Bøker i Critical Asian Studies-serien

Gives an account of the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. This book presents narrative accounts of the residents of Dharavi on the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. It explores the role language, housing and rehabilitation have on the life of people living with violence.

Presents an anthropological study located along India's western border with Pakistan. This book contains arguments that are situated within the context of contemporary religious nationalism, communal strife, and border politics in the Indian state of Gujarat.

The essays in this volume complicate the sense of Pakistan as prone to failure. It is recast as a prolonged meditation on the artificiality of the state form, the difficulty of committing to a single nationalist vision, the foreignness that resides within, etc.

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-European. The book examines shared experiences of modern transformation or modernity in three regions -- China, India and the Ottoman Empire -- which conventional historiography identifies as non-European, and therefore, by implication, outside of modernity or only tangentially linked to it as its victim. In other words, this work looks at modernity without reference to any 'idealised' criteria of what qualifies as 'modern' or not, studying the negotiation and legacies of the early modern period for the modern nation state. It focuses on the experience of modernity of non-European regions for they play a crucial role in the new phase of transformational patterns may have deeper roots than are generally assumed.Rejecting European characterisations of 'eastern' states as Oriental despotisms, the volume conceives of the early modern state as a negotiated enterprise, one that questions the assumption that state centralisation must be a key metric of success in modernisation. Among other topics, the book highlights: state formations in the three empires; legislation pertaining to taxation, property, police reform, the autonomy of legal sphere, the interaction of different types of law, law's role in governance, administrative practice, negotiated settlements and courts as sites of negotiation, the blurred boundaries between formal law and informal mediation; the ability of 18th century Qing and Ottoman imperial governments to accommodate diverse local particularities within an overreaching structure; and the pattern of regional development pointing to the accommodative institutional capacity of the Mughal empire.

This volume eschews programmatic solutions, focusing in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects.

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West. This book intends to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', and question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-European.

Includes the essays that complicate the sense of Pakistan as prone to failure.