When the British came to power in India, it was certainly not in the face of the organized resistance of Islam. Yet the British Raj came to its end among political and social convulsions in which Hindus and Muslims cut each other's throats and large populations were shunted across the new frontiers of a sub-continent, now divided into two nations on the basis of religion. Events of such magnitude have encouraged historians to seek explanations of matching significance which may account for the growth of Muslim separatism. This article is concerned with the period of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, before the onset of the end game when the communal quarrel burst out in deadly earnest. Explicit rival-ries between the communities tended to exist at two main levels, the level of organized politics at the top where Hindu and Muslim elites were rivals for influence with government and eventually for the control of government itself, and the level of mob violence in the streets. This article is concerned with organized politics at the top, although it does not deny the existence and importance of tensions at the base. Its main emphasis will be upon the provincial stage, in particular the Muslim majority province of the Punjab. In the period before 1919 the development of Muslim politics suggested that a specifically Muslim separatism orchestrated by the United Provinces had emerged upon the all-India stage. But the coming of the reforms reversed the situation of the preceding decades, and there was less incentive for Muslim politicians in the United Provinces to claim to be the spokesmen of Muslims in the nation.

This article argues that leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh regularly invoke women's privileged status as mothers to counter the claims of the largely secularist non-governmental organizations operating in the country today that Islam has been harmful to women and that the only route to progress is to discard the shackles of religion and tradition. The current Jamaat rhetoric marks a significant change from the original Jamaat position—elaborated by the party's founder Abul Ala Maududi—that women's divinely ordained place is in the home. Now, several decades later, Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh still enjoin women to fulfil domestic obligations; however, they also go to great lengths to highlight Islam's recognition of women as ‘individuals’ with ‘individual’ responsibilities to God and Islam as well as Islam's support for women's right to study, work and vote. I contend that the Jamaat in Bangladesh has been prompted to undertake these recent modifications by specific developments in local social and political contexts, specifically the twin pressures on the Jamaat of operating in a functioning, if often imperfect, democratic polity; and of competing with more secular organizations for the hearts, minds and votes of impoverished women.

In the nineteenth century, the British succeeded in deriving growing benefits from their Indian territories. With dominion firmly established, and the colonial connection beginning to take its modern shape, India came to fit less awkwardly with British economic interests. India now became Britain's best customer for her most important industry, a useful supplier of raw materials, a safe field for capital investment, a crucial element in her balance of payments and key to the multilateral system of settlements which sustained the continued expansion of her world trade.The pattern of trade and investment, which brought such signal benefits to Britain, depended upon dominion over India. Dominion had given Britain the levers of power to open up Indian markets to her trade,knock down the internal barriers to the free flow of her goods, and prevent the erection of external tariffs to protect the Indian product.Dominion enabled Britain to build, at Indian cost, a system of transport by rail and road which linked the ports, themselves the creation of British rule, to their hinterlands, and to tilt the advantage in favour ofher own nationals who dominated India's foreign trade; it helped to give British shipping, banking and insurance a virtual monopoly over the invisibles of Indian trade and it imposed upon India a currency and banking system which protected the ratio of sterling to the rupee. Butthese balance-sheets of imperialism do not reveal the full importance of the Raj to the British world system. Just as India's growing foreign tradehelped to push British influence into east and west Asia alike, so her growing military power underwrote that influence, whether formal or informal, in those regions. An oriental barracks, where half of Britain'sworld force was billeted free of charge, India was the battering ram of British power throughout the eastern arc of its expansion. Before the First World War, India seemed triumphantly to have justified the efforts of generations of empire-builders.

L'histoire a légué au Vietnam méridional des particularités économiques, sociales et culturelles qui n'ont cessé de peser sur l'évolution de la nation vietnamienne.

Indigenous communities find themselves at the losing end of socio-economic changes taking place in diverse contexts of development. Changes in property rights to land and related resources such as forests and water have universally had adverse effects on their livelihoods, which are almost absolutely dependent on these resources and the ecosystems to which they belong. The historical processes behind these changes have their political, economic and cultural specificities. A deep understanding of transitions in property rights in the traditional habitations of indigenous communities is crucial in capturing these specificities and the socio-economic consequences of the changes. Property rights could be described as the set of economic and social relations that define the position of each individual with respect to the utilization of a resource (Furubotn and Pejovich 1972).

In the historiography of Indian nationalism the didactic impact of the West is generally recognized but seldom detailed. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the nature of Ireland's contribution to the development of an Indian national consciousness in the formative phase of political awakening. It is hoped to establish that while many of the ideals of civic freedom and patriotism were derived from continental sources, the immediate lessons of a country struggling to free itself from the British ‘colonial’ yoke were provided essentially by Ireland. In this context, the model that will be studied for its impact on the mind of India's first generation of political leaders, belongs to the Irish Home Rule movement launched in 1870 and welded by Charles Stewart Parnell into a powerful anti-imperial force.

Until recently the Malayalam-speaking region of southern India—once known as the Malabar coast and now the state of Kerala—was portrayed as a bastion of orthodox high Hinduism. The region's caste system was famous for its intricacy and supposed rigidity; its temples were rich, numerous and heavily patronized by Malayali rulers; and there was a general sense of the area as a picturesque backwater hidden away behind the western Ghats, untouched by the turbulent forces at work elsewhere in south Indian society. According to this view Kerala was a static society, ‘pure’ in culture and religious tradition, and ripe for drastic modernization once British suzerainty was established during the nineteenth century.

Christian missionaries were some of the most influential actors in colonial India. Yet they only began working recently in relation to larger British influence in the subcontinent. Originally banned from the territories of the East India Company for fears of upsetting Indian religious sensibilities, they were allowed to operate after 1843 in parallel with a rising Utilitarian and evangelist fervour in Britain and within particular Company circles; the latter often blurred the distinctions between ‘moral improvement’, civilisation and Christianity. Missionaries were influential in the debate over sati and the subsequent outlaw of its practice. Protestant encounters with Hinduism and Islam were defined by the rhetoric of ‘heathen’ and ‘unbelievers’, as missionaries derided the ‘idolatry’ of Hinduism and ‘bigotry’ of Islam. Some of the first mission schools established were in the Bombay Presidency, Bengal and the Punjab. During this period missionaries ascribed utility to the corpus of western scholarship as an ally against Indian religions. They hoped to ‘prove’ their falsehoods. The primary way to do this was through western education, arguing that western scholarship was saturated with Christian morals and that such ethoses would transform Indians accordingly. This was a period when the symmetry between Christianity and western scholarship was championed by missionaries such as John Murdoch and Alexander Duff. After the Indian Mutiny (1857–8), missionaries were held in check (at least officially) by the colonial state as a means of avoiding upsetting Indian religious sensibilities. Yet, ironically, in northern India missionaries came to be relied upon by a cash-strapped Education Department. They came to dominate education and were credited with doing much to push the frontiers of western pedagogy in their efforts to propagate their faith.

Given different socio-economic structures, and acute landlessness among the Dalits of East Punjab, the agendas of conversion to neo-Buddhism and sanskritisation, the two most popular Dalit social mobility models in India, have failed to strike a cord among the Dalits in this border state of northwest India. But that does not imply that Dalits of Punjab have failed in improving their social status. On the contrary, they have been very vocal in their assertions for social justice and dignity, and pressing for a due share in the local structures of power; a clear indication of a significant surge of Dalit social mobility in Punjab. The question that still remains largely unexplored, however, relates to the patterns of Dalit social mobility in Punjab that have emerged independently of the agendas of conversion to neo-Buddhism and sanskritisation. The study aims to map out the contours of an emerging alternative Dalit agenda in Punjab, which is conspicuous by its absence in existing Dalit studies, and examines its catalytic role in enhancing the legitimacy and effectiveness of increasingly visible Dalit social mobility in the state. The paper concludes by visualising the possibility of an articulation and assertion of a similar alternative Dalit agenda through highly contentious democratic politics in other parts of India, where the archetypical agendas of conversion and sanskritisation have either failed to deliver social justice and dignity or could not simply appeal to the local Dalit population.

The purpose of this short discussion paper is to raise some general questions concerning the current state of the historiography on the industrialization of pre-Independent India. Although triggered off by a close reading of Professor Morris's contribution to the recent Cambridge Economic History of India, volume 2, it is not my intention to review the essay in a detailed and systematic manner; rather I seek to place it in the wider context of what is, in my view, the unsatisfactory state of our accumulated knowledge. The paper is organized in the following way. Section II contends that all too little is known about a seemingly crucial sector—a vacuity that is not confined to India alone among the Third World economies—and that this tends to distort accounts of the general functioning of the international economy. In Section III I try to pinpoint the major areas of weakness, and then go on to suggest the main reasons for this somewhat surprising situation. Finally, in Section IV, I argue that Morris's study reflects the problems I identify but does not take us further down the road towards their resolution.

In India in the early twentieth century the modern socio-technological phenomenon of traffic brought together many visible and accessible forms of everyday technology. However, in India modern motorized transport had to operate alongside earlier, seemingly ‘pre-modern’, modes of street-life. The emergence of traffic helped foster the expansion of late-colonial policing and the growth of the ‘everyday state’. It stimulated a new sense of a middle class identity and the proper ordering and disciplining of those who used the modern highway. But the technology of traffic was also contested—by those who evaded traffic rules as well as by those who were critical of technological modernity or the rising human cost of traffic accidents. The street at times became a site of open opposition to state authority or, through the deliberate disruption of traffic, a significant location for the exercise of political defiance and control.

The copious literature on love in early India has most recently been interpreted as a variant of the universal experience of human sexuality. Studies have rooted the uniqueness of Indian ideas either in theological conceptions of the immanent and transcendent, or in the particularity of the parent-child relation in India. Whatever the insights of such scholarship, two major problems relevant to this essay are its positioning of a ‘civilizational’ backdrop as its subject of analysis—either ‘India’ or ‘Hinduism’—and, particularly with the former approach, the subsequent application of what has been called the ‘repressive hypothesis’ to the Indian material, which poses the ‘transcendent’ principles of Indian civilization in a restraining role over those deemed life-affirming or immanent. This essay will offer an alternative to these interpretations by placing conceptions of romantic love in medieval India within their social and discursive contexts, and connect up the discourses on self-discipline in medieval India with those of love in a more historically specific and illuminating way.

This essay explores the division between ‘things Japanese’ and ‘things foreign’ in contemporary Japanese life through an analysis of modern retailing. Japanese department stores domesticate ‘foreign things’, including customs, holidays, goods, and people, by creating for these meaning consistent with the existing fabric of Japanese culture. Their role in gift-exchanges, in the adoption of foreign holidays and in establishing special advocacy centers for foreigners reinforces the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘other’ that shapes and affirms Japanese identity (economy, national identity, symbolism, popular culture, gift-exchange, Japan).

In the nineteenth century the towns and cities of the North-Western Provinces witnessed a huge expansion in public expressions of Hindu identity: temples mushroomed, new processions graced the streets and the cow attained new prominence as a symbol of Hindu piety. Rarely, if ever, were such activities motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, but they could provoke ill-will between Hindus and Muslims, especially in the towns where Islamic government, buildings and festivals had previously set the tone for the public life of their inhabitants. The colonial administration was a powerful but ill- informed force, able either to suppress or to protect the new display, and its responses were crucial in determining people's understanding of their rights to public religious expression.For the first half of the nineteenth century the British tried to preserve the balance of religious display in each town and city as they had found it, but this goal required that individual officers piece together a local history from imperfect sources and then invest it with the authority of the new state. It is easy enough to delineate the simplistic and sometimes crass categorizations that the agents of colonialism employed to explain Indians' religious sensibilities. What I want to do here, however, is show how their fundamentally novel reconstructions of a town's history of public religious display could feed back into Indians' own reading of their past and hence their future, even long after the British had abandoned their pursuit of a locality's ‘established usage’.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the city of Nanjing, China, the article analyses discursive practices of courtship and marriage in the context of post-Mao and post-Deng economic, social, and legal developments. Informants’ discussions often revolve around the tension between the idea that marriage should be about love and the increasing material demands that prospective grooms face upon marriage in a market-led consumer society. This tension also emerges in media debates on the hedonistic attitude of Ma Nuo, a contestant on the matchmaking programme Feicheng Wurao (If you are the one). Informants, on the other hand, articulate their feelings in terms of family responsibility and pursue marriages that, while based on choice, may also ensure financial stability and parental approval.

Historians of Indonesia often think of states, and especially colonial states, as predatory institutions encroaching aggressively on the territory and autonomy of freedom-loving stateless peoples. For Barbara and Leonard Andaya, early European expansion in Sumatra and the Moluccas was synonymous with the distortion or destruction of decentralized indigenous political systems based on cooperation, alliance, economic complementarity, and myths of common ancestry (B. W. Andaya 1993; L. Y. Andaya 1993). Anthony Reid (1997: 81) has described tribal societies like those of the Batak and Minangkabau in highland Sumatra as ‘miracles of statelessness’ which ‘defended their autonomy by a mixture of guerilla warfare, diplomatic flexibility, and deliberate exaggeration of myths about their savagery’ until ultimately overwhelmed by Dutch military power. Before colonialism, in this view, most Indonesians relied for security not on the protection of a powerful king, but on a ‘complex web of contractual mutualities’ embodying a ‘robust pluralism’ (Reid 1998: 29, 32). ‘So persistently’, concludes Reid (1997: 80-1), ‘has each step towards stronger states in the archipelago arisen from trading ports, with external aid and inspiration, that one is inclined to seek the indigenous political dynamic in a genius for managing without states’. Henk Schulte Nordholt (2002: 54), for his part, cautions against any tendency to downplay the violent, repressive aspects of colonial and post-colonial government in Indonesia, expressing the hope that ‘a new Indonesian historiography will succeed in liberating itself from the interests, perspective, and conceptual framework of the state’. An even more systematic attempt to demonize the (modern) state in Indonesia and elsewhere can be found in the work of James Scott (1998a, 1998b).

The economy which evolved during the last phase of Sri Lanka's colonial rule under the British (1796–1948) has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in the recent years. Much of the writing which has emerged is descriptive by nature; the concern has been to lay bare the manner in which the economy took its shape and not to provide an analytical framework to explain the developments of the colonial era. This is not to say that conceptualizing has been wholly absent. Indeed, one particular conceptual treatment of the economy of British Sri Lanka has produced an interpretation which has gained wide currency and it has now acquired considerable influence over the economic literature concerned with the country.

Let me say at the outset that although I am an admirer of Weber, yet in my view the relation between kinds of religious ethic and economic (and political) activity is more open than Weber made it out to be. It is also my view that it is time we went beyond Weber because we have exhausted his ideas, and because we now have more and better evidence than he had.

This paper will introduce intellectual debates from Pakistan's early years to show how the country's future culture was being discussed, deliberated and reshaped in these circles at the moment of its own inception as an independent state. By focussing on the communist perspective on Pakistan's independence, it will seek to illuminate some of those historical moments in Pakistan's history that have not received much attention either from historians or from the public. Within this context, the paper will present contesting voices that are critical of one another—particularly regarding the place of Islam in the new state—in order to rethink Pakistan's early history as a period that could have led to a range of possible future historical trajectories.

Islamists' ideas about the position of women are readily invoked to portray them as ‘anti-modern’. The operating assumption is that Islamism (mutatis mutandis Islam) sanctions gender hierarchy. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research and written sources of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India, founded in 1941, I question such assumptions. While defending Islam against the ‘epidemic’ of westernization, Maududi (b. 1903), the Jamaat's founder, called women ‘the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture’. Invoking the Quran and Prophetic traditions, he argued that women should not step outside of the home, and must veil themselves from head to toe. He stood against any political role for women. For decades, Maududi's interpretation went uncontested. However, from the 1970s onwards many members of the Jamaat began to critique Maududi and offered an alternative reading of Islam. They argued that women could indeed leave the home, assume key economic and political roles, unveil their faces, as well as act in films. By highlighting such voices and analysing the sociological coordinates of the contestations within the Jamaat, I underscore the transformation in the Jamaat's discourse. I conclude by discussing whether the critiques of Maududi by his own followers inaugurate an alternative discourse of Islamic feminism.