Abstract In 1932, Khana Ratsadon (the People’s Party) overthrew the absolute monarchy in a military coup, introducing constitutional rule in Siam (Thailand after 1939). The dominant historical narrative in Thailand centres on the monarchy as the instigator of historical change, celebrating the roles of Thai monarchs in the development and protection of democracy. According to this narrative, democracy is portrayed as the monarchy’s gift to the people, while the significance of the 1932 revolution and Khana Ratsadon has been marginalized in the history of the origins of democracy in Thailand. Since the military coups in Thailand in 2006 and 2014, both original and newly created objects related to Khana Ratsadon have emerged in political protests against coups and post-coup governments. Simultaneously, a revisionist historiography has gained momentum. This article explores how the discursive and material (re)emergence of Khana Ratsadon contributes to the formation of a counter-memory, creating a space for political commentary to enact and reimagine the possibilities of community anew. In doing so, the article will examine the intricate relationship between a historiography of oblivion, counter-memory, and what we term ‘banal and revolutionary objects’.

Abstract Why has political representation by Scheduled Castes in post-colonial India failed to improve the lives of the vast majority of this population? One common answer rests on the assumption that caste inequality is upheld by dominant social groups who effectively resist progressive state policy. Others point to the institution of joint electorates: though constituencies are reserved for Scheduled Caste legislators, Scheduled Caste voters form a minority within them; the representatives thus elected are chosen primarily by others, and precisely because they will not challenge the status quo, it is said. But neither of these explanations, I argue, can adequately account for the minimal effects of Scheduled Caste representation, because both imagine states as confronting a distinct realm—‘society’—with pregiven interest groups that are then represented in legislatures. Instead, an examination of how state actions themselves govern, produce, and reproduce caste groups and intercaste relations is required. The argument is illustrated through episodes from the career of Dr Sathiavani Muthu, who sought to address injustices suffered by Scheduled Castes in Tamil Nadu from the late 1950s through to the 1980s. Muthu’s skill, diligence, and commitment make her an ideal representative, and Tamil Nadu as a state ought to provide a best-case scenario for the success of such an actor, given the scholarly consensus regarding its good governance and the pervasion of its society with a progressive ideology. An analysis of why her efforts nevertheless produced little fruit reveals pervasive deficiencies in current models of political representation.

Abstract China’s gun-free society is maintained through a paradox—while the state’s disciplinary apparatus unmakes any exceptions to the norm by continuously disarming the wayward, it simultaneously perpetuates exaggerated narratives of threats posed by clandestine gun makers in the ethnic frontier regions. This article investigates the state’s construction of Hualong, in Northwest China’s Qinghai, as ‘the capital of China’s ghost guns’. By debunking the quasi-historical claim that Hualong was a major firearms manufacturing hub in the early twentieth century, the article reveals how the modern Chinese state uses this narrative to reinforce an ethnopolitical reset—placing the Han in exclusive control of both firearms’ regulation and the sovereign right to punish violators. Drawing on multiple archival sources, the article argues that monoethnic control of arms was a central tenet of twentieth-century ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that early twentieth-century Qinghai was adept in taking advantage of the mobility and fluidity of arms afforded by a trans-imperial infrastructure in its state-making enterprise. That infrastructure included Western missionary networks, treaty ports and foreign concessions inherited from the late Qing, a revitalized maritime hajj route, Japanese imperialism, as well as an expansionist Chinese nationalism struggling to find a foothold in the former empire’s legacy frontiers.

Abstract Population resettlement in contested ethnoterritories is an old practice that states have pursued for centuries. There is a nascent theory of demographic engineering to explain the phenomenon, although a robust theory on the issue is yet to be built. Theorists generally agree that states transfer and resettle populations to gain territorial control over contested ethnoterritories. But what is not clear in the current scholarship is how states accomplish this or what techniques they deploy to gain territorial control. To address this theoretical lacuna, it is asserted that states seek to gain territorial control in two ways: ‘right-peopling’ (settlement of ‘preferred people’ to alter the demographic balance of the contested area) and ‘unpeopling’ (the extermination of the existing inhabitants). In this article these pathways to gain territorial control are explained by exploring the case of demographic engineering in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

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

Abstract This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations ( kenjinkai ) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.

Abstract Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of ‘non-Muslim’ marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government’s laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship.

Abstract Although some modern popular songs are deliberately composed for the purpose of commentary or protest, most are produced for commercial reasons. However, such songs may nonetheless be adopted by political, cultural, and social movements, and in these cases, fans’ participatory meaning-making has an important role in the songs’ new purpose. Taking the 1935 Korean ballad ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ as a representative example, this article traces how the melancholy love song acquired successive layers of meaning against the backdrop of changing politico-economic contexts throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on political, popular music, and sports histories, I first examine how ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ became known as an anti-colonial anthem under Japanese rule, a position that persisted in postwar South Korea. I then investigate the ways in which fans of the Haitai Tigers, a professional baseball team, utilized the song to express a complex set of emotions and commitments regarding their politically oppressed and economically neglected home region of Chŏlla. Against the backdrop of their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Haitai fans, through their collective singing of ‘Tears of Mok’po’ in stadiums during games, transformed it from a colonial-era pop hit/anti-colonial anthem into a baseball fight song that expressed their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 1990s. Entering the twenty-first century, ‘Tears of Mok’po’ no longer played the same role for the Tigers and their fans, and it receded into historical memory. This change in meaning and association shows how the political and historical meaning-making of popular songs can be constructed, reintegrated, and even dismissed.

Abstract This article studies the aftermath of the Second World and decolonization (1945–1960) in the Indo-Burmese highlands, challenging predominant notions of state-building. Using the ‘Zomia’ heuristic, it argues how trans-border Naga tribal communities residing in so-called ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between British India’s Assam province and Burma neither entirely resisted states, nor attracted uniform state interest. This dual refusal of states and social actors reveals negotiated sovereignty practices, using violence. The article illustrates the Naga tribes’ agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states by using mimetic discourses of primitive violence, represented by headhunting. Violence served as a significant means of communication between communities and state agents, amounting to shifting cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices selectively securitized colonial frontiers that became international borders post-decolonization. Gradually, violence and the desire for development invited state extension here. The article reveals that uneven state-building and developmental exclusions by bordering created conditions for violence to emerge. It engages scholarship on ‘Blank Spaces’ to analyse the varying sovereignty arrangements that produced ‘checkered’ zones. It highlights the relationship between spatial history and violence to explain the persistence of coercive development and demands for more borders and states today across highland Asia. It uncovers the embeddedness of violence in creating and challenging developmental and democratic exclusions in post-colonial nation-building projects. The analysis complicates imperial legacies of producing territorial enclosures within democracies, allowing exceptional violence to occur. More broadly, it complicates contemporary geopolitical cartographic contests and stakes of state-possession, using historical methods with approaches from anthropology and political geography.