Borderlands and bordering processes are central to politics and the governance of people, goods, and territories, not only as markers of territorial-administrative control but also as practices that shape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, mobility/immobility, and relations of power and authority. This special issue focuses on Myanmar, where political governance is deeply entangled with ethnicity, territory, borders, and bordering processes. We attempt to untangle these relationships by adopting an approach that combines consideration of how borderlands are governed with recognition of the ways in which borders, borderlands, and border populations shape governance and administration. We define this approach as ‘border governance’, by which we mean governance in, of, and through borderlands. In this introduction, we explore the meaning and significance of border governance as it relates to Myanmar, its ethnic border states, and their relations to other nations bordering the country. In doing so, we engage with and develop scholarly debates in three primary areas: (i) Borders, territoriality, and bordering processes; (ii) Plural governance and everyday bordering; (iii) Peacebuilding and the borders of transition. The articles in this special issue were written prior to the military coup of February 2021. Nevertheless, the central arguments presented here remain relevant, as does our conclusion: to achieve lasting peace in Myanmar, the borderlands must be at the centre.

On 6 December 1959, the image of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Damodar Valley Corporation dam project in Bihar with a 15-year-old Adivasi girl called Budhini Manjhiyan was flashed across the national newspapers. This was an iconic moment in the national debate around development and change which was to dominate modern India on whether lands, predominately rural and tribal, were to be flooded to benefit the nation. Years later, in 2016, when the newspapers caught up with Budhini, she had returned to Jharkhand and was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her children. Her story resonates with the ways in which, in recent times, Adivasis are becoming increasingly visible as subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, conversion, development, and climate change. The post-colonial Indian state and its allies, with a developmentalist agenda uppermost in their minds, have made loss of land, displacement, migration, and forced resettlement a part of Adivasi experiences. Forces of globalization, often in tandem with the policies of the Indian state, are engulfing marginal spaces. The increasingly powerful majoritarian narrative of the state subsumes alternate voices with easy nonchalance. The foregrounding of planetary narratives on the fate of humanity in the era of the Anthropocene erases the importance of particular locales and specific communities that could offer an alternative to declensionist narratives. But amid this marginalization, there also lies a story of the assertion of Adivasi agency. Voices of Adivasis—although multiple and fractured—can be heard as they assert their identity, express their politics, and creatively negotiate with the state and its institutions. Scattered across India in geographically differentiated terrains, pursuing different occupations, and speaking different languages, the experiences of Adivasis are varied, as they inhabit many worlds. Their stories point to the multiplicity of cultures and myriad ways of thinking that must be accommodated within the ambit of the nation, and yet offer the possibilities of different ways of living and being on this earth.

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

Climate change and rising sea levels, which threaten many Asian and other coastal cities, have returned the question of adaptation to unstable marine surfaces to the global discussions about urbanization, as was illustrated by a recent United Nations (UN) roundtable. As de facto counterproposals to hydroelectric dams and similar regional development projects, floating or elevated structures reject land reclamation and terrestrialization processes. Consequently, the rapidly growing number of offshore structures, which often constitute unconventional settlements, have contributed to an amphibious transformation of Earth's surface in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This amphibious transformation meant that both terrestrial and aquatic places have turned into human habitats. This article asks how and why today's leading environmental-political strand in large-scale marine urbanization emerged from the waters of Tokyo Bay. It investigates Japanese star architect Tange Kenzō's ‘Plan for Tokyo 1960’ (1961) and world-renowned American designer R. Buckminster Fuller's floating design called ‘Tetrahedronal City’ (1966). Emphasizing the important role that Asian cities have played in shaping global urbanization ideas and practices, Tokyo Bay became a node in the global cybernetics revolution that moved urban design into the information age. Tange's and Fuller's evolution-inspired cybernetic designs used the post-war communication technology revolution to replicate, through artificial communication networks, the biological communication systems that enable organisms to interact with their environments. Applying communication technology to recreate, in floating or elevated structures, the biological processes of growth, adaptation, mobility, and autonomy became the central environmental-political strand for large-scale marine urbanization and reducing its ecological footprint.

This article explores the anthropometric survey of 5,000 Tibetans by the ethnographer HRH Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark in the northeast Indian Himalayan town of Kalimpong in the 1950s, as part of the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia. In the context of the crisis created by the Chinese incursion into Tibet in 1950, which pushed thousands of Tibetans into India, stationary field anthropometry, rather than a mobile expedition, became Prince Peter's principal entry into Tibetan worlds. This article explores the scientific paradigms underpinning his anthropometric survey at a time when anthropology had seemingly moved on theoretically and ethically, the historical conditions and contingencies of Prince Peter's research, and the survey's representations of Tibetan peoples and places. We argue that, while Prince Peter's understanding was in essence primordialist, linking particular peoples to particular places, in practice he took a more modernist approach to ‘Tibetaness’ as contingent upon historical processes. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential significance of this vast and unique collection of historic anthropometric data for Tibetans today.

This article introduces this special volume on the Mughal policy of sulh-i kull by situating the collection of articles in relation to broader developments across Eurasia.

Sulh-i kull or ‘Total Peace’ with all religions was a policy introduced by the Mughal empire in South Asia in the late sixteenth century. It was a radically accommodative stance for its day, especially when compared to the intolerant manner in which other Muslim and Christian polities of the early modern world dealt with religious difference. This article introduces a new perspective on Mughal Total Peace by arguing that it was meant to solve a long-standing problem created by the monotheistic ban on oaths sworn on non-biblical deities. Such a ban restricted the ability of Muslim kings to solemnize peace treaties with their non-monotheist rivals and subjects. In the second half of the article, I examine two pre-Mughal cases, from the eleventh century (Mahmud of Ghazna) and the seventh century (the prophet Muhammad), respectively, to explore what other, less ‘total’, mechanisms were invented to suspend this ban and enable oath-taking and solemn peace-making between monotheist and non-monotheist. In effect, I use the Mughal case to highlight a specific issue that shaped political theology in Islam over the long term.

This article examines the entanglement of administration, education, and law in North India under early British rule. While there exists extensive discussion on each of these three themes, historians have not paid enough attention to the processes in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, the official minds of the East India Company gradually came to imagine its revenue administration in North India at the institutional intersection of state bureaucracy, village schools, and the law courts. I will argue in this article that through this intersection of knowledge/law-making, the Company wished to foster an ‘enlightened’ but simultaneously obedient subjecthood among the Indian rural population. The contested relationship between the state, the local Indian officials, and the villagers in general, however, thwarted this patronizing ambition.

This article examines British Protestant missionary scholars' representations of Tamil culture and history, analysing how this form of knowledge evolved in relation to missionary concerns and the intellectual trends of nineteenth-century India. I focus on the work of Robert Caldwell, whose scholarship had a profound influence on the identity discourses of twentieth-century Tamil nationalism. I situate Caldwell's work in ethnography and philology within the broader field of colonial knowledge produced about Tamils in nineteenth-century India and within a broader study of British missionary concerns in South India. I examine two of Caldwell's publications to argue that his later work, far from being driven by mere scholarly interests, was also shaped by his concerns as a missionary, and that his evolving scholarship mirrored the development of anti-Brahmanism in British Protestant missionary circles of the time. Missionary anti-Brahmanism arose as a response to the caste system, which missionary groups came to regard as the biggest obstacle to Christian conversions. Departing from some of his earlier ideas, Caldwell strategically positioned his later work to challenge Brahman influence, which he saw as being intrinsically tied to the strength of caste sentiment in Indian society. Caldwell's construction of a discursive framework for understanding Tamil linguistic identity was informed by public reactions to his first publication and his subsequent understanding of the dynamic relationship between European scholarship and Indian social relations. More broadly, this article demonstrates the close relationships between Protestant Christian missionary activity, Indian social politics, and the field of knowledge production in colonial South India.

Much of the literature on India's nuclear programme assumes that China's nuclear capability drove New Delhi, the strategically weaker actor, to pursue a nuclear weapons capability. China's nuclear tests not only rendered New Delhi militarily insecure and dented its claim for the leadership of the Third World but they also polarized the domestic debate over the utility of the bomb. In the global scheme of nuclear proliferation, therefore, India was just another fallen nuclear domino. Marshalling recently declassified documents, this article revisits India's nuclear behaviour during the crucial decade between 1964 and 1974. By focusing on threat assessments made at the highest levels and internal deliberations of the Indian Government, this article shows how, contrary to the claims made in the literature, Indian decision-makers did not make much of the Chinese nuclear threat. This conviction emanated out of their distinct reading of the purpose of nuclear weapons in China's foreign and military policy; their perceptions of how India could achieve nuclear deterrence against China by using the bipolar international politics of the Cold War; and, finally, their understanding of the political costs of developing an indigenous nuclear response to China's nuclear threat. New Delhi's nuclear restraint resulted from its perceptions of Chinese nuclear intentions and its beliefs about the purpose of the bomb in Sino-Indian relations. India's perceptions of China as a nuclear adversary and its decision-makers’ views on the purpose of nuclear weapons in this rivalry were fundamentally different from the expectations set out by the domino theory of nuclear proliferation.

This article analyses the evolving nature and dynamics of the relationship between the centre and the periphery by examining how semi-democratic reforms have shaped and influenced the peace negotiation process between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) since 2011. We demonstrate that while the 2008 constitution has reduced restrictions on political, economic, and cultural activities in Myanmar, it has also inevitably produced a ‘two-headed government’ after the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), took charge in 2016 and was forced to share power with the military. This ‘two-headed’ government is the result of the historical distrust between the NLD and the army, combined with the NLD's lack of a clear strategy in dealing with EAOs. This has enabled the army to assert its well-articulated and hardline approach—without itself having an effective strategy or the capacity to end the country's armed insurgencies or bring the peace process forward. We show that the split at the centre has produced inertia and weakened the ability of the central government to formulate and implement effective policy, and further undermined the prospects for national reconciliation. Situating this case study within the wider literature of centre–periphery relationships and democratic transition, this article offers a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of how specific institutional arrangements at the centre in semi-democratic settings affect relations in both the centre and the periphery, as well as centre–periphery relationships.

This article explores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha and dhangar, or as part of a ‘village community’ of Coles/Kols, these Oraons, by the late nineteenth century, were referred to as a ‘tribe’. To trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across colonial records, I discuss texts and reports which later became part of bureaucratic memory. The shifts within official understanding, I argue, were related to the working of official minds, changing assumptions, and differing languages; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; the variations within ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule; and interactions with ‘native’ informants and correspondents, along with personal observations of local practices. There remained, however, an uneasy tension between wider intellectual trends in Europe and their reverberations in the colony, and the experiences of governance: colonial knowledge was not always produced with arrogance and assurance but also with doses of uncertainty, hesitation, disquiet, and often despair. In the shifting representations of the tribe across the nineteenth century, there is, I suggest, a pattern. In the pre-1850s, local nomenclature was adopted and voices of dissent—expressed through agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur—were addressed. By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial imaginaries and interventions. The 1860s witnessed the interplay of ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs, and Arcadian principles. From the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly structured by the supremacy of disciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the ‘native’ informant.

Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitary state which incorporated a civil religion that excluded competing forms of religiosity within its domain. This model of secularism, exemplified by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, fits Aśoka's Dhamma better than the separationist model does.

This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

This article analyses how past and contemporary Adivasi voices are expressed in colonial photographs, and how they have—and continue to—both enable and restrict speaking through visual representation. It examines the collection of the German anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt, who in the 1920s took about 12,000 photographic images and 2,000 objects from Adivasi communities in India, Ceylon, and Burma. As a racial anthropologist he defined and framed the photos and created the collection according to his own preconceptions. The photographs, embedded in a colonial context and an increasingly racial/racist German anthropology, reveal very asymmetric power relations. Yet, the voice of the Adivasi is not completely suppressed, as the photographed people are not mere objects, but find various ways of expressing sentiments in the photographs. Ninety years on, the images and objects have lost none of their ambiguity. They continue to resonate when newly arranged and criticized in the permanent exhibition of a German museum, as well as when curated at the Museum of Voice of the Adivasi Academy in Gujarat.

This article argues that gendered ideas about political representation were pivotal to the All-India Muslim League's new self-imagination as the exclusive representative of Indian Muslims after the Pakistan Resolution of March 1940. I offer a gendered reading of League politics during the crucial decade of the 1940s by examining the historical implications of Begum Jahanara Shah Nawaz's expulsion from the party in 1941 for accepting a post on the National Defense Council. When she claimed that she was appointed to the Council as a representative of all Indian women and Punjab, the League leadership condemned her for disobeying the party's resolution to remain aloof from British India's wartime administration. With an unusual intensity, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League's president, censured her for endangering Indian Muslims’ fragile unity and asserted that League members could either represent Muslims—or no one. Her arguments functioned as an effective foil against which the League solidified its homogenizing narrative of an Indian Muslim identity and its universalizing project of Pakistan. As the demand for Pakistan increasingly dominated the League's rhetoric, alternative models of representation that drew upon cross-religious, gender-based, or regional solidarities became progressively untenable for female Muslim League politicians. Shah Nawaz's expulsion, and the discourse on representation it generated, demonstrated that gender issues were central to League politics at both the provincial and the all-India level.

The 2015 general elections were considered a hallmark of Myanmar's transition from an authoritarian regime towards a new form of government. However, the elections did not take place in all parts of the country, and significant portions of the population were excluded from the vote, including voters in areas of contested sovereignty, those who experienced displacement by conflict, and the Rohingya. Against the background of the regulatory framework for elections in Myanmar and its electoral system, this article looks first into a particular understudied element of the electoral process—the cancellation or postponement of elections in areas affected by conflict, which is little understood by voters, election administrators, and outside observers. Second, the article examines the conditions necessary for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to participate in elections. Third, the article recapitulates the gradual legal disenfranchisement of voters and candidates who self-identified as Rohingya, which preceded their mass exodus to Bangladesh in 2017. While in 2015 all these processes of exclusion were arguably of lesser priority for the election administration, which facilitated the first credible Myanmar election in decades, they have not altered significantly since and will affect the electoral participation of disadvantaged communities again in the future.

This article examines the recent political history of the Devendrakula Vellalars (henceforth, Devendras). Officially recognized by the state and union governments in 2020 and 2021, this novel consolidated caste formation includes a broad range of formerly endogamous ‘Untouchable’ communities spread throughout Tamil Nadu but most highly concentrated in its southern half. I argue that the communities constituting the Devendras have been socio-economically diverse for at least the past century and thus do not necessarily share the same political priorities. They have, nonetheless, attempted to unite in opposition to the politically powerful Thevars (Other Backward Class or OBC) who are themselves a consolidated caste formation that grew out of colonial domination. The Devendras's economic diversity has, however, troubled their oppositional political consolidation, compelling the production of revisionist mythico-histories that appeal to widely held desires for authority and honour. Disavowing the Dalit past and recasting the Devendras as the descendants of heroes, such mythico-histories produce a collective identity characterized by the ideals of righteous self-sacrifice, valour, and agrarian civility. Devendras's identarian claims are, however, reliant on the acceptance of internal and external audiences, some of which violently oppose their assertions. They nevertheless seek recognition, and in so doing empower themselves by gathering strength in numbers.

Based on the writings of James Puthucheary in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this article seeks to highlight Puthucheary's contribution to debates within the Malayan Left on the national question. It will highlight Puthucheary's situating of the Malayan Left within a wider transnational flow of nationalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist thought, as well as his attempt—through his own Marxist-influenced assessment of the Malayan situation—to answer the political problem of the relationship between socialist politics and nationalism in Malaya. In doing so the article will highlight the way in which Puthucheary's own position on questions of education and language policy placed him in opposition to dominant trends within the Malayan Communist Party and the left-wing of the People's Action Party, provided a theorizing of the need for nation-building within Malayan socialism, and contributed towards a socialist politics which placed emphasis upon economic development and cultural nation-building from the perspective of the Malay peasantry. The article finally goes on to explore Puthucheary's subsequent disengagement from politics in the early 1960s and the growing limitations of a socialist politics of nation-building in Malaya, which led Puthucheary and others on the Left to contribute towards a programme of nation-building within existing institutions and parties in the 1960s and 1970s.

This article examines how the divine epithet ‘Rahman’ was invoked in public inscriptions and oaths in pre-Islamic Yemen. Between the first and the sixth centuries ce, with the spread of Christianity across the Roman empire and Abyssinia, and the subsequent rise of Jewish and Christian kingdoms in southern Arabia, the use of ‘Rahman’ was gradually biblicized. By tracing this history, this article opens a window into the use of this theonym in the Quran and the controversy surrounding its use in the first formal treaty in Islam, the Peace Treaty (Sulh) of Hudaybiyya.