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This paper explores the framework of 'city drafting' used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus on city drafting, demonstrate the continuity of what Raman [2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] calls 'document raj,' or a colonial bureaucratic system that grounds the logic of property in documentary possession and that administers property through specific dispositions to writing. How property is known and hence possessed rests on a certain grammatology of the state, which can be understood through three ethnographic objects: scripts, or the historically specific orthographic and inscriptive rules for how property is written; scribes, or the bureaucrats and associated technical experts whose graphical and grammatalogical knowledges shape how property is made and unmade; and scribbles, or the notations, jottings, and markings that indexically draw land and documents into different relations. This Special Feature's ethnographic focus on these three objects reveals the embeddedness of contemporary property and city making mechanisms in colonial documentary practices, thereby showing the epistemological limits of private property both in global metropolitan theory and as fungible economic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper envisages how the concept of 'Inequality' has been perceived by the Trade Unionists in late colonial Bengal. Informed by the ideology of Communism, these activists penned down a myriad of insightful analytical tracts, primarily in vernaculars, ranging from propaganda pamphlets to articles in the party organs. Their critique of Imperialism, and how it precipitates economic and socio-political inequalities was grafted in the ethos of class struggle. Through delineating their stark ideological differences with Gandhian mass politics, and by focusing on their intellectual endeavours concerning various structural inequalities of class, religion, caste, and gender it aims at charting out the indigenous response to the global doctrine of Communism. Often overlooked as conventional intellectuals, their literature brings to fore an alternative discourse on anti-colonialism in South Asia, overwhelmed by the theme of Nationalism. This paper is a methodological probe in doing intellectual history from below, adding to the edifice of the existing scholarship on Decolonisation, Communism, and Inequality in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British East India Company officials, based in the Indian subcontinent, amassed huge collections of natural history images. One of the largest collections, consisting of many thousands of individual paintings commissioned mainly from Indian artists between 1790 and 1823, was formed by Major-General Thomas Hardwicke. Some of these later formed the basis of John Edward Gray's Illustrations of Indian zoology, but the vast majority remained unpublished. This paper focuses on one of these images, a detailed watercolour of the red panda (Ailurus fulgens), painted to accompany a scientific description of the species which Hardwicke sent from Bengal to the Linnean Society of London in 1820. The painting pre-dates Frédéric Cuvier's description of the animal by four years, and is almost certainly the first image of the red panda to have arrived in Europe. This paper sets the painting in the context of Hardwicke's career as a naturalist and private patron of Indian artists, highlighting both his role as an early investigator of Indian zoology and the importance of "Company Art" in the accrual of scientific information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the Republic of India became an independent nation in 1947, the Indian state has strived to keep its territorial integrity, in spite of the numerous territorial claims made by neighboring states. Firstly, the Kashmir region is home to both Muslim and Hindu populations; therefore, when the Indian and Pakistani states were created, the region was split between the two new states. However, both states hold the belief that the entirety of the Kashmir region should be part of their territory,. This situation sparked numerous local conflicts and four local wars (1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999). Secondly, another disputed area is located on the border with the People's Republic of China, as the Chinese state does not recognize the McMahon Line, which was agreed upon by British India and Tibet. This led to the conflict in 1962 and to a tension-filled relationship between China and India. This paper approaches both the historical evolution of the conflicts and the way in which these two conflict areas are portrayed in literature. While Veera Hiranandani, in The Night Dia77 (2018), and Khushwant Singh, in Train to Pakistan (1956), focus on the conflicts between Muslims and Hindus after the partition of India and Pakistan, Salman Rushdie, in Midnight's Children (1981), analyzes the traumas of the conflict in Kashmir. Furthermore, Jon Cleary, in Pulse of Danger (1966), presents the context of the Sino-Indian war. The most disturbing novel about the Indian conflicts is Humphrey Hawksley's novel, Dragon Fire (2000), because the author presents an apocalyptic war between the Republic of India, on one side, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan allied with the People's Republic of China, on die other side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I consider religion in international political scholarship and suggest a study of its epistemological politics and conceptual history. I argue that scholarship which strives to 'engage' or 'recognize' religion in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, I ask if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of recognition scholarship. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jens Bartelson I argue that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. In order to assess the costs of recognition I propose a study of its conditions of possibility, that is, a study of the ways in which the subjects of recognition become recognizable as such. In the final section of the paper, I apply this to the example of religion in global politics and the formation of the Muslim subject in the lead-up to the partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of disaster politics debate how far natural hazards cause or catalyse political change. This paper builds on recent scholarship on tipping points and social contracts to argue that two case studies of historical earthquakes in 1930s British‐colonised India invite a focus on the dynamics of cooperation and conflict between state and non‐state actors. Officials of the colonial state and its nationalist rivals cooperated after one earthquake even though they otherwise bitterly opposed each other. Cooperation broke down after the second event, just one year later. Yet, in both cases, officials and nationalist leaders shared a broad vision for Indian society, which pushed both sides actively to seek to recover the social and economic status quo ante, preventing potential tipping points from crystallising. These case studies reveal how and why highly fraught social contracts can survive major disasters. The colonial state's transient and reactive approach to disaster governance continued to impact on post‐independence India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on an Urdu-language manual on lithography, published in 1924 by the Nizami Press in Budaun (United Provinces), to explore how a Muslim printer-publisher in a North Indian qaṣbah tried to reform educational methods in his trade. It introduces the Nizami Press (est. 1905) and compares the manual with similar European and Indian instructional handbooks. How did Indian printers and publishers learn their craft? What were the tools and materials used for lithographic printing in colonial India? And given the popularity of lithography, why were such manuals rarely published in Indian languages? By examining the material and technical aspects of the lithographic printing process explained in the Urdu manual, this article engages with larger scholarly debates revolving around knowledge production, pedagogy, and technological developments in South Asia. Furthermore, it analyzes the manual's language to demonstrate how printers and publishers were engaged in discourses about nationalism, modernization, and social reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

irscholarship in India has focused on the borders, territory and sovereignty of the Indian state, overlooking the rich complexity of interior border formation between colonial and independent India. The paper argues that the study of the princely states under the British paramountcy (1858–1947), neglected so far, is valuable toirscholarship on three grounds. First, in mapping colonial India’s engagement with the outside world, the focus has been solely on British India. The princes were equally participative and perceptive of the outside world. Second, the princely states represent yet another challenge to the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, demonstrating the limited capacity of European categories to understand the ‘non-West’. Third, incorporating the paramountcy system in the genealogy of sovereignty of the Indian subcontinent offers a fresh account of border construction inside the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the formation and collapse of the first global food regime of capital, focusing on the impact of tropical colonies like India. It also explores the role of anti-imperialist movements in this transition. While the literature on food regimes has shed light on the evolution of a worldwide food system, it has overlooked the contribution of South Asia to the first food regime or its struggles against colonialism. This study analyses the Ghadar Party in Punjab, British India, in the context of changes in the global wheat market. By incorporating a Gramscian conjunctural analysis, this article offers a refined understanding of transitional moments. It investigates why Punjab shifted from being a significant wheat exporter to Britain in the 1870s to primarily producing for the Indian domestic market by the 1920s. The article concludes that the colonial state implemented targeted policies to mitigate resistance from anti-imperialist movements, such as the Ghadar Party. These policies aimed to delink domestic wheat production from the global market due to subsistence crises related to the global food system. Lastly, the article outlines a method to analyse the link between place-based struggles and structural crises in a global food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North-West Frontier region of British India was of great importance in the history of the Indian subcontinent. The NWF region, which was part of British India till 1947 and, from then onward, part of Pakistan, was renamed Khyber Pukhtunkhwa in 2010. Situated at the crossroads of South Asia, Central Asia, and China, the region was of great geographical significance. This study explores the colonial policies implemented in this region shortly before it underwent administrative reform. Focusing on the Mohmand tribal tract, historically governed by various powers including the Ghaznvids, Ghauris, Mughals, Sikhs, and British, the study examines British policies that sparked dissent among the local population. The resultant armed resistance spread to neighbouring regions such as Swat, Malakand, Waziristan, and Khyber. Specifically, this paper explores the Mohmand Uprising of 1897-98, a significant event in NWF history. Central to this uprising was Akhunzada Najm-ud-din, also known as Haddah Mula, who mobilised the Mohmand populace and led attacks on Shankargarh village and Shabqadar fort. Subsequently, the British launched punitive expeditions against Mohmand clans and residents in response to these assaults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the history of madrassahs (Islamic seminaries) in South Asia from their inception in the 12th century until the end of colonial rule in 1947. The paper argues that many of the pre-colonial rulers of South Asia, including the Mughals (1526—1857), played key roles in promoting education and providing patronage of various educational institutions, including madrassahs. The policies of British colonial rule (1757—1947), however, made the most indelible marks on madrassah education, not only directly, wherein their policies have impacted on the structure, functions and curriculum of madrassahs, but also indirectly, through the prompting of responses from the ulama and the Muslim community that determined the contours and the content of madrassah education. The paper examines the roles of various strands of madrassah education, and the interplay of politics and curriculum of various major madrassahs. The paper demonstrates that madrassah as a concept and as an institution has come a long way, that its contents and contours have undergone changes, and that as an institution it has largely remained embedded within the society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically inquires into the foreign policy of Pakistan during the period (1947-51). British divided India into two sovereign states in August, 1947. Mainly, Indian National Congress spearheaded the independence movement in the Indian subcontinent on the basis of Indian [Hindu] nationalism. The Indian Muslims contested the Congress claim of One Nation Theory. The Muslims presented their own brand of counter Muslim nationalism called the TwoNations Theory. The basic assumption of Two Nations Theory was that India politically, unlike European nation states, was a heterogeneous society. There were two major nations in the subcontinent--Hindus and Muslims. Resultantly, both Hindus and Muslims had a birthright to selfdetermination and separate states. For about fifty years, the Congress seriously contested, both theoretically as well as politically, the genuineness of the validity of Two Nations Theory. The Congress never accepted the theory. It called the Muslim demand of a separate state "a vivisection" of India and would never agree to it. Fortunately, the British did not accept the Congress argument. The Congress did her best to prevent the creation of Pakistan, however, thanks to British fairness, the Indian subcontinent was divided. Then out of utter frustration and revenge, the Congress resorted to 'Policy of Strangulation' to undo Pakistan. The researcher has come up with a non-traditional concept that Pakistan in the early phase suffered from an economic existential threat rather than military. Understandably, the foreign policymakers of Pakistan overplayed the presumed military threat to its existence. However, for the better and realist foreign policy, Pakistan survived the immediate existential economic threat in the early phase. Pakistan confronted the deadly economic context during her infant years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asia, which is composed of eight countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, is an important global biodiversity hotspot. As a part of the Mapping Asia Plants (MAP) project, we reviewed the history of botanical investigations, floristic works, and publications in this region, as well as the key floras, checklists, and online databases in South Asia. The botanical survey of this region, which began during the 17th century, has two distinct phases: surveys conducted during the British India period and those conducted in the post-British period. The seven volumes of The Flora of British India are the most important contributions to flora research in South Asia because of their wider geographical coverage, which was performed by British botanists. Following on from this, different countries have launched independent floristic surveys. At the country level, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have completed, or partially completed, their flora surveys at the country level, while Maldives has not yet published its national flora survey. According to currently available information, the approximated numbers of plant taxa for each country in South Asia are as follows: Afghanistan, 5261 (vascular plants); Bangladesh, 3470 (vascular plants); Bhutan, 5985 (flowering plants); India, 21,558 (flowering plants); Maldives, 270 (common plants); Nepal, 6500 (flowering plants); Pakistan, 6000+ (vascular plants); and Sri Lanka, 4143 (flowering plants). Additionally, there are 151 books devoted to the key floras and checklists in South Asia. A total of 1.1 million digital records of specimens from this region can be found on the website of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). However, there are still major gaps and limitations—such as out-of-date publications, national floras that are mainly detailed only in local languages, massive non-digitized specimens, and the lack of a comprehensive online database or platform—which should be addressed in terms of their global applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a 'minor' state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of ḍakait ('bandits') within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between ḍakait and the state at the 'everyday' level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as 'criminal tribes'. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and 'tribe' in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state–society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilises the notion of global food regime to explore ways in which modern International Relations are reproduced through distinctive patterns of alimentary domination and subversion. It considers three ideal-typical international encounters – the Spanish conquest of the Americas, British rule in South Asia and the US occupation of Japan – to offer a stylised historical-sociological comparison of how food becomes a powerful site of interaction between conflicting dynamics of social differentiation and incorporation, segregation and admixture, and domination and subversion. The Spanish, British and Americans deployed different strategies of alimentary domination in these contexts, which can in large measure be explained with reference to their prevailing mode of production. But they also unleashed equally potent forces of culinary adaptation, transculturation and innovation which, in bringing together a multiplicity of foodways, subverted both the rigid structures of imperial rule and notions of a pristine pre-colonial or national cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The making of regional and national imaginaries in colonial South Asia and indigenous elites' role in this process are well documented. Less clearly understood are the cultural and social elements that were subordinated to the regional formations that prevailed. By focusing on the travel writings of Jhaverchand Meghani (1896–1947), a prominent intellectual and litterateur from western India, this article illustrates the internal configurations and contestations that underpinned the imaginings of regions in South Asia. Notably, Meghani saw the cultural preservation of Saurashtra as his life's mission. This article is the first to engage in a close reading of his travelogues, situating them in the wider context of emergent ideas of Gujarat in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that by showcasing Saurashtra's particular folk and oral traditions, Meghani distinguished himself from the other regionalists and thus also sought to prevent Saurashtra's complete subsumption within the modern state of Gujarat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, the vernacular science periodical emerged as a key medium for building science-literate publics in colonial South Asia. This article argues that the Hindi science monthly Vigyan became a discursive laboratory for experiments with language, literary genres, narrative plots, and settings to create culturally grounded science lessons for Hindi readers in the mid-1910s. I focus on the writings of Prem Vallabh Joshi, a pandit, science graduate, and small town teacher, who experimented with distinct literary genres to create a sensibility for science – an experimental temper – amongst Vigyan 's readers. Through his strategic use of scientific experiments in the "history of" a particular branch of knowledge, detective mysteries, and the genre of the fictionalized dialogue, Joshi inducted colonial readers into experimental culture and global scientific modernity. As a reflexive participant in the ongoing confrontation between "Western" science and Hindu śāstra in colonial society, Joshi staged a fictional encounter between the experimental demonstration of the iconic air-pump and the textual authority of śāstra. This article examines the encounter between sastric commitments and scientific sensibilities and their conjoined mobilization in Vigyan in the era of linguistic nationalism. In this colonial vernacular publishing culture, the serial possibilities of the periodical and the history of science itself became critical resources in the ontological confrontations between experimental science and traditional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the little-known but exceptionally well-documented German Schlagintweit brothers' expedition to India and Central Asia in 1854–58, under the auspices of the British East India Company and the king of Prussia. The brothers' careers present an instructive study of the opportunities and conflicts inherent within transnational science and the imperial labour market in colonial India in the course of the nineteenth century. Until now, historians have largely emphasized the ways in which European East India companies provided scientific practitioners with professional mobility from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. In these accounts, German scientific practitioners are represented as especially mobile, moving more or less freely within foreign empires, because at the time no 'German' empire existed that might compete for allegiances and make them appear suspect. My article, in contrast, offers a revisionist account of this globalizing picture in two senses. First, a close look at the local everyday practices of the Schlagintweit brothers' expedition highlights the considerable tensions and frictions that accompanied imperial recruitment to South Asia—even for German scientific practitioners. What emerges instead is a rich picture of the contradictory interpretations of supposedly cooperative projects among contemporaries, and the instrumentalization of scientific activities for political ends in the Indian subcontinent, for both established and aspiring colonial powers. Second, the ways in which the Schlagintweits' scientific expedition was represented and remembered in subsequent decades shows how the politics around transnational science projects only intensified with German unification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process Lhost is deeply aware that she is dealing with a world of rising legal consciousness, which by the same token is one of growing Islamic legal consciousness. One of the great themes of colonial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the interaction between the legal systems of the colonial powers and those of the indigenous societies they had conquered. Lhost has enabled us to understand much better the relations between Muslim judges and the state in British India. [Extracted from the article]

The article is about totka chikitsha , a particular type of subaltern therapeutics widely recognized in northern and eastern South Asia. These simple recipes often circulated through transient encounters, physical or mediatized, between strangers. During the colonial era, government employment and the traveling that it required made many Bengalis in clerical jobs particularly authoritative in totka therapeutics. Though this mode of therapy was seen as an alternative to the increasingly commoditized medical market, anticonsumerism also became a discursive frame within which certain sections of the medico-print market appropriated totka s. My discussion of the colonial history of totka therapeutics is also intended as a critique of the persistent "localism" that haunts any attempt to engage, whether academically or practically, with subaltern therapeutics. I insist that we must historicize the local, the same way we now historicize the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1850, an eleven-year-old Indian prince named Duleep Singh was ordered to complete a fraught diplomatic task: his mission was to present Queen Victoria with the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond in a contrived spectacle to show Indian submission to British rule. The history of the diamond in England reveals the malleability of the jewel as a symbol of Oriental excess and economic gains through colonial domination, and as an ornament to accentuate Queen Victoria's femininity while affirming Prince Albert's masculine identity. This article examines the display and treatment by the British of the Koh-i-Noor diamond with an emphasis on the feminization of the jewel, the Indian subcontinent, and Queen Victoria herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]