Why have you been dragged out like this?

That's what you get for skimping on wages

Why are you being taught this lesson?

It's payback time for all of your usury

Why must you suffer here in prison?

Must be for buying up all the cotton

Why can't you get but a cup of tea?

They say because you poisoned the water

Why can't you get but a bite to eat?

Must be the curse of eel and carp. As quoted in Wakabayashi Kisaburo, Zeniya Gohei (Osaka: Zogensha, 1984), p. 18.

—From Inga wasan, a Kaga folk ditty

The strange affair began innocuously enough. In the summer of 1851, Zeniya Gohei, a prominent merchant in Kaga han, started a land reclamation project on Kahoku inlet, which lies about three miles northwest of Kanazawa upon the Sea of Japan. Early in the eighth month of 1852, a large number of dead fish floated to the surface of the inlet near the construction site. Within weeks, there were reports of several local residents who apparently died from having eaten the dead fish. In the ensuing flurry of accusations, speculations, and indictments Gohei and his family members were deemed responsible and imprisoned. By the end of the eleventh month of 1852, the eighty-year old Gohei succumbed to ‘urinary blockage’ and died in captivity.

Less than fifteen months after Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was fatally wounded by the right-wing fanatic Sagoya Tomeo on 14 November 1930, the ‘mysterious priest’ Inoue Nissho orchestrated the Ketsumeidan jiken, or ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, in which the former Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and the Director-General of Mitsui Dan Takuma, were shot and killed, on 9 February and 5 March 1932, respectively. What made the Ketsumeidan Incident all the more shocking in the troubled context of the Depression and the Manchurian Incident was the fact that at one point the terrorists had planned to kill twenty of Japan's political and financial leaders, not just Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma. The grim implications of this bold conspiracy were soon driven home when Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was also gunned down in the 15 May Incident that year.

On July 16, 1905, an overseas Chinese, Feng Xiawei, committed suicide in front of the American consulate in Shanghai. The impetus for Feng's sacrifice was a labor treaty being negotiated with the United States, which had placed obstacles to the Chinese who would like to go to the United States to make a living. Two months before Feng's suicide, merchants in Shanghai had asked Americans to revise their immigration policy or face a boycott in two months. The Americans showed no sign of yielding. Four days before the deadline, Feng killed himself. This previously unknown individual became a hero in the 1905 boycott movement. For an overview of the boycott movement see Zhang Cunwu, Guangxu sayinian Zhong Mei gongyue fengchao [The Chinese Boycott of American Goods, 1905-1906] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1966); Margaret Field, “The Chinese Boycott of 1905”, Papers on China 11 (1957): 63-98; Edward J. M. Rhoads, ‘Nationalism and Xenophobia in Kwangtung (1905-1906): The Canton Anti-American Boycott and the Lienchow Anti-Missionary Uprising’, Papers on China 16 (1962): 154-97; Delber L. McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900-1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), especially chapter 7; Sin-Kiong Wong, ‘The Genesis of Popular Movements in Modern China: A Study of the Anti-American Boycott of 1905-06’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1995.

Democracy is a symbol of the May Fourth era, and one of the two cores of the so-called ‘May Fourth spirit’ that generations of Chinese liberal intellectuals energetically want to carry forward in order to promote the liberal develop ment of democratization in China. In an essay published in January 1919 to celebrate the third anniversary of the publication of Xin Qingnian (New Youth), Chen Duxiu, one of the intellectual leaders of the New Culture Movement, respectfully gave democracy and science the nicknames ‘Mr Democracy’ (de xiansheng) and ‘Mr Science’ (sai xiansheng), and proclaimed that ‘only these two gentlemen can save China from the political, moral, academic, and intellectual darkness in which it finds itself’.Chen Duxiu, ‘Xin qingnian zuian zhi dabianshu’ (New Youth's reply to charges against the magazine), Xin Qingnian (New Youth): (hereafter cited as XQN), Vol. 6, No. 1 (15 Jan. 1919), pp. 10-11. Seven decades later, on the eve of the People's Movement on the Tiananmen square in spring 1989, many Chinese intellectuals published enormous essays or articles on the legacies of the ‘May Fourth spirit’, challenging the official monopoly over the power of historical interpretation.For more details about the ideological struggle for the historical interpretation of the May Fourth spirit between official historians and liberal intellectuals, see Gu Xin, Zhongguo Qimeng de Lishi Tujing (Historical Image of the Chinese Enlightenment) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1992). One of the major themes in these essays or articles was the appeal to the young generation of Chinese intellectuals to strive for liberty, democracy, and science by inheriting the ‘May Fourth spirit’.

As European influence expanded in insular Southeast Asia throughout the early modern era, colonial interests shifted from maintaining favorable trade zones along the coasts and rivers to an increasing control of territory and its human populations. The island of Borneo entered the colonial ambit relatively late in this process,Graham Irwin, Nineteenth-Century Borneo: A Study in Diplomatic Rivalry (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). but its eventual division between British and Dutch spheres of influence and control has had profound consequences for the peoples that fell under either. There and elsewhere, territorial boundaries sliced across well-established networks of communication, trade, common traditions, and strong ties of kinship. These boundaries came to impose different symbols of formal status on people from the same ethnic groups. From the colonial perspective, boundaries were designed to function negatively, to restrict what was deemed illegal such as smuggling and migration, and positively, to promote legitimate activities like taxation and road construction. The usual colonial attitude was that borders should be precisely defined, clearly demarcated, jealously guarded, and exclusive. A. I. Asiwaju, ‘The Conceptual Framework’, in A. I. Asiwaju (ed.), Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa's International Boundaries, 1884-1984 (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1985), pp. 1-18 at pp. 2-3; A. I. Asiwaju, Borderlands Research: A Comparative Perspective. Border Perspectives Paper No. 6 (El Paso: University of Texas, Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, 1983), pp. 2-3; S. Whittemore Boggs, International Boundaries: A Study of Boundary Functions and Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 10-11. Yet the people so partitioned routinely defied the border divisions, causing no small amount of worry to the colonial states.

‘We will not recognize the Nation, if the Nation does not recognize us’

This statement was made by AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara), the Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago, at their inaugural congress in Jakarta, March 1999. The congress was organized by a consortium of Jakarta-based NGOs, and funded by international donors (USAID, CUSO, and OXFAM among others). Building upon a process of mobilization that began with the International Year of Indigenous People in 1993, the Congress marked the formal entry of masyarakat adat (literally, people who adhere to customary ways) as one of several groups staking claims and seeking to redefine its place in the Indonesian nation as the political scene opened up after Suharto's long and repressive rule. AMAN and its supporters assert cultural distinctiveness as the grounds for securing rights to territories and resources threatened by forestry, plantation and mining interests backed by police and military intimidation. Their attempt to place the problems of masyarakat adat on the political agenda has been remarkably successful. While seven years ago the head of the national land agency declared that the category masyarakat adat, which had some significance in colonial law, was defunct or withering away (Kisbandono 18/02/93), the term now appears ever more frequently in the discourse of activists, parliamentarians, media, and government officials dealing with forest and land issues.

Processes of transformation in cities in the non-western world during the colonial period have often been described as one-way processes through which European colonial regimes restructured the physical and social environments of the cities and established their domination there.Thus, for Anthony King, the transformation in Delhi between the early 19th and the mid 20th centuries was a process whereby the British colonial government installed, apparently at will, particular spatial and physical arrangements in the old city of Delhi and in the region immediately beyond it. For Narayani Gupta, this process had the additional impact of damaging the finely balanced social relationships and social structure of the city which had done so much to enhance the quality of social life there in earlier times. For Veena Oldenburg, the changes in late 19th century Lucknow represented a process by which the government, ‘guided by a ruthless concern for the security and well-being of its own members and agents’, drastically reorganized the physical space in the city. For Mariam Dossal, again, the changes in late 19th century Bombay were constituted by the drastic restructuring of the landscape, topography and everyday life of the people in the city through the active intervention by the colonial state. The ordinary residents of the city had hardly any voice in those developments. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976); Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires 1803-1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi, 1981); Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (Princeton, 1984); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Bombay, 1991). Rarely have scholars explored the possibility that these processes could have been contested and negotiated and that the indigenous elites of the cities could have appropriated some of the policies of the colonial governments to their advantage, thereby imparting a somewhat different nature to the changes in the cities.Though some works on South Asian cities examined the question of contestation and the attempts at political dominance in the cities by the indigenous elites, they kept the description of these contestations limited mostly to the sphere of electoral and representational politics. None of them took up the question of contestation by the indigenous elites (or, for that matter, by other social groups) in the field of spatial reorganization in the cities or dealt with the cities as lived and build environments. Examples of such works are, Kenneth Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, 1968); C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1975); Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (New Delhi, 1979); A.D.D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Mod ernising Economy in Bombay, 1918-1933 (New Delhi, 1978); Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: the shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 (Berkeley, 1991). This article seeks to correct this deficiency by showing that the process of change in at least one non-western city, namely, Ahmedabad, a large industrial city in western India, in the first half of the twentieth century, was not a one-way process of the establishment of domination by the colonial government but was instead one where a section of the Indian elites contested the restructuring that the government was carrying out in the city and appropri ated it to bring about their own reorganization of the urban centre. In carrying out the reorganization, the elites also established their political and social hegemony in the urban centre. The article analyses how the Indian elite group brought about the transformation, the nature of the changes fostered and the way in which the process of transformation helped the elite leaders to establish their hegemony in the city.

As explained by Abrams (1971:32-3), a connotation is ‘the range of secondary or accompanying meanings’ which a word ‘commonly suggests or implies’. The word ‘home’, for example, connotes ‘privacy, intimacy, and coziness’. Which exact secondary meaning from among the range is evoked ‘depends on the particular context in which (the word) is used’. Connotations play an important role in interpreting different types of texts, as shown by Abrams and others.For example, Fowler (1989:80-3); Schulte-Sasse and Werner (1977:90-109). For example, when in fiction events or their setting or atmosphere are presented the way they are perceived by a character, the connotations involved in such observations may well inform the reader about the feelings and values fostered by the character concerned, and thus contribute to an interpretation of the text.

Since 1991, India's courting of foreign investment has been accompanied by protectionist posturing in sensitive sectors like insurance and the media. The tensions in making the shift from a mixed economy to a relatively open and market-oriented economy were evident when the government considered reviewing a ban imposed by Jawaharlal Nehru's government in 1955, and allowing foreign press companies to operate in the country's ‘mind-market’ in 1991. This led to a welter of protest, forcing the government to drop the move. Since foreign media proposals periodically engage government attention and provoke reactions, this is an attempt to take a closer look at the issues involved. This paper will examine the posturing of the Indian elites, the state of the Indian press, the notion of media-cultural imperialism and the legal question of media ownership by foreign nationals. It will conclude with the suggestion that nationalist, cultural and mercantile interests were conflated to run one of the most effective campaigns by the press against the government in recent years. Large sections were animated by genuine concerns, but mercantile interests rode high, and manipulated them to telling effect.