'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.

Much of East Asia and Southeast Asia were unaffected by colonialism until the 19th century, when European nations, the United States, and Japan spread their influence and control throughout the continent of Asia. This resource traces the impact of foreign rule on the region, gaining insight into the many wars and policies that affected the local people, economy, and society. Though most of the modern-day countries of East and Southeast Asia gained independence in the wake of World War II, when Japan was defeated and the Allied powers began to lose control of their colonies, the impact of colonialism lingers on.

This text discusses the principal political and constitutional questions that have arisen in the states of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka following fifty years of independence. In Sri Lanka the pressing problems have been around the inter-ethnic civil war, experiments with constitutional designs, widespread prevalence of corruption and the recrudescence of Buddhist militancy. In India it has been corruption, Hindu nationalism and general political instability. In Bangladesh and Pakistan it has been the role of the military, the state and religion. A general theme is an analysis of the malaise that is prevalent and how and why this was inherited, despite the colonial legacy of parliamentary democracy, the steel framework of a trained bureaucracy, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs. At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.

Intense and sometimes contentious debates about South Asian identity.

Post-colonial Curriculum Practices in South Asia gives a conceptual framework for curriculum design for English Language Teaching, taking into account context specific features in the teaching–learning settings of post-colonial South Asia. It reveals how the attitudes prevalent in post-colonial South Asian societies towards English negatively influence English language learning. The book provides a comprehensive analysis to design a course for English language teaching that aims at building learner confidence to speak English. Based on original research, the study covers Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The book focuses on the context-specific nature of learners and considers a curriculum design that binds teaching materials and teaching methods together with an aligned assessment. Chapters discuss language attitudes, learner characteristics and English in the context of native languages, and introduce a special type of anxiety that stems from existing language attitudes in a society, referred to as Language Attitude Anxiety. The book will appeal to doctoral and post-doctoral scholars in English language education, students and researchers of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics as well as curriculum designers of ELT and language policy makers.