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Building Histories traces the lives of five monuments in Delhi—Red Fort; Rasul Numa Dargah; Jama Masjid; Purana Qila; and the Qutb Complex—from the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Each monument is explored in an individual chapter, which considers the various appropriations of its history, function, and symbolism by state (colonial and postcolonial) and non-state actors. The starting point for this discussion is the mid-nineteenth century when institutionalized preservation cemented the histories, uses, symbolism, and stewardship of monuments within a rigid archive policed by colonial and later national bureaucracies. Yet this archive was and continues to be constantly interrupted and challenged by affect—the emotive economy generated around the monument at various points in time. It is at this intersection of archival “truths” and affective “passions” that the book charts the changing lives of these five monuments. In doing so it reveals the profoundly mutable histories of these monuments—histories that transformed non-linearly over time; histories generated by unexpected co-optations and urgent inhabitations; and histories authored by various actors often with competing agendas. Building Histories is a book about the histories of buildings; it is also a meditation on the building of histories through these monuments.

Surveying more than 1,200 letters that two famous Indian historians, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) and his collaborator Govind Sakharam Sardesai (1865-1959), wrote to each other in the first half of the twentieth century, this book develops a two-tiered argument about the modern and academic discipline of history. At one level, it demonstrates how the basic concepts and practices of the discipline (such as those relating to historical evidence, historical truth, or even ideas of research and practices of archiving) were formulated in colonial India through vigorous, sometimes bitter and hurtful debates in public life, bypassing the institutional authority of the university. This “public” life of the discipline was necessitated by the colonial officials’ unwillingness to make official historical documents available to Indian researchers; it was also enabled by the fact that nationalist Indians interested themselves in historical research long before history became a researchable subject in Indian universities. Sarkar, with fraught support from Sardesai, played a central role in introducing Indian researchers to Rankean models of historical research while indigenizing the model in significant ways. Sarkar and Sardesai’s struggle to give early modern Indian history an academic form shows how unavoidable debates in public life shaped the discipline, even after historical study finally gained an academic status in India. Chakrabarty also develops a larger proposition about the discipline of history generally, arguing that, being non-technical in nature, the discipline remains open to the pressures of its “public life,” in addition to those emanating from its “cloistered” life in the university.

This book is an ethical history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth-century. In this era, Leela Gandhi argues, the concept of ethics had obtained a ubiquitous application. No longer the denominator for right and wrong or good and bad behavior, merely, it came to designate all projects of disciplined self-fashioning. These could tend either toward exclusivity and hierarchy or toward a more inclusive universalism, depending on the players. Gandhi discloses a shared ethos of perfectionist values across imperialism, fascism, and new liberalism, and highlights its exclusion of the ordinary, the unexceptional, and the unremarkable. By contrast, she illuminates a range of anti-colonial and anti-fascist practices of moral imperfectionism and points to their emergence in hidden transnational pockets, encounters, and events. She shows how these oppositional practices were devoted to self-ruination and an anti-care of the self and aimed at making common cause both with the victims and abettors of unjust sociality, by defending the former and reforming the latter. Gandhi draws her examples from belle époque anti-materialism, antinomian Indian spirituality, the military cosmopolitanism of WWI, and the world-situation of mutiny in the moment of post-war demobilization and decolonization. She also engages key thinkers of the time, including M. K. Gandhi, Edmund Husserl, Aimé Césaire, Henri Bergson, Sri Ramana Maharishi, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno. Bringing raw material practices into conversation with the mainstream of twentieth-century thought in an imaginative historiography, this book defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection.

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but this book uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on archival research in the files of the East India Company's administrative offices in Madras, this book tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. The book shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company's reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, the book maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilizations—Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, China—kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations over a such an expanse, he throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

This book traces a genealogy of madness in China from the turn of the twentieth century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” Throughout most of history, the insane in China were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of the condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas, vocabularies, and institutions gradually began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. Although many of these ideas were introduced to China from abroad, they were not retained wholesale; instead, psychiatric concepts were often changed, reinterpreted, and redeployed in ways that were unique to urban China at this particular historical moment. Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries, the police, asylum workers, and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, the book argues, were not just imposed onto the Beijing public but continuously “invented” by a range of actors in ways that reflected their own needs and interests.

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain's contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. This book reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island's traditions and maritime placement, and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, it tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. The book explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, it reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, the book provides a retelling of the advent of British rule.

This book, a general history of Korea as seen through maps, provides an illustrated introduction to how Korea was and is represented cartographically. It encapsulates six hundred years of maps made by both Koreans and non-Koreans. Largely chronological in its organization, the text begins by examining the differing cartographic traditions prevalent in the early Joseon period in Korea—roughly 1400 to 1600—and its temporal equivalent in early modern Europe. As one of the longest continuous dynasties, Joseon rule encompassed an enormous range and depth of cartographic production. The author then surveys the cartographic encounters from 1600 to 1900, distinguishing between the early and late Joseon periods and highlighting the influences of China, Japan, and the rest of the world on Korean cartography. In the final section, the book covers the period from Japanese colonial control of Korea to the present day and demonstrates how some of the tumultuous events of the past hundred years are recorded and contested in maps. Recent cartographic controversies are also explored, including the naming of the East Sea/Sea of Japan and claims of ownership of the island of Dokdo. A common theme running throughout the study is how the global flow of knowledge and ideas affects mapmaking, and how Korean mapmakers throughout history have embodied, reflected, and even contested these foreign depictions of their homeland.

Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, this book looks at the history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing on works of pornographic fiction, the author offers an exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China. The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, it identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. The author presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China and the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Western writers claimed to be witnessing the end of pure Japanese art and the beginning of a disappointing phase of westernized cultural hybrids. By the 1880s, Japanese artists, critics, and policymakers were aware of this claim and sought to respond by elevating contemporary Japanese art’s value and reputation abroad. Japanese painting embarked on a new phase of development as a bipartite endeavour. Illusionistic oil painting and other forms of recently introduced artistic techniques became known as yōga or Western painting, while earlier painting modes became reconceptualised as nihonga (Japanese or Japanese-style painting) and were conceived as the continuation of an authentically Japanese art. In fact, however, both modes of painting were shaped by the imperative to exhibit and market Japanese art abroad. The new, international culture of public exhibitions went beyond what we typically think of as export art, reshaping the expectations that Japanese viewers had for Japanese painting. Focusing primarily on painting and craft objects in 1880s Tokyo, the author gives special consideration to Kano Hōgai (1828-88), the painter of the iconic Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) who was championed by Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō as Japanese-style painting’s hope for the future.

This work offers a new resource-centered history of modern Xinjiang. The region, located on China's farthest western border, was shaped in the 20th century by not only Chinese officials, but also foreign powers, international markets, and autonomous local officials, each of whom were eager to stake their own claim to Xinjiang's rich resource wealth. Hoping to quickly and inexpensively exploit these resources, these various actors frequently built atop the efforts of their predecessors. This work reveals a new, transnational "layered" model of state formation that can be applied beyond Xinjiang to various Chinese border regions, including Manchuria, Taiwan, and Tibet. The larger framework can also apply beyond China, to contested, resource-rich border regions across the global south.

The government of early modern Japan (1603-1868), the Tokugawa shogunate, consistently demonstrated a keen interest in regulating the outwardly inconsequential urban popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)— fashion, leisure, street entertainments, woodblock prints, novella, and theater— as part of the effort to preserve its power and authority. This work probes how and why popular cultural practices occupied such a central place in governmental policies and shows how literary, visual, and theatrical practices of representation defied the official images of desirable subjects, which were designed to reflect a strict hierarchical organization of social order based on status and division of labor. Furthermore, the book looks at the important shift in the regulation of popular culture from the Tokugawa regime to Japan’s first modern state, the early Meiji government (1868-1890). By examining this shift, it outlines a general theory of the transformation in modes of subject-formation from Tokugawa to Meiji, and thus provides a new way to critically conceptualize this momentous historical change.

The Chinese Communist Party has often been credited with recognizing the revolutionary potential of a mobilized peasantry. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were not the only Chinese who believed that their nation’s future lay in its villages rather than in its cities. These other reformers, a loose coalition of “rural reconstruction” advocates, argued that the countryside could be made modern through the mobilization of rural people, but they rejected the Communist belief in violent revolution. Incredibly influential in the interwar years but now largely forgotten, rural reconstruction reformers embraced the ideas of scientific progress and cosmopolitan culture but disputed the city’s monopoly on modernity. Incorporating ideas from a variety of similar efforts from Ireland to India, Chinese rural reformers ranged from Confucian to Christian in their ideological commitments and attempted to preserve the vitality and social coherence of rural communities by undertaking everything from literacy education to theater modernization to agricultural outreach. Despite their prominence and widespread efforts, rural reconstruction failed to generate national change. As this book traces, much of that failure was the result of reformers’ willingness to relinquish their early messages of peasant self-transformation and self-sufficiency in order to cooperate with the Nationalist government. Nevertheless, rural reconstruction created a lasting political vision of a remade countryside and an educated, mobilized rural population that not only helped lay the groundwork for the Communist Revolution of 1949 but continues to inspire advocates for rural people and communities in China today.

This book presents a new framework for understanding the history of interpolity relations in Inner and East Asia. It is intended to inspire a less politicized approach to the Asian past and to help address challenges in the region today. The premise is that relations between rulers and states in Asia from the thirteenth century to the twentieth are best analyzed in terms of the interactions of three “worlds”—the Chinggisid Mongol world, the Confucian Sinic world, and the Tibetan Buddhist world. Each constituted a distinct form of civilizational authority and a legal order. Together they mutually shaped the context in which Great States since the Mongol empire emerged and their rulers claimed universal mandates. Tracing the complex relationships among Mongol khans, Tibetan Buddhist hierarchs, Chinese emperors, and Manchu rulers helps to make sense of the past and explain the narratives that feed conflicts today. Although the rules governing these relationships collapsed as states in Asia adapted to European conventions, older expectations continue to exert a meaningful hold on political imaginations in Asia. Recognizing this history is essential for moving beyond the status quo and the use of force.

Terrestrial Lessons is an unconventional history of a commonplace object we moderns have likely encountered at some point of time in our lives, especially as school-going children. For the last half millennium, the terrestrial globe has circulated as a master object of scientific modernity, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to our status as educated and enlightened inhabitants of our world. Today, it is a ubiquitous symbol of our “global” times, its familiar visage seemingly everywhere. Some have even argued that the image of the “global” Earth is the nearest thing to a universal icon. Yet such an understanding of our Earth as an iconic spinning globe is in fact hard-won, and is by no means free of dissonance or contradictions. Traversing the length and breadth of British India, Terrestrial Lessons follows the itineraries of this master object as it is transformed from a thing of distinction into that mass-produced commodity, the humble school globe. Adopting a thing-centered methodology that connects narratives and concepts to a series of “global encounters” between object and subject, the book demonstrates how a modern planetary consciousness was cultivated in schools across India and was foundational to colonial pedagogy. The terrestrial lessons conducted with the help of the modest school globe also constituted the earliest form of science education in the subcontinent. As such, this is the first in-depth study of the terrestrial globe as it leaves the shores of Europe to travel to and circulate in the Indian subcontinent.

This book presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasis communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, the author provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Narrating the history of these women, she argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasis identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, the book charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.