In this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and how connections among these factors impact the production and reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi drivers’ work. While most understandings of automobility remain tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving, (sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and practices of motoring and automobility.

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women's rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.

In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart towns and villages in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the small town of Anand. Following such dramatic displacement, the town emerged as a site of opportunity and hope. For its residents and transnational visitors, Anand's Muslim area is not just a site of marginalization; it has become an important focal point and regional center from which they can participate in the wider community of Gujarat and reimagine society in more inclusive terms. This compelling ethnography shows how in Anand the experience of residential segregation led not to estrangement or closure but to distinctive forms of mobility and exchange that embed Muslim residents in a variety of social networks. New Lives in Anand moves beyond established notions of ghettoization to foreground the places, practices, and narratives that are significant to the people of Anand. New Lives in Anand is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655

Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States. Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women’s experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women’s labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart towns and villages in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the small town of Anand. Following such dramatic displacement, the town emerged as a site of opportunity and hope. For its residents and transnational visitors, Anand’s Muslim area is not just a site of marginalization; it has become an important focal point and regional center from which they can participate in the wider community of Gujarat and reimagine society in more inclusive terms. This compelling ethnography shows how in Anand the experience of residential segregation led not to estrangement or closure but to distinctive forms of mobility and exchange that embed Muslim residents in a variety of social networks. New Lives in Anand moves beyond established notions of ghettoization to foreground the places, practices, and narratives that are significant to the people of Anand. New Lives in Anand is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it. Town planners, financiers, and property developers joined forces to secure the city as a space for commerce and encoded shelter types as legitimate or illegitimate. By the early twentieth century, the slum emerged as a particularly useful category of stigmatization that would animate city-making projects in subsequent decades. Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of Bombay's now infamous "slum problem" in the broader histories of colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city-rather than of its people-became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded.

One of the most important political transitions to occur in South Asia in recent decades was the ouster of Nepal's monarchy in 2006 and the institution of a democratic secular republic in 2008. Based on extensive ethnographic research between 2003 and 2015, Making New Nepal provides a snapshot of an activist generation's political coming-of-age during a decade of civil war and ongoing democratic street protests. Amanda Snellinger illustrates this generation's entree into politics through the stories of five young revolutionary activists as they shift to working within the newly established party system. She explores youth in Nepali national politics as a social mechanism for political reproduction and change, demonstrating the dynamic nature of democracy as a radical ongoing process.

Savant Singh (1694-1764), the Rajput prince of Kishangarh-Rupnagar, is famous for commissioning beautiful works of miniature painting and composing devotional (bhakti) poetry to Krishna under the nom de plume Nagaridas. After his throne was usurped by his younger brother, while Savant Singh was on the road seeking military alliances to regain his kingdom, he composed an autobiographical pilgrimage account, "The Pilgrim's Bliss" (Tirthananda); a hagiographic anthology, "Garland of Anecdotes about Songs" (Pad-Prasang-mala); and a reworking of the story of Rama, "Garland of Rama's Story" (Ram-Carit-Mala). Through an examination of Savant Singh's life and works, Heidi Pauwels explores the circulation of ideas and culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in north India, revealing how Singh mobilized soldiers but also used myths, songs, and stories about saints in order to cope with his personal and political crisis. Mobilizing Krishna's World allows us a peek behind the dreamlike paintings and refined poetry to glimpse a world of intrigue involving political and religious reform movements.

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969-the long sixties-in Lahore, Pakistan, following the 1947 Partition of South Asia. These films drew freely from Bengali performance traditions, Hindu mythology, Parsi theater, Sufi conceptions of the self, Urdu lyric poetry, and Hollywood musicals, bringing these traditions into dialogue with melodrama and neorealism. Examining this layered context offers insights into a period of rapid modernization and into cultural affiliation in the South Asian present, when frameworks of multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy. Lahore Cinema probes the role of language, rhetoric, lyric, and form in the making of cinematic meaning as well as the relevance of the Urdu cultural universe to midcentury Bombay filmmaking. Challenging the assumption of popular cinema as apolitical, Dadi explores how films allowed their audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and tense politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of deeper cultural imaginaries. By constituting publics beyond social divides of regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, commercial cinema played an influential progressive role during the mid- and later twentieth century in South Asia. Lahore Cinema is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Cornell University. DOI: 10.6069/9780295750804

Land of Plants in Motion is the first in any language to examine two companion stories: (1) the rise of an East Asian floristic zone and how the Japanese islands evolved an astonishing wealth of plant species, and (2) the growth of Japanese botanical sciences. The majority of plant species regarded as ""Japanese"" trace their origins to western China and the eastern Himalaya but are so indigenized that they often seem native today. Early modern scientists in Japan drew on knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine but achieved distinctive insights into plant life commensurate with but separate from their European counterparts. Scholars at the University of Tokyo pioneered Japanese plant biology in the late nineteenth century. They incorporated Western botanical methods but sought a degree of difference in taxonomy while also gaining international legitimacy through publications in English. Japan's age of empire (1895-1945) was less about plant exploration and more about plant collection, for both scientific and economic benefits. Displays of species from throughout the empire made Japan's sphere of colonization and conquest visible at home. The infrastructure for research and instruction expanded slowly after World War Two: new laboratories, botanical gardens, scholarly societies, and publications eventually allowed for great diversity of specialized study, especially with the growth of molecular biology in the 1970s and DNA research in the 1980s. Basic research was harmed by cuts in government funding during 2012-2017, but Japanese plant biologists continue to enjoy international esteem in many fields of scholarship.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

The role of markets in linking local communities to larger networks of commerce, culture, and political power is the central element in Anand A. Yang's provocative and original study. Yang uses bazaars in the northeast Indian state of Bihar during the colonial period as the site of his investigation. The bazaar provides a distinctive locale for posing fundamental questions regarding indigenous societies under colonialism and for highlighting less familiar aspects of colonial India. At one level, Yang reconstructs Bihar's marketing system, from its central place in the city of Patna down to the lowest rung of the periodic markets. But he also concentrates on the dynamics of exchanges and negotiations between different groups and on what can be learned through the 'voices' of people in the bazaar: landholders, peasants, traders, and merchants. Along the way, Yang uncovers a wealth of details on the functioning of rural trade, markets, fairs, and pilgrimages in Bihar. A key contribution of "Bazaar India" is its many-stranded narrative history of some of South Asia's primary actors over the past two centuries. But Yang's approach is not that of a detached observer; rather, his own voice is engaged with the voices of the past and with present-day historians. By focusing on the world beyond the mud walls of the village, he widens the imaginative geography of South Asian history. Readers with an interest in markets, social history, culture, colonialism, British India, and historiographic methods will welcome his book.

Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming "their own warders." Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.