Psychiatry education at both undergraduate and postgraduate level plays a critical role in shaping the future of psychiatry services. South Asia varies in the training offered and this article captures this aspect.

Current scholarship conceives of courts as victims or targets of populist authoritarians. But can empowered courts facilitate democratic backsliding? This article develops a new framework for understanding the approaches judiciaries take when tackling political corruption and argues that when judges attempt to replace ‘corrupted’ elected branches as the primary representative institution, their actions and rhetoric can enable populist authoritarians to seize power, raising the risk of democratic backsliding. I combine jurisprudence, newspaper archives and interviews to trace the process through which Pakistan’s Supreme Court, committed to playing a representation-replacement role, enabled the military-backed populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf to come to power in 2018, and use its powers to reverse Pakistan’s democratic transition. I also probe the political impact of anti-corruption jurisprudence in more established democracies. In doing so, I introduce a typology for understanding approaches courts take when combating corruption, and highlight the threat to democracy that can emerge from judiciaries.

Historians of empire have long been interested in how interpersonal relationships between coloniser and colonised did or did not conform to imperial ideologies. Yet, the relationships that developed between European and Indian officers in the East India Company’s armies remain underexplored. This is an important omission, because the armies employed thousands of people and represented a significant point of cross-cultural contact, while also being governed by a distinct set of rules and conventions. This article uses the variety of materials generated by a controversy in the Fifth Light Cavalry, Madras Army to understand the nature and limits of what contemporaries called friendships. Both interested parties and neutral onlookers testified to the existence of friendships and factions that bridged race and rank. Indian officers sought the goodwill of their superiors to ensure their professional security, while British officers looked to Indian allies for information and legitimacy. Although existing scholarship has often assumed that British and Indian officers led largely separate lives, the scandal in the Fifth Light Cavalry demonstrates instead that British and Indian officers could, and did, form parties defined by shared objectives. When disputes broke out between rival British officers, however, Indian allies risked becoming collateral damage, while British officers who sided with Indian friends were punished for violating social codes. Through this controversy, we see how and why hierarchies of race and rank were contested, as well as the mechanisms whereby they were ultimately preserved intact.

Is a marriage rendered invalid in the absence of a marriage certificate? How does the absence of state recognition influence the legitimacy of a marriage across different legal and cultural systems? In Bangladesh, customary marriages—where a marriage might not be formally registered with the state—are common. This article explores how shalish (community-based courts) accept alternate evidence to prove a marriage, noting the ways in which this approach can benefit women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural courts in Bangladesh, archival research studying court records, and interviews with diverse interlocutors, my findings indicate that Muslim women who do not have a kabinnamma (marriage certificate) prefer to go to shalish to mediate disputes because this site is embedded within the community and attuned to the cultural context of marriage. I provide a comparative analysis on the admissible evidence used to prove a marriage in state courts and in shalish, examining the legal reasoning within each system. Shalish operates with a flexible legal reasoning, which in theory has the capacity to recognize social hierarchies, balancing power and implementing justice in more equitable ways. Noting the kinds of cases where marginalized women benefit from the decisions in shalish compared to decisions from state courts reveals the gaps in state law, challenging the claims of universality and superiority over other forms of law as well as a need to rethink evidentiary protocols from the ground up. This article highlights alternate epistemic frameworks of justice that recognize and center rural women’s positionalities, desires, and standpoints, thereby decentering thinking about law and evidentiary processes rooted in Eurocentric, patriarchal, and urban frameworks.

This article enquires into pseudonymous Persian texts in South Asia as devices to domesticate non-Muslim technical knowledge and to legitimate the status of a Muslim professional group that emerged from interaction with the Indian natural and social environment. In the Risāla-yi kursī-nāma-yi mahāwat-garī—an illustrated text on the elephant and the elephant keeper, claimed to be authored by one of Noah’s grandsons—the aforementioned profession (acquired from Indian society) is Islamised by making it congruent with the Muslim view of scientific and technical professions as practices dating back to the prophets of Islam. The Kursī-nāma is examined from the perspective of the function of the pseudonymous text and of how its social context shaped the expected function. What does this form of writing tell us, whether deliberately or not, about its hidden authors and their environment? The fictional narrative of the Kursī-nāma is a stratagem that grants new canonicity to a critical subject. From being cursed in the Qur’an, mahout became a respectable occupation in Mughal India due to its close association with royal power. In the Kursī-nāma, the creation of a sacred genealogical tree (kursī-nāma) of the profession and an Islamic ritual associated with it were meant to control and claim authority within both the groups of mahouts and their social environment. From this point of view, the Kursī-nāma constitutes a unique source for investigating the ascension of a professional group and its search for social legitimation.

With the Cold War’s epicenter shifting from Europe to the Third World, the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy concerns of containing the Soviet bloc were tied to questions of socioeconomic development. Besides “trade and aid,” the appeal of this shift rested on the apparent complementarity between ideas of rural modernization and the practices of agrarian democracy. “Community development” referred to a series of projects initiated by the Ford Foundation and postcolonial governments toward this cultural-political end. This article examines the contested meanings, practices, and outcomes of such a project in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Drawing on the project’s archives and published sources, it addresses how and why a disjuncture between the political-societal aspirations of decolonization and the hardening Manicheanism of Cold War competition came to characterize the contested trajectory of this project. As its proponents and detractors negotiated competing expectations, inter-regional tensions, and geostrategic interests, this disjuncture gave way to a developmental ideology envisioned around the technocratic nodes of population control and food production. Consequently, the supposed complementarity between “agrarian democracy” and modernization was relegated to the margins of developmental thinking, even as growing rural unrest and Cold War realpolitik propelled its need for legitimizing new claims on political power. The prism of community development enables a novel analysis of the conjunctural dynamics of mid-twentieth-century decolonization and the contingencies of Cold War politics of agrarian modernization.

This article investigates marriage as a site for the historical study of time. Focusing on Hindu marriage in South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the article studies (a) how the moment of a marriage is made and documented through what the article calls ‘temporal practices’, and (b) how, once this moment is made and documented, it is put to use in and for a marriage ceremony. The article has three sections. In the first section, it discusses the device used to measure the time of the marriage ceremony: the water clock. This section also addresses how the water clock was used, and who used it, within the marriage ceremony; and registers a shift in the nineteenth century from the water clock to the mechanical clock. In the second section, the article discusses documentary practices that record the moment of a marriage and addresses historical changes related to these practices in the nineteenth century. In the third section, the article examines the work that the moment of a marriage does once it has been brought into being and documented. This section argues that the moment of a marriage frames and makes efficacious a certain action through which the bride and groom are transformed. The article concludes by arguing that the moment of a marriage temporally regulates the activities of the marriage ceremony and explores how this moment reconfigures relations to the past and future for the bride and groom.

The emergence of early cities required new agricultural practices and archaeobotanical crop-processing models have been used to investigate the social and economic organisation of urban ‘consumer’ and non-urban ‘producer’ sites. Archaeobotanical work on the Indus Valley has previously identified various interpretations of labour and subsistence practices. Here, the authors analyse a large archaeobotanical assemblage from Harappa, Pakistan (3700–1300 BC), questioning some of the assumptions of traditional crop-processing models. The ubiquity of small weed seeds, typically removed during the early stages of crop processing, is argued to result from dung burning. This additional taphonomic consideration adds nuance to the understanding of Harappa's labour organisation and food supply with implications for crop-processing models in other contexts.

This article examines the corruption scandal that exploded in 1889 with the apprehension of Arthur Crawford and the dismissal of several Mamlatdars in colonial western India. Using Ian Hacking's concept of “making up people” and the “looping effect,” this article demonstrates the instability of categories such as corruption and suggests that the everyday life of empire was undergirded by the colonial construction of deviancy to normalize the exceptionality of foreign rule. Additionally, the Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption scandal undercut the imperial ideology of the modernizing state. The corruption network revealed the simultaneity of imperial bureaucratic rationality along with the traditional patronage structures based on indigenous sexual and filial (caste) ties. It was precisely the British investigation that also revealed the reality of the homosocial empire and its privileging of caste recruitments. The Indian challenge to the case brought together rural and urban groups signalling the ascendance of a nationalistic solidarity. The Indians queried the imperial claims of moral superiority. At the same time, they acknowledged “native vulnerabilities” towards corruption, confirming the British stereotype of Indians as inherently corrupt. These selective claims, indicative of the emergence of upper caste, urban, and bourgeois notion of public virtue, signified the iterative nature of the “looping effect.”

What is a populist judge, and when do judges embrace populism? Populist judges bypass legal and procedural constraints, seek an unmediated relationship with the public, and claim to represent the public better than political elites. Judicial populism can emerge in response to institutionalized dissonance in the political system. Dissonant institutionalization facilitates contestation between state institutions and can undermine the legitimacy of political institutions. This legitimacy crisis can imbue judges with a belief in their role as representatives of the public interest. In Pakistan, the dissonance caused by unresolved differences between the civil-military bureaucracy and the elected political leadership—differences that were embedded into the constitutional framework, facilitated the rise of judicial populism. I outline the key features of judicial populism and study the dynamics surrounding the rapid expansion of populist jurisprudence between 2005 and 2019 in Pakistan, with a focus on public interest litigation that became the cornerstone of the judiciary’s populist turn. Through case analysis, archival research, and semi-structured interviews, I discuss features of the populist approach to jurisprudence and trace how dissonance within Pakistan’s political system created new opportunities for the judiciary and changed judicial role conceptions within the legal and judicial community.

Labor in the textile and garment industry is at the heart of a series of recent books on South Asia. Together these books document the different scales at which textile and garment work has been structured and restructured over the last century, and its implications for workers, their health as well as collective solidarity. Across the countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the industry developed and declined in vastly different temporalities and rhythms. Yet, as these works reveal, workers have often been confronted with similar challenges brought on by the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial development. In each case, textile and garment workers have been forced to navigate transitions to premature deindustrialization, closure, or national/transnational industrial policy changes. The books center workers and their long “post”-industrial or industrial “afterlives,” as they cope with the dramatic changes in the global manufacturing of textile and garment.

Scholars commenting on the reception of the historian and theorist ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) in modern South Asia have held that it was orientalists and Westernised intellectuals rather than indigenous intellectuals who popularised him in the region. Contesting these impressions, I argue that local intellectuals displayed their agency in using the historian's work to respond to various crises of colonial modernity. They read, translated, and appropriated Ibn Khaldūn to seek inspiration for modern Muslim nationalism, as validation for sectarian convictions and the rhetoric of Islamic reform, and to resist colonial and Hindu revivalist narratives of despotic Muslim rule in India.