Between 2022 and 2025, South Asia experienced a series of rapid-onset protest movements that successfully toppled established governments within compressed timeframes. This article examines the protest waves in Sri Lanka (2022), Bangladesh (2024), and Nepal (2025) through the lens of Rauf Arif’s Flash Social Movement theory while critically extending this framework through comparative institutional analysis. These movements demonstrate both the continued relevance of Arab Spring dynamics in contemporary Asian contexts and reveal new patterns wherein digital mobilization intersects with traditional forms of collective action. The analysis reveals how accumulated grievances, digital connectivity, and generational political consciousness converge to create predictable yet powerful challenges to authoritarian governance, while institutional variables (particularly security force cohesion and elite fragmentation) mediate the effectiveness and timing of regime change. By engaging with connective action theory and networked movement scholarship, this article advances our understanding of how South Asian contexts adapt global protest repertoires to regional political cultures.

This paper examines the raps of new-generation Malayalam Dalit rapper Vedan as an assertion of Dalit resistance, memory, and political agency in contemporary Kerala. His songs Voice of the Voiceless, Bhoomi Njan Vazhunna Idam, Urangatte, Theruvinte Mon, Karma, and Vaa confront the caste-neutral discourse in the state. By rejecting tokenism, his lyrics emphasise both personal and collective memory, voices the repressed and transforming individual pain into collective resistance. Through a close reading of selected raps, the paper argues that Vedan’s music marks a significant shift in Kerala’s cultural politics, which has historically denied space to the marginalised and the Dalit voices. His works are grounded in lived experience and refuses inclusion into dominant narratives. By rejecting the aesthetically refined and sanskritised language of mainstream music, his songs reshape the contours of public discourse and challenge the upper-caste control of cultural production in Kerala.

As a new and evolving polity in South Asia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Sultanate of Delhi experienced rapid regime changes and contested social hierarchies. Discussing social implications of political transition and disruption during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this paper examines Persian advice literature, chronicles and inshā (letters) to analyse how social categories of ḵẖāṣṣ (elite) and ‘āmma (commoners) were constituted, contested and reconfigured. It explores how Persian literati advised new rulers on recognising the rights of subjects to maintain social order, and how this guidance contrasted with actual disruptions, when established ḵẖāṣṣ were displaced to create a new ruling elite. It is argued that literary representation of ideal social hierarchies provides critiques of the contemporary social milieu, as well as the expectations and anxieties of the authors. The paper also argues that social hierarchies under the Delhi Sultanate were neither stable nor predetermined, but historically contingent and actively negotiated. In light of this, the Persian literature of the Delhi Sultanate period becomes records of both social disruptions and social-political order, situated amid the tension between idealised norms and historical realities.

This article induces an enquiry into the typology of a kūṭa, an intrinsic aedicule of the Bhūmija mode śikhara, through a brief comparative survey across different geographical regions. At the centre of this study is the distinctive temple at Ambegan situated in Maharashtra state from Western India, distinguished by its star-shaped kūṭastambhas and drāviḍa kūṭas – features that are seldom encountered within the established corpus of Bhūmija śikharas. The article introduces the architectural peculiarities of this hitherto unknown temple. Further, it attempts to demonstrate the choice, plurality and experimentation in the kūṭa forms within Bhūmija śikharas and emphasizes the need for an in-depth study to highlight the regional peculiarities of the mode.

Contrary to stereotypes of being a stagnant and segmented society, South Asia carries a rich history of religious co-existence and interaction stretching back by several centuries. Such activities involving various actors facilitated a range of sociocultural production within the region. The essay spanning the medieval and early modern centuries in north India explores the complex and unevenly charted domain of contact and exchange, involving practitioners of Sufism, Indic communities, and diverse knowledge traditions. Though these groups represented an elite approach to their individual traditions – Sufism, bhakti, Vaishnavism, yoga, tantra etc., they were also successful in reaching down to the level of popular understanding – primarily through works in multiple vernaculars. By exploring multiple practices of cohabitation and cultural assimilation, as well as competition and resistance with regard to spiritual and religious positions, the emphasis is on complex and nuanced understandings of such interactions. The discussion therefore focuses on multiple forms of exchanges involving Sufi and Indic traditions, and its impact on spiritual, esoteric and textual practices. The second half moves towards early modern Bengal where Sufi scholars engaged with spiritual and esoteric practices of Vaishnava-Sahajiya and Yogic-Tantric traditions through textual production, allowing opportunities to analyse creative exchanges and permeable boundaries.

This paper traces the growth of fine arts in late nineteenth century Madras through the activities at the Madras School of Arts. It focusses on the years (1877–1883) when Robert Chisholm served as its superintendent, the pedagogical shifts he initiated, and its impact on the students. The paper also enquires into less understood parallel formations in the city, notably the Madras Fine Arts Society. Citing contemporary newspapers and records, the paper demonstrates that from the 1870s, fine arts made inroads into the city through the efforts of varied players ranging from individuals and institutions to artists who were engaging with a new representational mode. Through this, the paper counters the perception that fine arts, understood as Western academic style painting and sculpture, did not have a presence in colonial Madras. Furthermore, it achieves three key aspects. It highlights unexamined aspects of art in Madras that would further the understanding of art history and education in colonial India. Secondly, it addresses gaps in the current writings on art in colonial Madras. Thirdly, it demonstrates that despite its leaning towards the crafts, varied strands of art education coexisted within the curriculum of the Madras School of Arts.

This essay elaborates upon my discovery of the oldest dated and illustrated manuscript of a Persian translation of Śiva Purāṇa at the British Library in London. This manuscript bears the shelfmark Or 14341 and was purchased by the library in 1986. My essay seeks to understand why Śiva Purāṇa was translated into Persian at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how the translated work was intended to be received, appreciated and circulated in Persophone societies. More specifically, it examines whether the manuscript Or 14341 was aimed at facilitating inter-religious and cross-cultural exchanges among peoples of diverse backgrounds in early modern South Asian and Persian societies. Drawing upon the material, textual and literary attributes of Or 14341, I argue that this manuscript embodies compelling evidence of the already prevalent use of Persian as a viable and legitimate mode of transmitting religious knowledge among Śaiva communities and their broader Hindu following. Furthermore, even though this manuscript – like any object of translation – could in principle participate in the cross-cultural and trans-regional exchange of ideas and materials, the makers of the manuscript were largely disinterested in stimulating inter-religious interaction among Śaiva and non-Śaiva communities.

Pithiā Pahār was an important monastic settlement in the Kaimur range of ancient Rohitavastu/Rohtasgarh in Chandauli, Uttar Pradesh, India. The Buddhist landscape of the region shows that it was a hill-top monastery founded in the age of the Buddha. The prehistoric paintings found on the outer walls of the caves suggest that earlier, it was a cave shelter, and after that, it was adopted by the Buddhists. The structural morphology of the cave proposes that it may be natural, but later on, chiselled out to habitat and meditate. The author explores the Buddha’s stay at this place during his first journey from Bodhgayā to Sārnāth, as well as the excavations of several types of meditative caves on the walls of the monastic settlement. One of the caves has very distinguished features, like the engraving of chatra on the roof wall and polish on the floor, which suggests the existence of mūlgaṅdhakutī. Mauryan Polish, three Minor Rock Edicts in the vicinity of the monastic site, i.e. Ratanpurwa, Ahraura, and Sasaram, indicate that Aśoka patronised it. The paintings of the Buddha and his associates on the walls show that the monastic settlement continued until the later Gupta period (6th–7th Century CE).

The Ikṣvākus ruled over parts of present-day Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in the third and fourth centuries CE. This paper revisits the inscriptions that they got inscribed at their preeminent city, Nagarjunakonda, as well as at a host of other sites in the early historic Deccan, to explore their imaginations of kingship and power, their kinship and marital practices, and the commemorative-memorial complexes that they participated in. In doing so, the paper seeks to situate the Ikṣvākus squarely within the cultural politics of their time and the modes of remembrance that they were imbricated in.