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 article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

Soviet writers have often claimed that there was no Russian threat to India. They have pointed, correctly, to the circumstance that no invasion attempt was ever launched and have stated that those projects which were canvassed were no more than the ideas of hotheaded generals and the like, were never adopted by the Russian Government and cannot be taken seriously. Further, they have pointed to the rejection of approaches made to Russian authorities by discontented Indians who sought Russian assistance in overthrowing British rule in India. Talk of the defence of British India, with its implication that there was a genuine Russian threat to be warded off, they argue, is more than misleading; it was a deception practised by nineteenth-century British rulers of India to disguise expansionist British aims in India and, beyond the Indian frontier, in the Persian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkestan, and it is now a device employed by modern British historians to conceal the true nature of British imperialism in India and to blacken the reputation of Russia. They do not accept that British statesmen and military officers could genuinely have believed in the possibility of a Russian invasion of India; and they suppose that British historians are not so incompetent as to think that nineteenth-century Britons did believe that the threat was real.

Researches in Indian economic history have stimulated curiosity about India's connections with the Indian Ocean area. Work done on European expansion in the non-European world has also contributed to the development of this area of enquiry. Recent writings on the Indian Ocean and the Indian maritime merchant have indicated important possibilities of further research. I shall first briefly consider some of these, and then pass on to an examination of a concrete historical problem where Indian economic history meets the history of European expansion and the two themes are held together by the Indian Ocean.

When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Through a focus on a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia in the Indian city of Bombay/Mumbai, this article expands our understanding of labour experiences of the city through the twentieth century and into the present. It moves between historical archives, oral history, and lived experience to illuminate how the labour of transport workers structures circulations, collective identities, and urban space. It explores several dimensions of the history and present of transport labour in India. First, it is concerned with the connection between the work of hereditary motoring and the reconfiguration and constitution of communal identities in contexts of urban labour migration. Second, it is interested how labour practices become embedded in broader social and cultural space. Third, given that chillia have continued in the trade for over 100 years, the article explores the circuits of work and labour surrounding their trade to illuminate intersections between political and cultural shifts in Mumbai, changing conditions of work in contemporary contexts of globalizing capital, and the forms of ‘non-consent’ that emerge out of these networks.

The legendary Gurkhas have inspired a considerable literature about their character, quality and exploits under British command. Some years ago, after I returned from fieldwork in an area of east Nepal inhabited by the Limbu people, many of whom had served in Gurkha regiments, I began to read some of this literature for background purposes. It struck me then, although not nearly so forcibly as it did later when I had read Edward Said (1978), and returned to the Gurkha material after a long absence, that these writings have a very distinctive character, constituting a particular mode of ‘orientalist’ discourse.

This is a narrative of events and panics in India in 1907: the fiftieth anniversary of 1857. After the East India Company's political ascendancy in 1757, the uprisings and insurrections of 1857 shook the very foundations of British rule in India. In the summer of 1907, several different strands of protest came together: the nearly all-India telegraph strike was barely over when a revolutionary terrorist network was unearthed, bringing the simmering political cauldron to the boil. The burgeoning swadeshi and boycott movement splintered, partly through the experience of Government repression, into political extremism within the Indian National Congress and revolutionary terrorism via secret societies. The growing radicalism within nationalist politics culminated in the split of the Congress at the meeting at Surat in 1907. Through this process the Indian National Congress changed from its constitutional and elite politics of reform into a more popular and mass-oriented organization. Though much has been written about this period of Indian politics, this paper delineates the larger international technological and informational entanglement through a case study of India, and in particular, Bengal.

Within the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy, and nostalgia. The refugees or, more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This paper explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, which was designed to integrate refugees into the socio-economic fabric of India, or eulogizes them as heroic protagonists who successfully battled overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee as both victim and victor obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this paper will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This paper interrogates refugee reminiscences to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to both popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees.

Guru cults are an increasingly prominent feature of Indian religious life today, especially in the towns and cities, and among the urban middle classes. Many of these gurus are actually worshipped by their followers, who believe that they have magical powers; and in most cults the devotional element is strong. Since independence there seem to be more gurus in India; more of them have a more than local following; their followings are growing rapidly, and the cults are receiving more publicity, which reflects their discernible impact on the Indian scene. The godmen, as they are called, are often somewhat ostentatious; their travels, by air, road or rail, are widely reported in the press, and their followings are known to include numerous high ranking and well known figures in the worlds of politics, business, the professions and academia. Courted and feted, they preside over anniversary functions, commemorations, and installations, and their pictures and books are to be found on bookstalls throughout the subcontinent. In part, the publicity given to the gurus and godmen of India reflects the growing popular interest in them among western followers: the antics of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, in Oxford Street or in Berkeley, California; the Transcendental Meditation Movement of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with a following of as many as four hundred thousand in the west; the powerful vogue in America for the boy Guru Maharaj; and the ecstatic cult of Bhagwan Rajneesh, which attracts hundreds to Poona, are just a few of the more notorious examples.

It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India, and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of labour migrants, the article argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the article explores the ways in which migration, its effects, and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination—a process that is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the article gives attention to continuity at the material, personal, and more emotive levels. This runs counter to research that situates migration as rupturing or change-driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways, providing comfort and familiarity, but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced, and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad.

The emergence of criminal secret societies in post-Mao China has closely correlated with the criminal subcultures, massive unemployment, impoverishment, economic inequality, relative deprivation, and political corruption that have arisen from the reform process. Although perceived as the roots of organized crime worldwide, these variables have generated crime incentives—mainly among disadvantaged and marginalized social groups—far stronger in China than in most of Western societies. The factors underlying organized crime in China are not simply the by-products of economic liberalization, but rather related to the structural problems caused by flawed reform policies and China's particular political context. These problems account to a large extent for the double nature of many criminal organizations as both anti-social and anti-state forces. The regime's crackdown on organized crime may hamper efforts for greater socio-political pluralism. But in the long run, it may strengthen the rule of law and lead to the improvement of relevant reform policies.

Event

During the spring, summer and autumn of 1947 India's richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe. The trigger for the catastrophe was Britain's parting gift to its Indian subjects of partition. Confronted by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland—Pakistan—a campaign which since 1946 had turned increasingly violent, the British government early in 1947 accepted viceroy Lord Mountbatten's advice that partition was necessary to arrest the country's descent into civil war. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi notably excepted, the leadership of the Congress party came gradually and reluctantly to the same conclusion. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru's deputy, likened it to the cutting off of a diseased limb. But in accepting the ‘logic’ of the League's ‘two-nation’ theory, the British applied it remorselessly. They insisted that partition would have to follow the lines of religious affiliation, not the boundaries of provinces. In 1947 League president Muhammad Ali Jinnah was forced to accept what he had contemptuously dismissed in 1944 as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, a Pakistan bereft of something like half of Bengal and the Punjab and most of Assam.

Buried in an obscure journal published in Burma is a letter addressed to its readers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication. The editor had asked one of the publication's founders, a well-known former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer turned progres-sive reformer, to pen a few lines. Years later, the writer achieved acclaim as an ardent supporter of Burmese nationalism and independence and one of the founding scholars of Burma and Southeast Asia studies. These were his words of inspiration to an audience that comprised mostly educated Burmese:

Burma did not lose its independence because the rulers of Burma came into conflict with the British Empire, but because they had not sufficient wisdom to preserve their country; they did not know enough of Burma or of the outside world. And it will not again be capable of independence until Burmans know enough of Burma and of the outside world to guide its destinies.

In essence, the Burmese were responsible for their own colonisation because they lacked ‘wisdom’ and only through gaining this elusive knowledge could they be free. This opinion was based on nearly three decades worth of first-hand observation of Burmese society. The author was J. S. Furnivall.

Westernization is a pervasive modern phenomenon. Its impact is more pervasive and pernicious than many people are aware and/or willing to admit. The spread of the dominant Western culture has caused a gradual demise of many peripheral cultures. The incursion of Western agents into Naga soil, beginning with British military conquest and American missionary intrusion, has resulted in a significant influence and westernization of Nagas and their culture and worldview. Consequently, it is almost a cliché to assert that since colonial contact the long-evolved Naga traditional values are being replaced by Western values. Today, the literal colonization of Nagas by the imperial West has ended, but the process of westernization is continuing, thanks to the ongoing influence being exerted by modern media, technology and other trends of globalization. My objective in this paper is not to highlight the ‘form’ or ‘material’ aspect of the culture, such as clothing (although mimicry in this area is almost faultless among a large section of Nagas), rather, my goal is to discuss the current state of mindset and fundamental cultural structures of the Nagas that have resulted from the adjustments in the lives and minds of the people because of the imposition of westernization. In fact, it is more than merely a process of adjustment consequent upon conquest, it is an extensive overhauling of cultural institutions, values and practices. I will underscore the westernization of some basic social structures and the mindset of the people.

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

This article seeks to better understand political violence in Bangladesh. Analysing the case of student politics, the article enquires into the productive use of violence by student activists and leaders. It argues that student violence should not be considered as a breakdown of order or a sign of state fragility, but as a means of gaining access to party-state resources and patronage. Violence operates to mark out and maintain power relations between student groups and factions. Risk-taking and the performance of self-sacrifice are important to delineate spaces of power and broker connections to potential political patrons. While actively engaging in political violence provides legitimacy within student hierarchies, victimhood provides a powerful means of publicly displaying one's commitment to a political party. Student public authority, while violent, is closely integrated in national political-party authority structures and, as a result, is intrinsically connected to the Bangladesh party-state. While it might seem counter-intuitive, this article argues that the use of political violence helps one to gain protection from the (party-)state.

Bengal is a vast cremation ground, a meeting place for ghosts and evil spirits, a land so overrun by dogs, jackals and vultures that it makes one wonder whether the Bengalis are really alive or have become ghosts from some distant epoch. And yet in the imaginative words of the poet, golden Bengal was once ‘well-watered, fruitful, abundant with crops.’ A garden of culture and civilization for over a thousand years … (Biplabi, 7 November, 1943, cited in Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Medern Bengal: the Famine of 1943–44, New York, 1982).

This paper reflects on the apparent ‘paradox’ of a contemporary Bangladesh that appears both ‘more modern’ and ‘more Islamic’, focusing on changes in the family (and the gender and generational orders that it embodies) as a central locus of anxiety and contestation. The paper begins with theory, how the paradox is framed by classical social science expectations of religious decline and how this has been contested by contemporary writers who describe specifically modern forms of piety. It then turns to Bangladesh, where highly publicized symbolic oppositions between ‘religion’ and ‘development’ contrast sharply with people's pragmatic accommodation of development goods in everyday life. Analysis of religious references in interview data reveal the co-existence of very different understandings: a more traditional view of religion as embedded in the moral order; and a more modern deliberate cultivation of a religious life. They also reveal how many of the uses which people make of religion are not specifically religious: to conjure a moral universe, to mark what is important to them, to say things about themselves. The final section returns to theory, reflecting on how this is informed by the findings from Bangladesh, and suggesting that the importance of the private and personal as a site for governance offers a further dimension of why the supposed ‘paradox’ of a religious modernity may not be so paradoxical after all.

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again.

- Attributed to Aurangzeb

There is no safer way to blacken a person's reputation in the estimate of following generations than to attribute a wanton holocaust of wasted beauty to him.

- Antonia Fraser on Oliver Cromwell