Shivaji was a prominent feudal lord in the 17th century, located in Western frontier of the South Asian subcontinent. The figure of Shivaji re-emerged two centuries later as a Homeric hero, who served as an inspirational template for late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Bengali nationalism. Shivaji was so central to Bengal during this period, that in 1906, Lokmanya Tilak inaugurated the Shivaji Utsav in Kolkata, and Rabindranath Tagore wrote an eponymous poem that extolled Shivji, criticizing a pre-colonial Bengal for not recognizing his greatness. Tagore’s criticism is especially interesting because the Marathas were viewed and written about very differently in the eighteenth century. Accounts of violent Maratha, or bargi incursions into the Bengal countryside abound in the literature and folk memory of the times. The Maharastrapuran, composed by Gangaram in 1751-2, provides an account of the incredible pain and violence inflicted by the bargis, during one such incursion. The later transformation of Shivaji by the Bengali elite hinted at a more crucial epistemological transformation, the replacement of existing memories with the mythicization of the Hindu nation-state. In my paper, I place Grant Duff’s ‘History of the Marathas,’ Romesh Chandra Dutt’s ‘Maharashtra Jiban Prabhat,’ and ‘Anguriya Binimoy’ by Bhudev Mukhopadhyay within the same interpretative frame to show the emergence of a new category, that of positivist ‘history.’ The paper will contrast this new epistemology with eighteenth-century Bengali Mangalkavyas and folk literature such as nursery rhymes to demonstrate a deliberate forgetting by later elites in order to establish a past that the nation found useful.

Generations of academic and popular works have presented Nepali state as a quintessential product of military violence that was singularly preoccupied with an insatiable demand for tax revenue while remaining altogether inattentive to the sufferings of the population. The evidence unambiguously shows that rural population in Nepal were far from passive victims of a monolithic state power. This paper argues that individuals and groups frequently petitioned the royal authority and demanded justice against official venality to protect their various rights. In doing so, they played a key role in the shaping of state sovereignty in eighteenth century Nepal. Utilizing previously unstudied archival sources, I argue that reoccurring adjudication of quotidian disputes supplied the emergent state authority with critical information to deepen its tentacles of sovereignty. Nepali state sovereignty thus did not result from the unidirectional flow of power from the center, instead it came about as a result of the “empowering interactions” with the subject population. In conceptualizing state sovereignty evolving out of “empowering interactions”, the paper therefore views the eighteenth-century Nepali state as a socially embedded state. Nor was this model of state making only confined to the Himalayan foothills

Around ten million Bangladeshis are now located in approximately 170 countries around the world, thus creating a huge, vibrant but also multi-layered ‘Bangladesh’ outside Bangladesh that are located in multiple places crisscrossing the world. They are located in the Middle East to North America, and from Europe to the Pacific and beyond. While the Bangladeshi diaspora have some direct empirical impact on the economic development of Bangladesh, its cultural impact and connections are normally overlooked. Bangladeshi transnational diaspora is a large, complex and dynamic population that has had a significant impact on both Bangladesh and the host countries. This paper aims to unearth how this varied and disparate population construct the idea of ‘Bangladesh’ in two different locations in the Pacific. While the Bangladeshi Diaspora in USA, UK and Europe have been well studied, the Bangladeshi communities in the Pacific locations such as Australia and Japan have never been researched with due rigour. In this way, this paper is the first step to bring up and analyse the memorialisation attempts of Bangladeshi diaspora towards contemporary and historical notions of Bangladesh nationhood in two far-fetched parts of the Pacific. I will investigate here the memorialisation processes through which Bangladeshi migrants construct and imagine ‘Bangladesh’ and how these affect their identity formation in the diaspora of Australia and Japan. While the Bengali/Bangladeshi diaspora in Japan is a well-knit long-established community, the Australian-Bangladeshi community represents a new, younger looking ‘Bangladesh’ outside Bangladesh. Despite the differences, the Bangladeshi diaspora in these two different locations definitely represent a larger ‘Bangladesh’ that is a transnational, bi-lingual and largely middleclass community. This paper will focus on the major modes of memorialisation and(re)construction of ‘Bangladesh’ in both these diasporic Bangladeshi settings. While historicisation has been the early means to resurrect the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh in Australia and Japan, a host of new narratives such as films, theatre, media and literary writings produced in/by the Diasporic Bangladeshis also became ways to imagine and present ‘Bangladesh’ in these two diaspora settings. I will thus investigate in detail here how the first or second generation of Bangladeshi migrants are both remembering and narrativising Bangladesh as a nation. Through these two interconnected modes of identity construction of/by the Bangladeshi communities in the Pacific, I shall unpack the connections, contentions as well as commitments of the Japanese- and Australian-Bangladeshis towards the nationhood of Bangladesh while living and negotiating in the Diasporic condition.

Javier Milei's victory in Argentina opens a new panorama in the region, being the second candidate of the new right from a large Latin American country to achieve electoral victory after Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Although there are political manifestations of this nature in the world, the particularities of the new right in Argentina and Brazil are notorious and anchor their political projects in long-standing historical experiences in each country with a strong emphasis on nationalism as a unifying ideology.
In this presentation we propose to analyze the specific features of Argentine democracy and the particularities of ruling nationalism in light of the administration of the new right under Javier Milei, in historical perspective. With the aim of highlighting the continuities and ruptures between the current political project and the classical liberalism of the processes of national consolidation in Latin America at the end of the 19th century, in this paper, we propose to address the characteristics of the new Latin American liberal rights in mirror with those that administered nation states during the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.
In particular, analyze the role assumed by national states in their nineteenth-century homogenizing processes in relation to the special features of what is called new rights and – in Argentina – anarcho-market capitalism. In both, look for the elements from which they were nourished to build paradigms of a special nationalism.

This paper aims to rediscover the pivotal role of nation-states in shaping transnational dynamics, particularly in the context of migration, by examining the historical case of Italian migration towards Tunisia and their complex allegiances during the interwar period. These communities, defined by their multilingualism and cultural hybridity, exhibited strong nationalist identifications with their homeland, even while engaging in transnational practices. Through an analysis of the sociocultural interactions between Italian-Tunisians and the Italian state's involvement in Tunisia, the paper unveils the often-overlooked mechanisms by which nation-states influence and reinforce transnational social formations. The study argues that the Italian-Tunisian case underscores how national political projects and migrant transnational identities can align and mutually reinforce one another, challenging conventional understandings of the opposition between nationalism and transnationalism.