marked by connections with overlapping communities of anti-colonial intellectuals drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and East and South Asia. Close reading of Rajaratnam’s London lifeworld, his published fiction and journalism, and the many annotations he made in the books he read reveals a very different intellectual history than the one that we think we know, and allows us to better understand his lifelong uneasiness with capitalism and racial governmentality. Re-reading Rajaratnam as an autonomous intellectual disembeds his early intellectual life from the story of the developmental state, enabling a focus on the role of affect and form in his writing. The process also offers new insights into Singapore today, where the legacies of state-sponsored multiculturalism are increasingly challenged, and where citizens, residents, and migrants seek new forms of solidarity in and across difference.