Many cultures include in their narrative discourse tales of women who have gone to war or joined the hunt and indeed Chinese culture has produced a plethora of tales which relate the deeds of such strong and exceptional women. The general opinion from Western academics about these women is that they are rebelling against restraints imposed upon their sex by patriarchal society and ‘under the guise of patriotism or wifely devotion [find] an understandable motive for rejecting hearth and home.’ That patriarchal discourse should perpetuate through history and literature a subversive mode of thinsimply because it was duped by the invocations of patriotism an loyalty appears less than convincing. Certainly, if these are the woman warrior's motives then they have been exceptionally well disguised by the literary redactions of the deeds of the women warriors in Chinese culture. It is the intention of this article to explicate the complexity of the woman warrior in Chinese culture and reveal the multiplicity of discursive functions she fulfils by using the specific case of two mid Qing texts, Honglou meng and Jinghua yuan. The contradictions embodied in the recurring form of the woman warrior and her Amazonian sisters hold a key to understanding the complex and ambiguous signifying systems of sexual ideology in mid Qing Chinese culture. In this respect I will be invoking an Althusserian notion of the specific relationship between ideology and literature whereby the particular feelings or perceptions generated by the literature are regarded as being produced by the ideology within 'which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes' through an internal distanciation from that very same ideology.2 In Honglou meng and Jinghuayuan this internal distanciation is made apparent by the elaborate use of myth in the former and irony in the latter.

A figure who walks larger than life through the pages of eighteenthcentury south-Indian history is Tipu Sultan Fath Ali Khan, who held power in Mysore from 1782 until his death at the hands of the British in 1799. In general, scholars of his reign have taken a mainly Eurocentric approach, essentially concentrating on his external relationships and activities, particularly with regard to the French and the British, while more recently there has been some examination of his economy and administration. Recent research into both kingship and religion in south India raises issues which suggest that it is time this ruler was reassessed in his own terms, from the point of view of the cultural environment in which he was operating.3 Little attempt so far has been made to do this.4 One matter which merits closer attention is his use of symbols, particularly in connection with the symbolic expression of kingship. Given Tipu's somewhat ambiguous status as a parvenu, whose legitimacy as ruler was questionable, this would appear to be a fruitful area for research.5 His most famous symbol was the tiger, yet while it has captured the imagination of scholars in other disciplines,6 it has not exercised the minds of historians to any extent.7 It is the aim of this paper to restore the balance by looking at this symbol in the light of the work of Susan Bayly, who has underlined the strongly syncretic nature of religion in south India. Drawing upon both written and oral material, Bayly has described the interaction which has taken place between Muslim, Hindu and Christian traditions, the result of which is a borrowing of symbols and ideas, a frequently shared vocabulary, and an interweaving of motifs within a common sacred landscape, at the centre of which is the imagery associated with the ammans or goddesses of the region.8 It is my contention that an examination of Tipu's tiger symbol will reveal that it is firmly rooted in this syncretic religious environment and that this should emphasize to us the importance of placing the Mysore ruler within his cultural context in order to understand his actions, particularly from the point of view of kingship.

Following its annexation by the British in 1847 the Punjab province witnessed several significant developments—individualization of property rights in land, fixation and rigorous collection of land revenue in cash, introduction of a new legal-administrative system, construction of a road and railway network, canal-building activities and a colonization programme, commercialization of agriculture and increased monetization of economic transactions. These developments created a situation which, in turn, gave rise to two related problems –agricultural indebtedness and land transfer.1 These problems were not entirely unknown in the province in the earlier period, but during the last quarter of the nineteenth century indebtedness became so widespread and land transfer increased to such an extent that these became a matter of concern and embarrassment to many officials. For the magnitude of these problems seemed to contradict the colonial government's claimthat under its paternal care the province was enjoying agricultural prosperity, and the land revenue rates were moderate. Simultaneously some officials warned that there was a political danger in the situation. For a substantial part of the land sold and mortgaged by the cultivators was going to the moneylenders, and this meant the dispossession of the peasant proprietors. If no remedial steps were taken, it was argued, the animosity of the peasant population towards the moneylenders (sahukar) would ultimately be direted against the government.2 Initially the government refused to take any steps, arguing that the facts were insufficient 'to warrant interference by legislature to restrict the transfer of land'.3 But ultimately the contention that the problem posed a political danger gained ground and the Punjab Land Alienation Act was passed in1900 (and came into effect in 1901).4

Ongoing volatile political activism in the Indian Punjab, embodying an armed guerrilla warfare, inter-religious dissensions and severe official retaliatory policies, is a microcosm of a pervasive governability crisis in entire South Asia. The dilemma, with all its intensity, is the culmination of various parallel political processes in currency for almost one century. While the state, both colonial and post-colonial, may conveniently and simplistically perceive it as a mere administrative prblem or, at the most, an enduring communal disharmony fostered by hazy ideas,1 its very endurance warrants a serious review of numerous crucial denominators. Politicized ethnicity, largely banking on religious and similar other primordial factors, has received added momentum from interaction with a sterilized and elitist state structure in the wake of vital demographic changes and diasporic quest for identity. Neighbouring Pakistani Punjab exhibited a profile in political defiance for the entire period of Benazir Bhutto's premiership when her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) confronted a formidable opposition from the provincial government of the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA/IJI). It eventually catapulted Mian Nawaz Sharif into premiership.2 Such an increased political activism in the grain basket of the sub-continent may pose a perplexing issue for those to whom the province since early times has been a conformist, centrist and pro-establishment area when it came to its relationship with Indiawide movements all the way from the stormy events of 1857 to the 1980s Quest

Having followed Modern Asian Studies for some time now as being among the major journals to have sustained a high degree of sophistication on debates relating to the historical and cultural developments of modern South Asia, one was greatly distressed to read Akbar S. Ahmed's article ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics’. Practices of representation always implicate positions of enunciation. In what follows, I wish to re-read Ahmed's article to show that his representations of Indian society derive their legitimacy not from their engagement with the many-layered sociocultural formation of the present-day Indian nation, but from a perspective which reinforces the continuing relations of dominance between metropolis and former colony. As an academician of and for present-day India, to challenge such a perspective is not merely an attempt to radicalize academic frameworks but, as I wish to show, expressive of a larger social need to create spaces where one is able to transform present reality. It is to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation. It is to identify marginality as a space of resistance, as a site of radical possibility.

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: ‘Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis’.

It is almost common knowledge by now, thanks to the penetrating research by several scholars in the field, that Bengal silk was an important commodity in international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the general assumption so far has been that it was the Europeans rather than the Asians who played the major role in the export of raw silk from Bengal.As a corollary to thi and taking into consideration the dominant position of the European Companies in Bengal textile trade, historians have maintained even in recent studies that around the mid-eighteenth century, European trade was the most important factor in Bengal's commercial economy. 1 There is no denying the fact that the Companies were the most dominant factor in Bengal's seaborne trade but that does not necessarily imply that they were far ahead of Asians in Bengal's export trade as a whole. For the above does not take into account Bengal's export trade by overland routes which had always been extremely significant. It is generally assumed that with the fall of the great empires–Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman–and the consequent decline of ports like Surat, the overland trade was doomed. The reason for this sort of assumption, it seems, was mainly the lack of data regarding India's overland trade compared to the abundance of quantitative material in the Company archives on European exports from Bengal. It is also possible that the fascination of the sea and preoccupation with the European market, as also the nature of the surviving evidence, have obscured the significance of the traditional and continuing trade through the overland route from India. Moreland thought that India's overland trade in the seventeenth century was of small importance and that the important development took place at sea.2

In the 1950s Hong Kong was the centre of the Southeast Asian gold trade due to its traditional facilities as an entrepot. In the postwar period, however, this trade took place illegally, which distorted the direction of the trade. This article surveys the British attitude to the gold market in the immediate postwar period, using archival records from the British Treasury and the Bank of England. The changing pattern of the gold trade between the major centres of Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand is then described. The gold market offers an almost unique view of the pattern of smuggling trade in the region due to detailed reports in the local press and investigations at the time by the Bank of England.

International trade figures prominently in the economic growth strategies of East and Southeast Asian countries. Despite the economic recession experienced across much of the world since the early 1990s, the pace of economic growth was sustained virtually unabated in the countries of East and Southeast Asia.During the entire decade of the 1980s the East and Southeast Asian economies grew more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world economy. Along with this growth performance, international trade in the East and Southeast Asian region increased at about twice the rate of Europe and North America. Merchandise exports in East and Southeast Asia increased at an annual average rate of 10% per annum between 1965 and 1989. In 1990 and 1991 aggregate merchandise exports from Asia's Newly Industrializing Economies (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong) grew by 9.0% and 11.4%, while the four ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) developing countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) recorded average increases of 12.9% and 14.3%, respectively.Expanding merchandise exports were accompanied by surging capital inflows and rising investment rates, culminating in accelerated growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) along with a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty.