Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law: Self-Determination, Land Rights and Gender Justice in India. Indrani Sigamany. Routledge. 2026.

Law and historical injustice

Considering the layered history of development-induced displacement in India from the colonial times to today, one can situate Indigenous groups (Adivasis) firmly on the other side of development. Although people belong to tribe now comprise less than eight per cent of the population, they make up 40 to 50 per cent of the communities who are displaced. Among these are mobile and nomadic indigenous communities who are more vulnerable, as their mobility patterns are at odds with the governmentality of the state. Conservation policies (like the Forest Act of 1927 and the Forest Conservation Act of 1980) are most often at odds with the rights of persons inhabiting these forests, and other factors come into play within tribal groups, such as gender.

The book departs from other works that centre formal legal recognition by focusing on mobile and nomadic communities, who are often overlooked.

It is these nuances that Indrani Sigamany’s book Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law try to unravel. Her work is situated between three main scholarly conversations: first, global Indigenous land rights and law (see Anghie, 2023; Mutua and Anghie, 2000); forest law and Adivasi dispossession in India (see Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Galanter, 1968); and feminist political ecology (see Agarwal, 1992; Xaxa, 2004). The book departs from other works that centre formal legal recognition by focusing on mobile and nomadic communities, who are often overlooked. Sigamany employs a critical theory approach and an Indigenous-positionality approach, with a deep engagement with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006. The book argues that advancing substantive rights is crucial, but access to justice is mediated by other factors like administrative injustice.  

Chapter one undertakes an evolution of forest-based legislation from colonial to post independence times focusing on how these acts transformed common forest lands into state property and criminalised shifting cultivation practices. These legislative actions have had a devastating impact on indigenous communities. Sigamany points to the inconsistency of, and contradiction between, the growing international legal instruments on Indigenous rights and land laws (for example, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People 2007), and the national experience of tribal and indigenous communities (54). The author argues that although the FRA was enacted to undo the “historical injustice,” its implementation is fraught with administrative barriers, legal incompatibilities, and political tensions, which ultimately limit the transformative potential of the act. Thus, she questions whether the promise of justice is being realised through FRA, and whether administrative justice delivers for indigenous communities. Chapter one traces the historical trajectory of forest-based laws, and the proceeding chapters probe how these manifest in the experiences of the mobile communities. 

Is all land god’s land? 

Mobile indigenous peoples, who are usually pastoralists move with their herds through specific grazing corridors, and these corridors may not agree with the boundaries of the nation-state. Maldhari herders of Mera district, Gujarat (“Mal” means livestock and “Dhari” means owner) migrated through Afghanistan in the past, but after independence, they were limited to the borders of India and thus, their usufruct rights (the right to use and enjoy communal lands for the grazing of the herds) shrank. Being nomadic, they do not own any land; they have a saying that “all land is god’s land”, rejecting ideas of individual property ownership.  

Maldharis conventionally had a communal way of living. But these traditional practices were nearly eliminated with the coming of the dairy development initiative, the White Revolution in 1970. Their grazing lands also shrank due to sale of gauchar (pastoral) lands by the government to the private individuals and industries and violations by private individuals. All these losses of lands also had a gendered consequence, as it increased the workload of Maldhari women. For example, women now have the new task to gather fodder in addition to cooking and laundry. Women also lost the control of marketing the milk produce because of the encroaching dairy cooperative, thus losing their economic independence. Sigamany then looks at the Dhangar pastoralists of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra and illuminates how the economic foundations of their pastoral life were altered because of erosion of gauchar lands integration into capitalist markets.  

Traditional gairan (grazing fields) were re-allocated to private individuals and industries by the government, giving meagre compensation to those who were displaced.

Traditional gairan (grazing fields) were re-allocated to private individuals and industries by the government, giving meagre compensation to those who were displaced. The Government also declared their grazing field an Indian conservation area. These case studies expose India’s neoliberal capitalist system, in which the needs of the economic elite supersede those of tribal communities left marginalised and unprotected by the state (84). Only some take a legal route to assert their land rights, with many barriers to accessing the required knowledge and resources. Maldharis favoured political action, but Dhangars were introduced to the necessary legislation by an NGO (85), and the book reveals the key role of NGO support in seeking redress.  

Nomadic women and struggles for self-determination

Chapter three problematises the gender within Indigenous communities, arguing that tribal women face double discrimination of being tribal and female within an oppressive patriarchal culture. Whenever there is a threat to forest-based livelihood and loss of lands, it is experienced more acutely by women, as their productive and reproductive roles are closely interlinked with forest lands. Based on the case studies of Raika camel herders and settled Adivasi Forest community of Bhasla of southern Rajasthan (87), where active struggles for their lands were led by women, Sigamany unpacks the dichotomy of dual representation of women as victims and of women in control of their lives.

Chapter four attempts to broaden the frame by bringing in self-determination of tribal communities. By taking the examples of people who make a living from producing tendu patta (a type of cigarette) and their struggle against displacement, Sigamany shows how legislation is used to access justice. She showcases, how through NGO support and mobilisation, communities tried and succeeded to gain control over the tendu trade and transitioned from labourers to owners via a cooperative model. Similarly, in Amba village, communities were threatened with displacement when a survey order was passed which could change the status of and prohibit them from inhabiting it. The process became important as Gram Sabha (the general governing body of Gram Panchayat, a basic governing institution in Indian villages) participation was undermined and free prior and informed consent (FPIC) was not taken. The author terms this an example of “administrative injustice”. The lack of commitment by the administration has harmed forest communities and has ultimately complicated the use of legal mechanisms for forest rights (137). 

Can rights-based frameworks coexist with market-led growth?

Sigamany’s book is an excellent critical reflection on the debates surrounding mobile indigenous peoples and their land rights, illuminating the contested nature of justice and how it is negotiated at ground level, either politically or legally. However, there are some areas which merit reflection. For example, can rights-based frameworks coexist with market-led growth? There are also questions that arise from the tensions between collective rights of the indigenous communities and individuality of women. For example, while collective land titles are seen as an emancipatory response, they can also reproduce internal and gendered hierarchies regarding participation in decision making and control over resources. 

Nevertheless, her scholarship stimulates us to broaden our horizon regarding access to justice via rights-based frameworks and most importantly, it rejects the binary framing of laws as being either futile or emancipatory. As she argues, substantive rights like FRA are a welcome tool to secure legal redress for land violations, but it must be strengthened with other factors like administrative justice. This book will appeal to scholars and students of gender studies, human rights law and Indigenous studies, and it invites further research on the intersection of justice, mobility, and conservation governance.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Rachel O’Neill. Translated into simplified Chinese by Wei Huarong. Yuelu Publishing House. 2026. (Originally published in English by Polity Books in 2018.)

The malleability of the “pickup artist”

In January this year, my book Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity 2018) was released in Chinese translation. The book is an ethnographic study of the “seduction industry”, which purports to teach men the skills needed to be “good with women”. Working with an incredibly dedicated team in the months leading up to its release, I learned a great deal about the relevance of the topic in China, and had cause to reflect on the book’s arguments more generally several years on from its original publication.

One of the first and most interesting things I learned is that the term “PUA” – shorthand for “pickup artist”, a man skilled in seduction techniques – is commonly used in China, deployed to describe varied practices of emotional manipulation and even abuse. So commonplace is the phrase that its usage is largely divorced from any more concrete relationship to the “seduction community”, the actual community-industry hybrid from which it originates.  

The seduction community is not a “subculture” – something separate from and in some sense “under” the rest of society. Instead, it must be understood as a logical outgrowth of the “twin rationalities” of neoliberalism and postfeminism.

For me, this is a fascinating discovery, not only because it signals an important development in sexual politics in the region, but also because it exemplifies one of the book’s core arguments – namely, that the seduction community is not a deviation or departure, but instead an extension and acceleration. By this I mean that the seduction community is not a “subculture” – something separate from and in some sense “under” the rest of society. Instead, it must be understood as a logical outgrowth of the “twin rationalities” of neoliberalism and postfeminism.

The first of these posits that one’s problems in life are individual and must ultimately be resolved through individual effort. The second maintains that women today are empowered and indeed advantaged over men. Within the context of the seduction community, these logics combine to produce an understanding that heterosexual men can and should approach their intimate lives as something to be worked on, invested in, “optimised” and so forth. In doing so, they are licensed to deploy tactics that undermine women in a variety of ways, to “level the playing field”.

Neoliberal masculinity

This manner of thinking is in no way unique to avowed pickup artists. Instead, it “fits” with much wider beliefs about how people generally should be (active, entrepreneurial, ambitious) as well as how men specifically should be (assured, assertive, dominant, “masculine”).

The spread of “PUA” in China as a popular idiom demonstrates this point further. Many, even most, people there use it without particular reference to the seduction community, precisely because it’s a useful shorthand to describe socially prominent or expected ways of being a man. To the extent that the seduction community is a novel cultural entity, this is because it codifies practices of emotional manipulation, often in highly elaborate and technical ways, and creates a market to sell these techniques to apparently ever-growing numbers of men.

This latter point was another key learning for me. In the Anglosphere, there can be no doubt as to the pernicious influence of the “manosphere” on large numbers of young men, as demonstrated by the incredible popularity of figures such as Andrew Tate and dramatised via programmes such as Adolescence.

Despite an apparent crackdown by authorities in China following a high-profile suicide case some years ago, PUA content remains rife across popular social media platforms in the region. As LSE alum Kedi Zhou describes in an interview that prefaces the Chinese edition: “seduction techniques that once circulated only within niche forums are now front and centre on algorithm-driven platforms, often packaged as “confidence coaching”, “lifestyle content”, or “masculine strength and discipline””. Kedi highlights the prevalence of videos in which men secretly film themselves approaching women, an issue that is very live in UK also.  All this raises the question of what can and should be done about the general mainstreaming of PUA in China and elsewhere.

When I wrote the book, I made clear that targeting individuals – as happened, for example, with the international media event that surrounded American PUA Julien Blanc – offers limited grounds for change and can in fact generate further visibility for PUA content. Thus, while individual men need to be held responsible for their actions, as a tactic for feminist organisers this has serious drawbacks.

How tech enables PUA culture

A more beneficial approach may be to target specific practices associated with but not limited to PUA, such as covert filming. A staple of the PUA genre, content of this kind ranges from men filming their initial interactions with women in public spaces through to filming sexual scenarios in private settings. Moreover, the tactic is becoming ever harder for victims to spot, owing to the use of products such as Meta’s AI glasses.

Platforms actively promote seduction-related content to young men, serving this up as part of a masculinised media diet, whether or not male users demonstrate any particular interest in the subject.

Campaigns that target these practices have great potential. We have seen glimpses of this with mobilisations in South Korea under the slogan “my life is not your porn”, which feminist activists elsewhere can take inspiration from. A great deal more could also be done to regulate the technologies that facilitate covert filming, not least given that feminist campaigners have long raised concerns about their propensity to enable gendered abuse.

Crucially, we also need to turn our attention to platforms. YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, Rednote and others all host seduction-related content. Moreover, research demonstrates that many of these platforms actively promote such content to young men, serving this up as part of a masculinised media diet, whether or not male users demonstrate any particular interest in the subject. In this way and in many others, privately controlled and profit orientated social media exerts a distorting and frequently malignant force in the realm of intimate life, taking over more and more of the “space of our world”. Sexual politics cannot be held apart from such struggles, and indeed should be central to them.

A final question Kedi posed to me in our interview is what my hopes are for the book in its Chinese translation. As a teacher at LSE working with students from all over the world, including on a course dedicated to feminist media and cultural studies, I am very aware of how urgently many want to explore questions of intimacy and relationality amid renewed interest in feminist separatism as well as wider discourses of heteropessimism.

Against and beyond seduction

The book’s concluding chapter is called “Against Seduction”. It is a treatise against the seduction community, to be sure, but also and even more so against the vision of heterosexuality it makes available, one that is hugely effortful for men and at the same time full of animosity and antagonism towards women. This is, in my view, an impoverished vision, and one for which there is no necessary or in-built rationale, whether psychological or biological.

Manipulating women, manoeuvring them, striving for dominance – none of this actually offers men fulfilment at a human level.

It is also borne of the recognition that PUA does not serve men, not really. Manipulating women, manoeuvring them, striving for dominance – none of this actually offers men fulfilment at a human level. Indeed, attempting to realise a sense of masculine selfhood in this way can be deeply alienating, as was made clear to me by the deep loneliness, isolation and perpetual discontent many of my research participants recounted.  

We need to open up wider conversations between women and men about how they want to relate to one another, how they want to interact and engage, what relationships should feel like, if they are to escape the current “tragedy of heterosexuality”. My hope is that the Chinese translation of Seduction might enter into and become part of these conversations in small way. I am so grateful for the opportunity.

Note: This essay gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Islam: A New History from Muhammad to The Present. John Tolan. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Islam’s beginnings and evolution 

What are the roots of Islam, and how has it been interpreted and practiced in different ways across time and place since its inception? Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present by John Tolan, surveys a wide range of defining historical episodes and movements from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 6^th century through to today. Tolan’s historicising approach focuses not only on events, but highlights the diverse contributions of caliphs, travellers, Sufi saints, merchants, and Islamic reformers in shaping Islamic societies across regions and eras.  

From the spiritual legacy of Rabia al-Adawiyya, the 8th-century Muslim saint, to contemporary interpretations of Islam, the tradition has continually transformed, adapted, and evolved since its inception. During the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam remained unified under his direct guidance and the presence of his companions. However, the significant doctrinal and political developments emerged following his death in 632 CE. The first caliph was chosen by Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (632-634) and unifying the Arabian Peninsula and combating early waves of apostasy. The question of succession – specifically who would lead the Ummah (believers of Islam) – marked a decisive moment in Islamic history and led to the emergence of sectarianism such as Sunni and Shi’a. 

Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition.

Tolan draws attention to Nana Asmau, Uthman ibn Fodio’s daughter, a distinguished scholar, poet, Sufi, and reformer, who exercised significant intellectual and political influence during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the modern period, figures such as African American Imam Amina Wadud – who converted from Christianity to Islam – have continued this tradition of reinterpretation. In her work Qur’an and Woman (1999), Wadud argues that each generation of Muslims must retain the freedom to reread and reinterpret the Quran, underscoring Islam’s dynamic and evolving engagement with history, and society. Further, Tolan highlights how Muslim scholars, organisations, and leaders have politically mobilised Muslim communities across the world and their contribution of proliferations of Islam especially in the Middle East, the USA and Europe. He discusses figures from an Egyptian author Gamal al-Banna to the brother of Hassan al-Banna and from Malcolm X to Mahmud Muhammad Taha and Bilali Muhammad.  

The Quran and sectarianism

Tolan  episodic historical approach zones in on key events in Islam, particularly those surrounding the compilation of the Quran and the struggle for political authority after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. The Quran was first full text compiled in written form during the caliph of Uthman ibn Affan, a process that later became a source of sectarian controversy. Certain Shi’a scholars such as Ibn Abil Hadid and Yasir al-Habib have argued that portions of the original revelation were concealed, alleging that Ali ibn Abi Talib as the rightful successor were omitted, and that some Quranic materials were destroyed during the standardisation of the text. 

Tolan further situates these theological disputes within the larger political conflicts between emerging Sunni authorities and Shi’a factions during the Umayyad period, followed by the Abbasid era, when competing claims to the caliphate continued to shape Islamic governance. He demonstrates how the institution of the caliphate became a source of deep and enduring division within Islam. For instance, Tolan discusses accusations directed at Ali in relation to the assassination of Caliph Umar, including claims that Ali protected and facilitated the escape of the assassin, Piruz Nahavandi – a Persian captive taken during the Battle of Al-Qadisiyya (25). Through these episodes, Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition. 

Islam’s spread and divisions 

Initially, Islam expanded its dominance from Damascus (634 CE) to Antioch (637 CE) and Jerusalem (638 CE). By the time of Caliph Umar’s death in 644 CE, the Islamic empire spanned from Libya to Afghanistan and from Azerbaijan to Yemen. Later, Tolan briefly discusses the rise of Islam most continents of the world through battles, merchants, and Sufi’s spirituality. Tolan notes that how the first Fitna or civil war stated in the 7^th century in Islam which gave to rise new sectarian divisions such as Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kharijites. These sects started to practice Islam in their own ways. For instance, Shi’a believed that Ali was first Caliph of Umma and Sunnis believed Abu-Bakr, and some Muslim rulers imposed a Jizya (tax) on Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Hindus. 

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims

Tolan highlights the significance of Ibn Battuta’s Rihla (1959) in understanding the global spread and lived diversity of Islam. Battuta’s travels from Mecca to Mali, India, Mauritius, and China – illustrate how Islam adapted cultures across regions. Serving as a qadi (a Muslim judge) in India under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and later as an envoy to China, Battuta offers detailed observations on governance, economy, and international relations. His vivid, experiential narrative enriches Islamic history, particularly through contributions such as his writing of hadith (corpus of sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) in Arabic at the request of Muhammad ben Aydin, Sultan of Birki (Birkin) (125). 

Colonial influence and modern Islam 

In the chapter “Colonization and Its Discontents, 1798-1918,” Tolan traces the history of European colonisation in Muslim societies from the late 18th to the early 20th century. He examines how India came under the control of European powers such as the East India Company, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, who established colonial regimes across different regions. Tolan highlights how the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) employed Muslims to codify Islamic law in matters of inheritance, marriage, and divorce, at Masulipatnam (Andhra Pradesh), Malabar Coast (Kerala) Gujarat, and some part of Bengal, while the British East India Company similarly institutionalised Islamic (Sharia) law for Muslims in Bengal, Madras, Bombay presidencies and later all over India as part of its colonial governance strategy (168).  

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims. For instance, the Deobandi Movement founded in 1866, went against modern western education and promoted traditional studies (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh). Contrastingly, Sir Syed Ahmad founded Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, to modernise education with Islamic values. Later, these movements spread not only across the Indian subcontinent but also to the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.   

Overall, Tolan’s book is a comprehensive account of key Islamic events and historical developments; however, some of his arguments are insufficiently substantiated. For instance, the claim that Shi’a Muslims believed that Ayesha (wife of Muhammad) concealed Quranic verses proving Ali’s rightful succession is presented with limited evidentiary support. The book also overlooks the significant role of Sufi traditions in the spread of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, particularly the contributions of key figures. Nonetheless, Tolan’s work offers a broad historical perspective on Islam’s evolution, transformation, and the emergence of diverse sects across regions. The book focuses primarily on political events in Islamic history and their role in the making and unmaking of Islam. In so doing, it makes a meaningful contribution for Islamic scholars, academicians and individuals to understand the evolution of Islam from Muhammad to present.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty. Tulasi Srinivas. Duke University Press. 2025.

What does beauty and the many forms of labour, consumption and culture that surround it, look like in contemporary Bangalore (Bengaluru)? Tulasi Srinivas’s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnographic study of contemporary Indian beauty parlours in the capital city of the state of Karnataka, India. The beauty parlours located in every corner of contemporary urban India may initially seem like unlikely sites for political anthropology. But Srinivas’s detailed account of the moral, political and emotional worlds that sustain the beauty parlour begs to differ. Through vivid descriptions of bodies, relations, and myths, Srinivas adroitly demonstrates how the pursuit of beauty is deeply intertwined with gender, religion, and power in urban India. 

Beauty parlours have emerged as crucial sites for understanding contemporary urban life as spaces where gender, labour, consumption, and cultural transformation meet, yet few ethnographies have captured their complexity. Srinivas thus makes an original and worthwhile intervention with this work. Her scholarly background in anthropology of religion and ethics permeates the work. Each chapter explores a theme corresponding to an aspect of the goddess and a facet of beauty culture, providing the book with a conceptual symmetry. Srinivas’s analysis of beauty is deeply feminist, while also expanding feminist discourse by including perspectives beyond the heteronormative frame. This book challenges both Western feminist discourses on beauty, which are mostly centred on cisgender heterosexual women’s experiences and South Asian feminist scholarship on embodiment and public space. Both of those traditions have tended to overlook queer and transgender experiences in discussions of beauty, labour, and aspiration.  

Ethnographic approaches and urban context 

The book is immersive, seamlessly blending theory and case studies and a multi-sited ethnographic approach of participant observation and in-depth interviews at beauty parlours around Bangalore. Encompassing upscale boutiques to modest neighbourhood salons, the client base of these beauty parlours is wide, serving women from different classes and castes from middle-class housewives to working-class migrants and queer communities. This enables Srinivas to capture the heterogeneity of the beauty industry. 

The work situates intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which the beauty services sector exploded

Crucially, the work situates these intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which it emerged as a global tech hub. During the same period, the beauty services sector exploded, and by the end of the 1990s, the “personal care” market was booming. In this neoliberal urban milieu and capitalist expansion, when beauty work became a new labour niche, Srinivas’s ethnography stays attentive to everyday life and interpersonal relationships in the salon. She documents the intimate ties between beauticians and their clients, and how the salon becomes a microcosm of Bangalore’s social contrasts and connections.  

Her fieldwork combines traditional observation with a knack for narrative. For example, Srinivas describes sitting with beauticians as they styled hair or threaded eyebrows, and interweaves these descriptions with stories of film stars, Hindu goddesses, and personal hopes. She acknowledges the unstable power dynamics between the researcher and subjects in the salon setting, as well as the challenge of representing intimate, embodied experiences without exploiting them. Srinivas’s reflexivity about her own positionality as a researcher and as an Indian-American anthropologist returning to Bangalore strengthens the ethnography. She occasionally appears in the narrative, which humanises the account, renders her presence and learning process transparent. 

Beauty as a social, moral and political project

A central contribution of this book is its reconceptualisation of beauty as a richly layered social project. Srinivas notes that the concept of beauty has long been a central ethical category in South Asian cosmology. She illuminates how the abundance of beauty signifies auspiciousness, moral virtue and order, while ugliness in myth signals evil, chaos, or the asura (demonic) realm. This cultural association of beauty with goodness means that women’s appearances are never politically neutral.  

Clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires.

Srinivas argues that women in Bangalore’s salons practice ethical self-fashioning. As they seek smoother skin or more radiant faces, they also shape their “ethical subjectivities” through storytelling and ritual practice. For example, clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires. Beauty is a political resource, a way for women to navigate recognition as an intersubjective acknowledgement of one’s social standing and worth, as well as respectability and opportunities within the prevalent power dynamics.  

Rather than romanticise beauty, Srinivas outlines its complexity. It is not entirely empowering or oppressive, but a constantly evolving arena of negotiation. This perspective counters the Western feminist discourse that attempts to place beauty within binaries; they either view beauty solely as a patriarchal trap or they see it as a form of liberation. Within this context, Srinivas portrays beauty as part of everyday politics involving ethics and feelings. 

Myth, narrative and embodiment 

Salons of Bangalore are revealed as storied spaces where women often recount Hindu epics and legends alongside Bollywood plots and personal anecdotes, through which they process their realities. A beautician might compare a client’s predicament with a scene from the Mahabharata, or a group of clients collectively riff on the beauty contests of celestial apsaras. Such storytelling, Srinivas argues, functions much like Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights (an endless story technique that is ultimately survivalist)She suggests that Bangalorean women sustain hope and community through shared mythic references. This perspective resonates with current anthropological interest in affect and futurity in neoliberal societies, as Srinivas aligns with scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Lauren Berlant who view narrative and imagination as essential tools for managing uncertain futures. 

Srinivas does not side with scholars (such as Talal Asad and Johannes Fabian) who argue that myth is “passé” in contemporary anthropology, a mere reflection of something else. In fact, in her fieldwork, she observes how myth provides a vocabulary of embodiment and emotion that bridges the personal and the cosmic. Srinivas’s writing excels in conveying the sensory and affective dimensions of this process. 

Caste and labour politics of beauty 

Srinivas also illuminates macro-political issues through grounded, everyday encounters, analysing the caste and class dynamics underlying India’s beauty culture. She delves into the politics of skin colour and caste to argue how fair skin – coded as savarna (upper-caste) and upper-class – remains a premium beauty ideal in India. Srinivas powerfully juxtaposes the myth of Draupadi with Mahasweta Devi’s subaltern story of Dopdi. Through this retelling, she exposes how social violence against darker-skinned women persists in contemporary India, albeit in new guises. She shows how caste inequalities are both reinforced and contested in everyday beauty work. 

A book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle

Labour and economic exploitation form another critical thread of her work, as Bangalore’s beauty workers are often young women from the northeastern states or from marginalised caste backgrounds. Srinivas analytically links personal narratives of loneliness of migration and vulnerability to abuse, and a constant negotiation of belonging to wider political-economic structures. She argues that beauty labour is political labour in the sense of who gets to occupy urban spaces, whose bodies are considered desirable or polluting and how global capitalist forces intersect with ancient inequities of caste.  

One potential limitation of the work stems from its analytical breadth. Srinivas sets out to combine mythology, economics, sensory ethnography, and political critique all in one volume, resulting in certain topics being touched upon but not followed explored in depth. Similarly, the detours into Sanskrit aesthetics and epic myths might overwhelm readers unfamiliar with these references and can occasionally lead to an idealised interpretation of its role. 

That said, this is a valuable and nuanced book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle. In terms of disciplinary impact, The Goddess in the Mirror may well become a touchstone for integrating aesthetic and affective dimensions into analyses of power.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better. Daniel Silverman. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

When making political judgements, citizens must confront an array of false or inaccurate information held or spread intentionally (disinformation) or unintentionally (misinformation). Such information, if not filtered out as false, informs how we evaluate everything from political candidates to climate change. Misinformation can even foment violence. As such, academics from a range of disciplines have recently examined the power of misinformation and considered ways to reduce its influence across countries ranging from India to the United States. They have studied misinformation about topics as diverse as vigilante violence against minorities, health care, climate change, and science denialism more broadly. 

Misinformation in conflict contexts 

Despite the burgeoning research into the topic of misinformation broadly, there is strikingly little work on misinformation in conflict contexts. In Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better, Daniel Silverman makes an important contribution to our understanding of people’s beliefs amidst war. In doing so, he also contributes to a vibrant literature on civilian attitudes in and about war. Regular people’s beliefs in factual inaccuracies about the war matter, he argues, because these beliefs likely play a role in larger conflict processes and outcomes. Silverman focuses on inaccuracies about civilian targeting; a wealth of evidence indicates that indiscriminate civilian targeting can drive civilians to support the opponents of the perpetrator (see, for example, Kocher et al. 2011 and Lyall et al. 2013). 

Beliefs in factual inaccuracies depend on, first, whether people have firsthand or local information about the relevant events and, second, whether they have incentives to seek accurate information

In this book, Silverman argues that beliefs in factual inaccuracies depend on, first, whether people have firsthand or local information about the relevant events and, second, whether they have incentives to seek accurate information. Individuals that live near violence have local knowledge, and they seek accurate information because their lives may depend on it. In contrast, people far removed from the violence have only information from partisan media, and they do not need accurate information so instead rely on directional motivated reasoning. Silverman therefore hypothesises that, compared to individuals living close to violence, those living at a remove from conflict will hold more inaccurate beliefs and be more vulnerable to believing misinformation.  

A mixed-methods approach 

Silverman uses a creative mixed-method approach to test this argument. First, drawing on Pew surveys fielded between 2009 and 2012, he finds that concerns about how discriminate US drone strikes are shape opposition to that drone campaign. Second, drawing on work with Kaltenthaler and Dagher (2021), Silverman analyses an original survey of Iraqis to examine their agreement with factual misperceptions about Coalition airstrikes. He finds that Iraqis who have lived in areas close to the violence are less likely to agree with the incorrect claims. Further, the effects of prior attitudes toward the US on belief in misperceptions are more limited among those who have been exposed to the violence. Finally, using data from 179 semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees living in Turkey – collected by Schon (2020) – Silverman finds that individuals are more likely to believe that they are able to discern true from false information when they have been more exposed to conflict. Silverman also briefly explores some qualitative information from the interviews which demonstrates that proximity to conflict events was crucial for many people’s development of a clear understanding of the war.  

Self-reported truth discernment cannot necessarily measure agreement with misinformation

The book uses data from three different countries, lending credence to the generalisability of the argument. However, while the chapter on Iraq (chapter four) contains a careful experiment which directly tests the larger argument of the book, it isn’t clear how the sections on Pakistan (chapter three) and Syria (chapter five) test the key theory. Chapter three shows that concerns about civilian harm shape support for US drone strikes, and drone strikes themselves shape attitudes toward a range of political actors; these findings don’t directly concern misinformation. Chapter five focuses on people’s confidence in their ability to differentiate true from false information. But presumably people who believe untrue information also believe that they are capable of discerning the truth; indeed, there is some evidence that people who believe they can “do their own research” are also more likely to agree with falsehoods. As such, self-reported truth discernment cannot necessarily measure agreement with misinformation.   

Challenges for research in a conflict zone 

Conducting quantitative political opinion research in conflict zones is quite difficult, sometimes necessitating the use of imperfect measures like those discussed above. Given such challenges, the book would have been greatly enriched by more extensive qualitative work entailing language skills, fieldwork, and/or text analysis. For example, in the discussions of war-related misinformation in Pakistan (Chapter three) and Iraq (Chapter four), there seem to be no direct citations from the sources promoting the misinformation or even news stories in Urdu, Arabic, or Kurdish. Non-experts in the region would have benefitted from a much more developed discussion of the relevant misinformation.  

Readers would also stand to benefit from qualitative insights developed in interviews or focus groups conducted by the author on the precise topic of the book. Conversations about, for example, where people receive their information from and who they choose or choose not to believe, would be profoundly informative. Silverman suggests toward the end of the book that the next step in this research agenda is a more in-depth exploration of the role of cognition and psychology in susceptibility to wartime misinformation, but it seems as though interviews or focus groups could have helped further this precise research agenda. 

Those criticisms aside, I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding misinformation or civilian attitudes in conflict. As media continues to fracture, misinformation will play an ongoing role in politics around the world; this book helps us understand some of the factors that lead people to believe it.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle. Ching Kwan Lee. Harvard University Press. 2025.

The stories we tell ourselves can be incomplete without being untrue. That is one starting point of this ambitious work that situates a pivotal moment in Hong Kong’s history within a larger frame of geopolitical tension, rival capitalisms and postcolonial subjectivity. In Forever Hong Kong, Ching Kwan Lee offers something more thought-provoking than the conventional portrait of democracy versus authoritarianism. Nor do theories of inequality in global cities explain Hong Kong’s politicisation. In her view, existing approaches capture “the moment but not the movement, the appearance but not the essence of the uprising”. Instead, the core issue is the transformation of colonised subjects into historical agents, and their search for self-determination. 

Hong Kong’s double coloniality

The central claim is that Hong Kong’s protests in 2019 were a response to a “double coloniality coproduced by British and Chinese rule”. Lee argues that the decolonisation struggle has been directed not only towards political domination by mainland China but also legacies of British rule and crises of capitalism. She gives two main reasons to adopt this “decolonising” lens. The first is to understand the aspirations of a social and political movement. The second is to analyse the claims of Chinese officials that the problem of governing Hong Kong is one of unfinished decolonisation. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, ‘with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations’.

Lee’s approach inevitably raises questions about how to situate the case of Hong Kong within broader histories. She reminds us that Hong Kong was not entirely outside the wave of decolonisation after the Second World War. Both expatriate and Chinese reformers in the colony demanded constitutional changes. But the city was actively detached from this trajectory when the PRC gained a permanent seat at the United Nations in 1971 and successfully campaigned to remove Hong Kong and Macau from the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories. The complicity of British and Chinese policy in perpetuating Hong Kong as a colony informs Lee’s framework of “double coloniality”. At the same time, an aversion to communist rule shaped an ambivalent relationship between the people of Hong Kong and colonial modernity. Lee also asks us to consider both coercive assimilation and the politics of difference as tools of imperial domination. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, “with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations”. The puzzle is why this transformation intensified under “national” Chinese rule rather than “alien” British rule. Chapter One begins by juxtaposing foundational myths in the pre-1997 period – such as those of stability, rule of law, and free-market utopia – with the inconvenient realities that these incomplete stories ignored. Chapter Two focuses on the “interregnum” (1997-2017) when one political master had left the stage and the next had yet to establish itself. These chapters describe the conditions under which people responded to crises in the postcolony and began to make demands beyond the parameters of double coloniality.  

A postcolonial generation 

The following chapters go inside the 2019 movement and identify a postcolonial generation as the force behind the making of a political community. Lee contrasts this with other struggles of decolonisation, which were often spearheaded by a national bourgeoisie, an exploited working class or a dispossessed peasantry. As the title Forever Hong Kong hints at, “a new temporality imposed by the new sovereign” paradoxically accelerated the cognitive rupture of a political generation from the foundations of colonial hegemony. This led a pragmatic majority to join a struggle that had been led by a minority of passionate youths. The generation that came of age after 1997 experienced disagreement and tension as the movement developed, but has retained its primacy in assembling people otherwise divided by class, gender, race and religion.  

This book raises significant questions that are not fully resolved. One is the extent to which the articulation of a decolonising subjectivity glosses over persisting or new ambivalences among the population. Lee notes on multiple occasions that individuals’ identification with decolonisation is uneven. The precise nature of this unevenness deserves further attention. The author also points out how many activists’ demands were couched in concrete terms – like universal suffrage, anti-extradition or anti-national education – rather than explicit visions of a more completely decolonial polity. Since political identification can be implicit, we need more tools to examine the non-discursive dimensions of agency and subjectivity. Lee offers a starting point with ethnographic insights on the process of action. She is concerned not with elites and their texts but with communities of action (or what citizens called 抗爭共同體, “communions in resistance”) in the birth of a political community. And yet the exact relationship between praxis, theory and subjectivity remains unclear. Clarifying this relationship would be analytically fruitful: under what conditions does repeated action lead to qualitative changes in political consciousness? It would also allow us to better understand what a legacy of resistance looks like in the absence of an overarching theory of change.  

Waves of self-determination? 

Beyond these questions are broader implications about the persistence of demands for self-determination in the 21^st century. Commentaries during the Second World War already talked about the rise and fall of self-determination. By telling a story from the mid-20^th century through to the 2020s, Lee convincingly shows that self-determination has an unfinished history that takes the form of multiple waves. She doesn’t make clear, however, whether we should understand the case of Hong Kong to be at the beginning, the middle or the end of a wider wave. Another suggestion is that Hong Kong’s experience with multiple empires makes obvious what has always been the case: that colonial domination does not hail exclusively from the West. Demands for self-determination will evolve as the world moves beyond the demise of European empires into a multipolar age. How will the meaning of equality – the concept with which Lee ends the book – change in tandem with patterns of domination? 

Does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination?

The unfinished history of self-determination is not just about periodisation. It is also about the generational aspect of political identity. In addition to the role of a political generation in catalysing a movement for self-determination, Lee shows the effect of such a movement in the making of generations. In other words, she connects the sociological problem of generations with the political question of self-determination. Like recent reinterpretations of Black Atlantic world ordering and the indigenous politics of refusal, this book looks beyond statehood as the only way to assess the goals and outcomes of such movements. Instead, it draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation entelechy”, which refers to the realisation of potentialities inherent in a cohort. The book invites us to ask: does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination, alongside or in lieu of other social categories? If so, what difference does that make? And if a generation cannot access state power, through what political processes can its agency materialise in shaping its destiny?

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. Stephen Witt. The Bodley Head. 2025.

Anna D’Alton (AD): Your book, The Thinking Machine, is a deep dive into the titan tech company, Nvidia and a detailed profile of Jensen Huang, its co-founder and CEO. Why did you think it was important to examine Huang and Nvidia at that granular level?

Stephen Witt (SW): He’s the most successful businessman of our era, and there really hadn’t been much written about him. I first came across Nvidia 20 years ago when it was a manufacturer of video game equipment. It was a choppy affair; a lot of people were shorting the stock, they didn’t believe in Huang. And for 10 or 15 years, the stock basically didn’t do anything, so I stopped paying attention.

Then in 2022, I started experimenting with Midjourney and ChatGPT, these incredible generative AI models, and I was blown away. I wanted to write about it, but OpenAI was a very crowded story, so I was looking for another way in. I came back to Nvidia, and found that a minor manufacturer of video game accessories had transformed itself into the producers of the hardware for all the AI that was running, making that technology possible.

As I researched it, I remembered Huang, but assumed he would be gone by now. It had been 30 years since he’d taken on the role of CEO, when the company was founded in 1993. But, to my surprise he was still there, and is the single longest-serving tech CEO in the S&P 500. I thought that was a fascinating story. Huang completely re-engineered Nvidia to make it the most valuable company in the world – in history, by some measures.

AD: Thinking about the scale of the technological transformation Nvidia was part of and the microchips they produce, how did Huang’s understanding of, approach to, graphics processing units (GPUs) change the game?

SW: Huang and his co-founders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, entered the dawning GPU market in the early 90s because it looked promising. They were somewhat naive at the outset: they had 50 or 60 competitors, each one vying for the market, which led to a fight to the death! Within six or seven years, Nvidia emerged as the winner, but Huang was scarred, and disinclined ever to participate in such a crowded marketplace again. He had these successful graphics circuits that powered computer graphics and image processing in the gaming industry, and he started looking for other, more niche arenas where his company might grow.

Even if you are the big, established incumbent player, you have to deliberately lower your profit margins and build products for niche customers that don’t seem profitable to your shareholders.

He saw that scientists were taking the circuits in the graphics cards and repurposing them for scientific computing applications, like quantum physics or weather forecasting. He decided to build a tool for them, knowing he wouldn’t have competition there because it was such a small market. He built a software platform called CUDA that essentially allowed you to flip a switch and transform the graphics card from a toy for video games into a real scientific tool. This attracted a whole host of new users, including, eventually, AI developers – a turn of events Huang and his team hadn’t predicted. Once he saw that AI was turbo-charging the company as the sector began to take off in 2013 or 2014, he pivoted Nvidia overnight from gaming to AI, and that gamble paid off.

AD: And that was quite a wild leap. What are the qualities, choices or insights that led Huang to achieve such astronomical success with Nvidia?

SW: Huang is an engineer. He has taken risks, mostly informed risks, some of them more outlandish. Nvidia will sometimes come out with a product or do something mystifying, but Huang’s perspective is this, and I agree with it: that there is more risk in not taking risks. If you look at the history of computing and the semiconductor industry, the pattern is that small, marginal companies move into tiny markets, which the big guys ignore because they’re low-profit and low-margin, so they’re happy to cede that business to a small player. But then the small player leverages that small market, grows it, and raids the industry from below, ultimately eliminating and usurping the large player. This is known as disruption, a phrase coined by the management consultant Clayton Christensen, who had observed this happen in the hard drive market, and wrote a book about it called The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997).

The lesson here, which is very hard to learn, is that even if you are the big, established incumbent player, you have to deliberately lower your profit margins and build products for niche customers that don’t seem profitable to your shareholders. It’s very hard to do, and it disgruntles your shareholders. But this is what Huang was doing with CUDA. He absorbed the lesson of disruption early, and leveraged it to build a successful company.

AD: How would you describe the speed and scale of the gains in computing power in the last decade or two?

SW: I don’t know the exact figures, but it’s on the order of millions and billions of times faster, and that’s just at the level of the individual microchip. When we think about scaling it up to the level of the data centre, which is basically a giant barn full of Nvidia microchips, it’s totally unprecedented. Huang has described this ramp-up as “the new industrial revolution”, and I think he’s right about that, both in terms of the amount of capital that’s being deployed to build these systems and the scale of impact it’s going to have on productivity and society.

There are extremely smart teams of people inside Google, Amazon and other companies, and their only objective is to destroy Nvidia.

AI has turned out to be a heavy industry, and that was not something people anticipated when they were experimenting with these systems 10 years ago. That’s arguably been the biggest surprise. AI’s capabilities increase in a direct fashion with scale, and that has proven to be quite a profitable equation for Nvidia.

AD: Looking at competitors, with Google and Huawei now producing advanced chips, do you think there are any real challengers to Nvidia?

SW: Yes, Google especially. Google just built a world-class AI. Recent independent evaluations of AI suggest that Google Gemini is at the top of the pack. And Gemini was not trained on Nvidia chips; they use their own in-house chip called the Tensor Processing Unit. This poses a huge threat to Nvidia. To cope with competition, Huang has become a confidante of Donald Trump. This has enabled him to remove restrictions on exports to China, which is a huge AI market. But the Chinese authorities have discouraged internal use of Nvidia hardware because they’re trying to build their own stack. So that’s another huge threat. Other companies like AMD and Broadcom are certainly trying to drive Nvidia’s profit margin down. I don’t think they’ve yet been successful. But as Huang himself says, there are extremely smart teams of people inside Google, Amazon and other companies, and their only objective is to destroy Nvidia.

AD: Today AI is so dominant and there’s such fanfare about it. But some have spoken about an AI bubble, questioning whether it is as stable and sure a bet as we think, or whether there’s over-investment. What are your thoughts on that?

SW: This is a transformative technology – you can’t argue otherwise. There are 800 million people using ChatGPT every week. It’s transforming society. Having said that, the railroads transformed society, as did the internet. And there were still investment bubbles related to it. Something can be the real deal and still have an investment bubble form around it; in fact, it possibly makes it more likely.

The question is not so much what AI can do, but whether the timing of cash flows will pay off. We have to prove pretty quickly, given the scale of investment, that all this money being dumped into these data centres is going to produce a useful product pronto.

The question is not so much what AI can do, but whether the timing of cash flows will pay off. We have to prove pretty quickly, given the scale of investment, that all this money being dumped into these data centres is going to produce a useful product pronto. And if there turns out to be some kind of ceiling there, if we turn out to plateau with this current approach of scaling, that could trigger a cascade of disappointed Chief Financial Officers pulling Capital Expenditure – the funds companies allocate to buy, upgrade and maintain essential physical assets like property, technology, or equipment – away from this sector. And if that were to happen, Nvidia’s stock price would drop significantly, and the whole stock market could follow.

I can’t quite tell if we are living in that world or not – both the bubble side and the non-bubble side make great points. Certain sectors of the tech economy are more clearly unstable to me: quantum computing is in an obvious bubble right now, in my opinion. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were a bubble. AI doesn’t quite fit or feel like that because we are, in fact, in the middle of a real paradigm shift, a real technological revolution. And the companies involved, for the most part, are extremely well capitalised and run by smart people.

Note: This interview gives the views of the person interviewed and the interviewer, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India. Sanjaya Baru. Penguin Random House India. 2025.

Drivers of Indian migration 

Indians take pride in being the world’s largest democracy and the fastest growing major economy, but the realities of governance in a vastly multicultural country pose a great challenge. Several systemic weaknesses are contributing to outward migration, from India’s archaic tax regime and bureaucratic overreach to deep socio-economic inequalities and a widening trust deficit among the country’s diverse ethnic groups. And it’s not just blue-collar workers: relatively well-off Indians are emigrating in growing numbers. As a result, Indians have become the largest diaspora in the world, a trend that has accelerated in the last two decades. 

In Secession of the Successful, Sanjaya Baru, a political economist and one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, analyses different waves of Indian emigration in the past 200 years, tracing the changing socio-economic nature of each wave. The book is situated at the intersection of public policy and governance studies and adds to the existing body of literature on migration from the developing to the developed world. It comes at a time when debate over immigration and the tightening of immigration policy is raging worldwide, with no sign of abating. 

As India’s elite increasingly move overseas, by taking up residency or acquiring citizenship, they disassociate themselves from India’s future.

According to Baru, Indians have historically migrated to distant lands, but emigration in large numbers can be traced back to the early 19th century when the colonial state transported people as indentured labour. This first wave was followed by a second one in the 1960s that comprised of semi-skilled workers travelling to Gulf in search of higher wages. Baru clarifies that he prefers the term “overseas” over “diaspora” as the latter does not capture the social, economic, and regional diversity of overseas Indians (90). Referring to overseas Indians as Pravasi Bhartiya (Non-Resident Indian) is also faulty, he contends, since it fails to inspire overseas Indians to either return or invest more in the home economy, an explicit objective of the Indian government (39). 

Brain and wealth drain or “secession of the successful” 

The book is more focused on understanding the third wave of emigration, beginning in the 1970s, and the fourth wave, coinciding with the dawn of the 21st century. These two waves, comprising largely of middle-class professionals and high-net worth individuals (HNIs), is what Baru collectively refer to as “elite migration”– a term he adapts from Devesh Kapur’s work on the domestic impact of international migration from India. This group, constituting India’s social, economic and power elite, comprises the major chunk of those emigrating in the third and the fourth waves and amounts to what Baru calls the “secession of the successful”. This is because as India’s elite increasingly move overseas, by taking up residency or acquiring citizenship, they disassociate themselves from India’s future. The fourth wave is, however, distinct from the third, as the push and pull factors coalesce to the “ease of living” overseas – broadly implying better living standards and less state interference – compared to India. 

The flight of India’s elite is in turn reigniting the debate over “bran drain” in developing societies (44). Whether the emigration of Indians is something to celebrate or regret is a recurrent question the book raises. By referring to the works of economists like Dadabhai Naoroji, Jagdish Bhagwati and V.M. Dandekar, among other international economists like Harry G. Johnson, Herbert Grubel and Anthony Scott, Baru unpacks the debate of around the effects of migration from developing to developed societies. The combined effect of skilled labour migration is an international transfer of resources in the form of human capital, often referred to as the “brain drain” (49). While several top Indian officials and leaders, from Manmohan Singh to Narendra Modi, have hailed brain gain over brain drain, Baru suggests this official endorsement for emigration has accelerated and legitimised the latter (61). This loss of human capital is accompanied by a drain of wealth due to the flight of HNIs (138), both of which negatively impact the economy. Another impact of the mass emigration of India’s youth means that ageing parents are left without care. This calls for the Indian state to make policies that cater to the needs of the elderly (164). 

Religious and political implications of emigration 

Another emerging trend among the Indian diaspora is growing public assertion of religion fused with political mobilisation (196). Unlike previously, when India sought to protect the interests of its diaspora in countries with significant communities of overseas Indians, such as in Fiji, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, rising political divisions among this diverse diaspora, particularly in the West, is hurting its image and harming India’s bilateral relations with friendly countries like Canada (204). Baru gives the example of overseas Hindu Indians, showing how their political activism and religion-infused nationalism have promoted the cause of “Global Hindutva” (207). 

The irony with such ‘Globalised Indian Nationalists’ is that their religious nationalism does not translate into a desire to return home

The irony with such “Globalised Indian Nationalists” is that their religious nationalism does not translate into a desire to return home (212). In fact, most of the professionals and wealthy overseas Indians rarely return, whom Baru calls “Non-Returning Indians” (43). Moreover, concerns from host countries over their political activism and potential impacts on India’s democracy has prompted Indian diplomatic efforts to counter alleged anti-India activities (218). This has made overseas Indians, as Baru says, both a diplomatic bridge and a political challenge to be managed. 

India and rising anti-immigration policy worldwide 

Overseas Indians, until now, have reaped the benefits of liberal immigration regimes in the West, while enjoying a favourable portrayal as “good citizens” in the Gulf. But this may be imperilled as anti-immigration sentiments grow worldwide. Already, protectionist leader Donald Trump has curtailed the issuance of H-1B visas in the US, curtailing a key access route for skilled labour and qualified professionals from abroad. In a scenario of reduced opportunities in the world labour market, managing migration has become increasinlgy difficult and contentious for sender and host countries. 

The book could have been improved by incorporating a broader range of existing academic works on development and governance in India. For example, Dipankar Gupta argues in his book The Caged Phoenix (2010) that India’s phenomenal growth has not translated into development due to high levels of income and wealth inequality. Baru does cite data on economic and wealth inequality in India, but does not clearly link it with his main argument. Moreover, in in his 2019 book, India’s Power Elite, Baru situates his analysis of the changing caste and class composition of India’s elite within the existing theoretical literature on elites to build a strong argument. Secession of the Successful lacks a similarly robust and compelling theoretical framework to make its case. 

Nevertheless, the book grapples with pressing questions. It will be a valuable resource for both a general audience interested in the causes and effects of Indian emigration, and public policy officials dealing with managing migration. Overall, Secession of the Successful make a significant contribution to the understanding of the future of democracy, and debates around the ease of living in India.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Graphic Gears on Unsplash.

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Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria: Language, Literacy, and Power in Late Qing Borderlands. Jiani He. Routledge. 2025.

What does it mean to rule a multilingual frontier at the fading edge of an empire? Mark Elliott’s The Manchu Way (2001) is one point of departure. In his lucid account of the Qing Empire’s territorial and cultural frontiers, Elliott shows how language, ethnicity, and administrative institutions intertwined in the practices of imperial rule. Moving from the Qing to 19th- and early 20th-century Southeast Asian world, Eric Tagliacozzo’s Secret Trades, Porous Borders (2005) takes us to the maritime and terrestrial borderlands where multilingual and multiethnic webs of smugglers, traders, and intermediaries made made frontier zones sites of dynamism and ungovernability. 

[The book] requires us to think about power not through the registers of treaties and wars but through the minutiae of managing languages.

From the frontier’s open routes we might turn to its enclosed spaces, namely from the maritime world to the classroom. At the micro-level of education and everyday instruction, the politics of language took on another form: how was imperial and later national authority translated, standardised, and reproduced through schooling? In this sense, how might the story of classrooms and textbooks in a remote corner of Manchuria (a historical region in northeast Asia) help us rethink the birth of the modern Chinese state? These are the questions that hover, sometimes quietly, sometimes insistently, through Jiani He’s Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria. It is not an easy book. Nor is it a simple one. It is a learned work, grounded in archives and philological care, that requires us to think about power not through the registers of treaties and wars but through the minutiae of managing languages: those spoken, those written, and those translated. 

Language as a tool of imperial rule  

He’s stage is the Jirim League, an old Mongol confederation and late Qing administrative district squeezed between Beijing’s bureaucracy and the conflicting imperialisms of Russia and Japan. It is on this border ground, He shows, the Qing state tested out new modalities of governing difference. Her ostensible object is disarmingly small: a trilingual textbook, the Manchu-Mongolian-Chinese Combined Reader, published in 1909 and used in the region’s new-style schools. But from this slim textbook, He extracts a counterintuitive tale of transition: how an empire that had long celebrated its polyglot rule struggled to make its border peoples into literate citizens, and how this effort at linguistic literacy entangled imperial inclusion with national assimilation. 

That the book has already drawn scholarly attention is telling. A detailed and rather exacting review appeared a few months after its publication. Written by a fellow Qing linguistic historian, the review essay both marvels at He’s command of the source languages and carefully disputes some of her readings and transliterations. As welcome a reception as it is, however, it reads the book mostly from the perspective of philology. My own engagement with the volume moves in a different direction. There is a broader historical claim in He’s book, that  reclaims Manchuria’s frontier as part of the modern Chinese state and in so doing, speaks back to a long-running historiographical debate about the nature of that state. 

Statecraft at the borders 

Two interlinked insights run through Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria. The first is He’s refusal to see the Qing borderland as peripheral, ancillary, or anything less than a centre in its own right. The other is the re-imagination of border itself, not as a place where old practices fall into neglect or disrepair but as a frontier where the state’s new capacities to measure, extract, and allocate resources are put to the test. In both these senses, the Jirim League becomes a place of innovation rather than inertia, of stress rather than stasis. Its schools, administrative offices, and printing houses were the places where administrators experimented with the new instruments of statecraft – the school, the poll tax, and the bureaucratised languages – under the combined pressure of population movement and international rivalry. Here, the Manchu, Mongol, and Han categories first started to break down under the weight of mobility and migration, not because of neglect, but because of design. If the empire was to manage this kind of border, it had to teach its population to read one another. 

The late Qing project to rationalise and control language [was] a project of political re-invention in which the empire’s trilingual textbooks seek to preserve the diverse state in the language of a modern nation.

A hierarchy of language

The second theme of He’s book concerns the meaning of language reform itself. For her, the late Qing project to rationalise and control language is no mere pedagogical intervention. It is also a project of political re-invention in which the empire’s trilingual textbooks seek to preserve the diverse state in the language of a modern nation. It was both bridge and boundary, the same instrument that promised Mongols a place in the new political order that erased their difference. The trilingual textbook at the heart of He’s book bears the weight of this ambivalence. On the facing page, Chinese is the language of progress; on the next page, Manchu and Mongolian mark a place for imperial difference. It was, in this way, a compromise of a sort: to teach Chinese literacy to Mongols was both to promise them a place in the nation and to dissolve the very hierarchy of tongues that had long marked Qing order. Language, in the new order, was both connective tissue and boundary.  

He has the command of sources to support her claims. Her discussion of early 20th-century Manchu and Mongolian schooling in Manchuria shows a world still shaped by older habits of translation but also already drawn into the gravitational field of reform. We meet administrators who cling to 18th-century bilingual primers, officials who worry about the moral entropy of transliterated Mongolian, and students struggling to master three scripts at once. In them, the texture of He’s historical world comes into view. They also show that the translation of language and its teaching were neither ordered from above nor fully embraced at the level of the classroom or office, but sometimes clumsily negotiated.  

He’s book resonates with the larger historiography of empire and modernity, a series of studies looking to the steppe, the desert, or the sea as places where new forms of political imagination were made possible.

But even as one applauds the book’s rigorous evidence base, it has its limitations. On the Mongolian side of this story, for example, we hear less about the people for whom these were new schoolbooks and more about Manchu intermediaries and Chinese officials. The voices of Mongolian teachers and translators who surely had their own linguistic agendas in this story are less often heard. The book’s analytical vocabulary, too, at times feels strained, particularly when we are asked to take the later Qing meaning of a Manchu term like kamcime as “simultaneous expression”. By the 1900s, this was a less simultaneous than a hierarchical world. Bureaucrats by then could no longer be found rehearsing the virtues of parallel text but were scrambling to render multiple tongues administratively legible. 

New insight on the making of modern China 

Despite these caveats, Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria achieves something valuable. It reminds us that the making of modern China cannot be understood through its coastal ports or treaty negotiations alone. We must also follow it into the inland frontiers where the state learned to make do with difference, to translate, to codify diversity. In this sense, He’s book resonates with the larger historiography of empire and modernity, a series of studies looking to the steppe, the desert, or the sea as places where new forms of political imagination were made possible. The world she chronicles was no mere residue of an older order: it was a workshop of the modern.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Ink Tablet from the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) or early Republic period (1912–49). Public Domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore. Jamie Wang. MIT Press. 2024.

Contradictions of an eco-modern state 

Singapore is celebrated as a global exemplar of sustainable urban development. It boasts an attractive green skyline, a thriving modern economy, and a high quality of life for many of the city-state’s residents. Over the past six decades, the Singaporean government has made concerted efforts to transform this 735-square-kilometre island of six million people into a green and modern knowledge economy. At the same time, the government has been criticised for its authoritarian approach to governance and its brazen pursuit of technocentric capitalist growth. In short, the urban sustainability story of Singapore is replete with numerous contradictions.

Wang highlights the extensive investment of money and materials that is required to build and maintain this highly engineered lush landscape.

In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore, Jamie Wang probes beneath the glossy façade of Singapore’s triumphant sustainability narrative to explore the tensions, misalignments, and paradoxes of this eco-modern state. She draws upon her background as an environmental humanities scholar to tell “more-than-human” stories about urban greening, housing development, transportation and water infrastructures, and urban farming. The study highlights the co-constitution of humans and non-humans, and Wang notes that “exploring, collecting, and telling these stories is my attempt to weave together a more diverse, human and other-than human, material and affective urban life” (178). The result is a rich and nuanced narrative that weighs the benefits and drawbacks of Singapore’s pursuit of green capitalism while also encouraging readers to imagine alternative sustainable futures.  

Urban greening as state-building 

Urban greening is the most prominent agenda of Singapore’s eco-modern agenda and the city boasts thousands of greening initiatives that integrate nature and the city. The globally renowned Supertrees project as well as thousands of green walls and rooftop gardens serve as an effective branding tool to attract tourists while creating a pleasing aesthetic experience for residents. Wang highlights the extensive investment of money and materials that is required to build and maintain this highly engineered lush landscape and argues that the government’s greening agenda is less about ecological protection and more about producing governable configurations of non-humans and humans. She writes, “In controlling nature and the citizens in this regimented and interrelated way, Singapore effectively creates the sense of a highly secure, stable environment in which to invest, live, and visit” (36). In other words, urban gardening is a primary strategy of state-building.  

Erasing historic ways of life 

Control is also a dominant driver in the provision of collective services in Singapore. This is particularly evident in the government’s systematic replacement of traditional houses with high-rise residential towers. Today, the public housing programme provides stability and affordability for 80 per cent of the island’s residents. However, it comes at the expense of autonomy and the residents’ ability to choose from a broader array of housing options. Wang describes her visits to the few remaining traditional low-rise neighbourhoods where a slower, more deliberate mode of existence reflects the unique Singaporean culture of the past. She argues that the government’s comprehensive management of housing and land use is not only an infrastructural strategy to support dense living conditions but also a social engineering strategy to erase memory, culture, and communal modes of rural and semi-rural life.  

The push for security in agriculture and water 

A primary motivation of high-rise living in Singapore is to replace the traditional land-intensive agricultural economy with a land-efficient knowledge economy. Since the 1980s, the government has rezoned farmland to construct high-rise apartments, office buildings, and transportation infrastructure (152). This has resulted in steep declines in agricultural production and today, Singapore’s heavy reliance on food imports is a national security concern. The government has addressed this by supporting vertical farms, a new form of a food production that involves indoor growing on vertical shelves, often using hydroponic, aquaponic, and aeroponic techniques that do not require soil. The government promotes vertical farms as a key strategy to provide food security while bolstering the knowledge economy. Meanwhile, the compressed growing cycles and optimised production requirements of vertical farms involves significant energy, water, and fertiliser inputs while also replacing the traditional agrarian society with a globally-leading agrotechnology economy. 

She finds inspiration in spontaneous, uncontrolled instances where nature and humans diverge from the government’s ecomodernist script to reveal the relational and situated characteristics of the world.

National security concerns also drive the government’s plans to modernise Singapore’s water supply. The city-state currently imports about half of its water from Malaysia (119) and this creates risks due to uncertainties about future climate change impacts and geopolitical tensions. To achieve self-sufficiency by 2060, the Singaporean government has invested in desalinisation and water recycling technologies that are expensive and energy-intensive and produce significant volumes of toxic wastewater. Moreover, this high-tech approach to water supply decouples water from the island’s natural hydrological cycles, transforming it into a manufactured product for human consumption. Surprisingly, there is little emphasis on demand-side water management and efficiency programmes to reduce water consumption by the island’s agriculture and manufacturing industries.  

The limits of sustainable development under capitalism 

Wang’s study provides important lessons about the deficiencies of human-centred, capitalist, and technocratic forms of sustainable development. She argues that the championing of technoscientific innovation and economic growth serves to obliterate the social and cultural aspects of everyday life while alienating humans from their non-human surroundings. She finds inspiration in spontaneous, uncontrolled instances where nature and humans diverge from the government’s ecomodernist script to reveal the relational and situated characteristics of the world. For example, rare plants continue to thrive outside of the urban greening initiatives, animals do not always follow the prescribed ecological corridors, and small groups of Singaporeans continue to practice place-based forms of agriculture. These examples demonstrate that alternative configurations of humans and non-humans continue to co-exist alongside the controlled conditions of the Singaporean government. 

Wang concludes that “the work of reimagining through a rich and layered more-than-human relation is also an effort of re-collecting and re-membering, resisting the singular eco-modernist’s future” (179). Her insights go beyond Singapore to include all cities that are striving to align economic growth with ecological protection. Green and prosperous cities will not be achieved through the development and implementation of technology-led capitalist growth but instead require deliberate and sustained efforts to integrate humans and non-humans in the messy multiplicity of everyday life.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: infinindy on Shutterstock.

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