Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India’s foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. As a part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, this volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime. This volume probes reasons behind the relevance of differentiated cartography of territorial nationalism in our shared understanding of space, politics, society, and the community.

Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India's foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. This volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on the ways in which movements of people across natural, political, and cultural boundaries shape identities that are inexorably linked to the geographical space that individuals on the move cross, inhabit, and leave behind. As conflicts over identities and space continue to erupt on a regular basis, this book reads the relationship between migration, identity, and space from a fresh and innovative perspective.

In this pioneering study, Dr. Fernandez explores how the rise of institutional geography in Victorian England impacted imperial fiction’s emergence as a genre characterized by a preoccupation with space and place. This volume argues that the alliance between institutional geography and the British empire which commenced with the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, shaped the spatial imagination of Victorians, with profound consequences for the novel of empire. Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire examines Presidential Addresses and reports of the Royal Geographical Society, and demonstrates how geographical studies by explorers, cartographers, ethnologists, medical topographers, administrators, and missionaries published by the RGS, local geographical societies, or the colonial state, acquired relevance for Victorian fiction’s response to the British Empire. Through a series of illuminating readings of literary works by R.L. Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Flora Annie Steel, Winwood Reade, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, the study demonstrates how nineteenth-century fiction, published between 1870 and 1901, reflected and interrogated geographical discourses of the time. The study makes the case for the significance of physical and human geography for literary studies, and the unique historical and aesthetic insights gained through this approach.

"Re-Imagining Northeast Writings and Narratives: Language, Culture, and Border Identity" presents a collaborative effort to critically examine the concept of Northeast India, focusing on its linguistic, geographical, cultural, and social dimensions. Through a compilation of articles and essays, the volume delves into various aspects such as language, literature, culture, challenges, and the complexities of identity within the region. Each contribution offers detailed insights and findings, enhancing our understanding of Northeast India's diverse cultural landscape and the experiences of its people. By addressing themes of spatiality, movement, and responses to representations of the Northeast, the volume aims to deepen scholarly engagement with the region and stimulate discourse on its unique linguistic, cultural, and border dynamics. It serves as a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, and anyone interested in gaining a nuanced understanding of Northeast India and its intricate interplay of language, culture, and identity.

This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

This book examines Indo-Pacific issues from a Southeast Asian perspective and goes beyond discourses such as ASEAN–China or ASEAN–US–China. It analyses the new regional balances in the ASEAN and Indo-Pacific region at the diplomatic, strategic and economic levels while taking into account the ongoing uncertainty of the international order, reshaped by the post COVID-19 crisis and characterised by the increasingly adversarial China-US relations, the sensitive context of South China Sea and Taiwan crisis and the impact of the war between Russia and Ukraine. It highlights Indo-Pacific not only from a geostrategic angle but an economic one, considering ASEAN amidst competing connectivity strategies and integration challenges. The book offers an inclusive outlook capturing diversity and convergence of strategies in a key region where the stage of tomorrow’s global order will be decided. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and international relations and Area Studies, especially Southeast-Asian Studies and Indo-Pacific Studies.

Migration of the South Asian peoples to Australia has resulted in a continually growing and flourishing diaspora, one of the most prosperous communities, with an ever–increasing role and responsibility in all areas of society. One of the challenges in writing about the South Asian diaspora in Australia is the nature of the beast: the multifarious migration and entry points into Australia range from colonial indentured workers to political asylum seekers to transnational marriages to students and high–end professionals. How did their journeys and experiences generate bridges that have influenced the historical, cultural, social and academic perceptions of the ever–changing continents? It is hoped that this critical anthology will help present a dynamic community in transit, and showcase the achievements of the South Asian diaspora during the last decade, which have not only made a significant impact on Australia’s multiculutural landscape but also furthered South Asian–Australian engagement.

The assertion that even institutions often viewed as abhorrent should be dispassionately understood motivates Arkotong Longkumer's pathbreaking ethnography of the Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations comprising the Hindu right. The Greater India Experiment counters the urge to explain away their ideas and actions as inconsequential by demonstrating their efforts to influence local politics and culture in Northeast India. Longkumer constructs a comprehensive understanding of Hindutva, an idea central to the establishment of a Hindu nation-state, by focusing on the Sangh Parivar's engagement with indigenous peoples in a region that has long resisted the "idea of India." Contextualizing their activities as a Hindutva "experiment" within the broader Indian political and cultural landscape, he ultimately paints a unique picture of the country today.

The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies.