During the course of our exploration of the history and architecture of central India, Mukhtar Ahmad Khān, a school teacher and local historian, directed our attention towards a collection of unpublished legal documents pertaining to the shrine of Shaykh Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in Dhār, Madhya Pradesh.1 As a corpus, these documents are concerned with grants of land, revenue, and legal issues regarding the management of the shrine, but they give, nonetheless, incidental information about the Chishtīs and the religious activities for which they were responsible. The shrine at Dhār—more correctly a dargāh—has enjoyed a continuous history from the fourteenth century to the present and is preeminent among the many Sufi places of pilgrimage in central India. Despite its manifest importance, the institutional, religious, and social histories of this dargāh await scholarly attention. The present article takes a first step in this direction by focusing on one crucial document that dates to the late seventeenth century.

This article classifies individual lexemes in Chinese dialects into four categories: popular, learnèd, colloquial, and literary. Popular and learnèd refer to the origins of a word: whether it has been transmitted orally or learned in an educational context. Colloquial and literary refer to usage. The traditional Chinese terms for distinguishing character readings, wén 文 and bái 白, literally ‘written’ and ‘spoken’, do not correspond neatly to the four categories that are proposed here. This article illustrates the differences between all six terms, mainly by using standard Mandarin and Běijīng dialect, and secondarily by using words from Mĭn and other dialects.

‘Swaraj’ is perhaps the most widely known of the keywords that are associated with Indian nationalism. Although it was initially used to translate the Western concept of ‘self-government’, by the second decade of the twentieth century, swaraj had become a complex term that could not be readily translated by using English expressions. Intellectual historians have extensively analysed the use of swaraj in the Gandhian oeuvre. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj has often been taken as a guide to explain the meaning of the term. However, the prior history of swaraj and the uses of swaraj by politicians who disagreed with Gandhi's definition of that term have not been adequately explored. To fill this lacuna, in this article, a selection of instances are examined that marked the transformation of swaraj from a traditional term that was associated with the precolonial Maratha history to an untranslatable term that was used by Indian nationalists to conceptualise their anti-colonial activism. I demonstrate here that swaraj was left untranslated in a range of English-language Indian political texts and documents to shape an agenda that was opposed to the collaborationist policies of imperial liberalism. The article thus illustrates the crucial role that the question of untranslatability played in sustaining the anti-colonial agenda of mainstream Indian nationalism.

In the late 1920s and the 1930s a fully developed discourse emerged in China that linked either travel as a general concept (mostly with a primary focus on its leisure form) or tourism more specifically to the interests of society and the nation. This article analyses its development as it evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. For this purpose, it first probes into the discourse that surrounded, from the 1920s onwards, the constitution and the activity of the Travel Department of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and of the China Travel Service, in line with which the travel service that one and the other provided was considered to involve dimensions of service to the nation and to society. The article proceeds by looking into two separate but ultimately linked lines of discourse that came to full bloom during the Nanjing decade and after: one that linked travel to the building of society, and another that linked it to the strengthening of the nation.

This article examines Ottoman–Portuguese commercial agreements in Basra during the century after 1622 and the legal ambiguities that they engendered. On two separate occasions, the Portuguese established a factory in Basra: first in 1624 during the reign of the Afrāsiāb pasha (who governed in the name of the Ottomans from 1612 to 1667) and once again in 1690 when the city was ruled again by Ottoman governors (Ottoman direct rule was restored in 1667). Yet there were myriad issues that supplied cause for disputation between the two parties, not least the legal status of the factory itself. On the face of it, both the Portuguese and the Ottoman functionaries in Basra operated according to divergent models of extraterritorial trading privileges. After a century of expansion on the coasts of Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese had grown accustomed to the model of the factory (feitoria), in both those places in which the Portuguese governed in their own name and those in which they traded at the sufferance of African and Asian rulers. On the other hand, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottomans had granted so-called capitulations to European powers in the Mediterranean, which were governed by norms that were distinct from the factory model of Africa and Asia. Basra brought these two models into interaction and disrupted the straightforward implementation of either model. Frequent moments of misunderstanding and manoeuvring between the two sides were the result.

The Brahman sage Gautama cursed Indra with emasculation, in some versions through the appearance of vulvas on his body, as a punishment for intercourse with Gautama's wife, Ahalyā; Ahalyā's punishment involved detraction from her visible or physical presence. I present an analysis of the version as told in Padmapurāṇa 1.54. The story, in addition to reflecting male suspicion of women and dread of feminisation, simultaneously functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of succumbing to lust and reflects inter-varṇa tension: the weak-willed Indra, a divine kṣatriya, is humiliated by the continent Gautama, whose asceticism is the source of the devastating power that he unleashes against both Indra and Ahalyā. I also compare this myth to the Greek tales of Achilles, Herakles, and Teiresias's feminisations, and suggest that the association of heroic feminisation with sexuality (as seen in the stories in which Indra, Achilles, and Herakles are feminised) may be a shared inheritance from Proto-Indo-European times. However, the myths of Achilles and Herakles's feminisations, like that of Indra's, are shaped by their specific cultural context: the feminised Greek heroes’ penetration of women is confirmation of their continued masculinity, rather than the result of a reprehensible lack of self-control.

This article traces how the Yemeni-origin Sufi order of Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its ritual litany of al-Ḥaddād, with chants and prayers for the Prophet and his descendants especially from Hadramawt, became part of everyday Muslim devotional practices in Malabar through immigrant networks of Hadrami Sayyids. Competing, sometimes rivalling, and appropriating other Sufi religiosities, the Alawi order meaningfully involved within the theo-legal Sufi discourses that have been remoulding the Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean. By focusing on two notable early immigrant Sayyids in Malabar, this article argues that the successful placement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual was a complex socio-religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.

Japan's Kobe City Museum holds a unique yet overlooked xylographic print of an early seventeenth-century composition that centres on a Chinese-language world map, mounted as a scroll. At first glance, the scroll seems to contain a copy of a well-known composition attributed to the Jesuit Giulio Aleni that is extant at two Italian libraries. It is known in the literature as Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, after the title of only one of three constitutive parts. Detailed comparison shows that the hitherto unstudied Kobe sheet is significantly older. This observation initiates a discussion of the contents and materiality of the Kobe sheet in three steps. First, a reconstruction of intertextual connections to late Ming books based on the introductory text illustrates the function of the sheet map. Second, the origins of the maps proper are investigated, which, unlike the introductory text, can be traced back to a collaborative book project. In a last step, the afterlife of these map sheets is discussed, further illuminating the genealogy of maps that facilitated the production of the Kobe sheet. Throughout, this article highlights the local co-creation of map artefacts and the necessity to study maps in context, beyond the analysis of their cartographic contents.