In the summer of 1920, when the Khilāfat movement (1918–24) was at its height, thousands of British Indian Muslims, under severe emotional stress, began to emigrate to the neighbouring Muslim country of Afghanistan. Believing that British India was no longer safe for Islam they had sought refuge in the hijrat or voluntary withdrawal as the only course left open to them.

The Indian state of West Bengal is governed and politically dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M) for short) which has been in Government there since 1977 as the largest constituent party to the ruling Left Front. The CPI(M)'s position in West Bengal is unique both in India and in the world in the sense that it is the only Communist party to be popularly elected and reelected to power for such a long period. Today it draws most of its electoral support from the rural areas where the party is supported by peasants of practically all socio-economic sections. It is to an interesting period in the history of Communism in Bengal that this article will turn, namely to the creation of a particular alliance of Marxists and peasants in the restlessness in that state in the late 1960s and the virtual elimination of non-Marxist forces in large areas.

I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in Bangladesh. I argue that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. Hence, to understand decentralization, we must first understand how local government works. This implies analysing not only decentralization, but also democracy, from the bottom up. I present a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as a joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms/interests, and the organizational density and ability of civil society. I then test these ideas using qualitative data from Bangladesh. The evidence shows that civic organizations worked with non-governmental organizations and local governments to effect transformative change from the grass roots upwards—not just to public budgets and outputs, but to the underlying behaviours and ideas that underpin social development. In the aggregate, these effects were powerful. The result, key development indicators show, is Bangladesh leap-frogging past much wealthier India between 1990 and 2015.

Through a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

The definition of China as a nation has often been contrasted with the definition of China as a culture. The modern Chinese state, it is said, has to displace the Middle Kingdom concept of the Great Tradition. The culturalism of dynastic China had to be transmuted into nationalism as China accepted the challenge of modernization. Truly, China has experienced revolution in the twentieth century; the political and cultural definition of China in the 1970s does differ from that of the 1870s. But perhaps our concentration on Chinese tradition as a deterrent to modernization has obscured the continuities of Chinese history. Though certain aspects of the Great Tradition hindered change in China, others contributed to it. The Chinese heritage provided the framework and orientation as Chinese selected elements from Western civilization, and while transforming their own tradition they also translated and transformed those importations designed to bring wealth and power. Reinterpretations of the importations were informed by Chinese perceptions of the past as well as of the present.

The introduction of modern concepts like adulthood and sanctity given to individual rights has legally turned the individual settlement of marriage between two consenting adults to be legitimate. Under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955, except for certain incest taboos, the legal restrictions on marriage of two adult Hindus are almost non-existent. Briefly speaking, this means that under the law both sagotra (same gotra) and inter-caste marriages are permitted. Yet, the customary rules regulating marriages in most parts of north India are based upon caste endogamy, village and clan exogamy. While keeping within caste, they adopt the gotra or got, as is known in rural north India, rule of exogamy (gotra are an exogamous patrilineal clan whose members are thought to share patrilineal descent from a common ancestor). For marriage certain prohibited degrees of kinship have to be avoided. As a rule three or four got exogamy is followed by most caste groups upper or lower. Any break in this, though legally allowed, is not acceptable.

Maunsell, a lieutenant in the 23rd Native Infantry of the Bengal Army set out on horseback in October 1812 from Agra, in what were then called the North-western Provinces, on a visit of inspection to Etawah, seventy-five miles south-east, accompanied by two sepoy orderlies and a horse carrying his belongings and equipment. All three were armed, Maunsell with sword and holster pistols, the sepoys with the Brown Bess musket and bayonet.

The study of the British demission of power in India has focused on the political story, on the nationalist pressures and the British policies that led inexorably to self-government and to partition. This began, explicitly at least, with the Montagu declaration in 1917. But the idea of gradually developing self-governing institutions seemed in many ways easier to implement in politics than administration. India was proceeding from an authoritarian to a popular government: the transfer of power was not only from British to Indians but also from administrators to politicians. And as Philip Woodruff, writing on the I.C.S., comments, ‘it is hard to serve where you have ruled’. On one level, the Service could be Indianized, and from the early 19205 Indianization proceeded apace. What was more complicated was the role the I.C.S. was expected to play in the changing constitutional and political circumstances from 1920 through to 1947—expected to play, that is, in addition to the sustained execution of the everyday functions of government.

The old project of modernizing madrasas has acquired a new zeal in South Asia after September 2011, whereby madrasa reform programmes became an acknowledged soft tactic of the war on terror. With 9000 Aliya (reformed) madrasas, the Bangladesh madrasa modernization programme has been identified as a potentially useful model for the neighbouring states of Pakistan and India who have made slower progress in implementing similar programmes. In this paper I argue that, although the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh has succeeded in integrating secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, in reality this modernization project has failed in its underlying ambition to generate a ‘modern discourse’ on Islam—a discourse that is compatible with the demands of western modernity. The right to speak for Islam is still primarily exercised by the ‘ulama and graduates of the Qoumi (unreformed) madrasas. Aliya madrasas today compete with the secular schools not with Qoumi madrasas. The growth of the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh, instead of bearing testimony to the popular appeal of the modernization agenda, demonstrates the preference of Muslim parents for increased Islamic content in the school curriculum

The history of opium is a major theme in modern Chinese history. Books and academic careers have been devoted to its study. Yet the question that scholars of the opium wars and of modern China have failed to ask is how the demand for opium was generated. My puzzle, during the initial stage of research, was who smoked opium and why. Neither Chinese nor non-Chinese scholars have written much about this, with the exception of Jonathan Spence. Although opium consumption is a well-acknowledged fact, the reasons for its prevalence have never been fully factored into the historiography of the opium wars and of modern China. Michael Greenberg has dwelt on the opium trade, Chang Hsin-pao and Peter Fay on the people and events that made armed conflicts between China and the West unavoidable. John Wong has continued to focus on imperialism, James Polachek on Chinese internal politics while Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, the latest work, has studied the political systems that controlled opium. But the political history of opium, like the opium trade and the theatre of war, is only part of the story. We need to distinguish them from the wider social and cultural life of opium in China. The vital questions are first, the point at which opium was transformed from a medicine to a luxury item and, secondly, why it became so popular and widespread after people discovered its recreational value. It is these questions that I address. We cannot fully understand the root problem of the opium wars and their role in the emergence of modern China until we can explain who was smoking opium and why they smoked it.

China's long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China (‘the War of Resistance to Japan’) to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the war's legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society.

It may be asserted with some assurance that the very name ‘Siraiki’ will be quite unfamiliar to most readers of this article. The well-known predilection of most South Asianists for working from English sources and their concentration upon the larger Indian scene, where such sources are so much more abundant than for Pakistan, may contribute to this unfamiliarity; but it is doubtless due principally to the quite recent introduction of the term on a general scale in its homeland. In simple terms, ‘Sirāikī’ is the language of the middle Indus valley, while the ‘Sirāikī movement’ that seeks to improve its standing is based in the central part of this region, the South-West Panjab, principally in its most important cities, Multan and Bahawalpur. This article sets out to inform a wider audience about the movement which is attempting to assert the language's separate identity and to secure for it increased official recognition.

In 1880, the area north of Calcutta was a ‘jungle’, an area with swamps and marshes and a few scattered villages. With the expansion of the jute industry, the area was rapidly transformed. Factories were set up, and large numbers of people came to the area in search of work. Until the late 1920s, the industry prospered and the population of the industrial area increased enormously, but since then employment growth has stagnated and the population has increased only moderately. At present, the industrial area still shows the features described in the reports at the beginning of this century: ‘mill lines’ crowded with migrant labourers, bad housing conditions, particularly in the private bastis, small houses with little ventilation and light, open drains, public bathing places.

The revivalist movements which developed in so many Muslim communities at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries are well known to students of Islamic history. The Fulani jihād of Usuman dan Fodio, the Sanūsīyah movement in Libya, the rise of the Wahhābīs in Arabia, the reforms instituted among the Volga Tatars, the Mujāhidīn movement in Northern India and the Fara'idis of Bengal have all been the subject of study to a greater or lesser extent. Scholars have pointed out that movements which aimed initially at internal reform in a particular Muslim community often developed the added dimension of attack on what was conceived as an external, generally foreign, threat to that community, this being most clearly the case with the Wahhābīs and the Mujāhidīn. A contemporary movement which has features in common with all those mentioned above, that of the Padisr among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, has on the contrary received scant scholarly attention. This is all the more surprising since a European state—the Kingdom of the Netherlands—became involved in a war with the Minangkabau while the Padri movement was still in its full vigour; but although Dutch records and memoirs deal more than amply with this war, they have remained ignored for what they can tell us about the Padris themselves. This is not to deny that scholars who have attempted a brief characterization of the Padri movement have recognized that its complexity goes beyond the mere epithet ‘Islamic revivalism’, and the more perceptive have tried to link it to certain changes taking place within Minangkabau society, depicting the movement as ‘a social revolution’, ‘a coup d'étai’ or, by implication, as a revolt of the intellectuals. In the later stages of the movement, after European intervention had gathered momentum, a French scholar has characterized the war fought by the Padris as a ‘war of independence’.

Malaya has a plural society in which Malays form 49·8 per cent of the total population, Chinese 37·2 per cent and Indians 11·2 per cent. Apart from this racial diversity, there is the added fact that the Malays tend to live in the rural areas whereas the immigrant groups tend to live in the urban areas or on the plantations, and only to a much lesser extent in the rural areas. For example, of the rural population of Malaya, Malays form 70 per cent, Chinese 17 per cent and Indians 11 per cent. In the urban areas of Malaya, Malays make up 23 per cent of the population, Chinese 65 per cent and Indians 10 per cent. In 1957 the average annual income of the adult male in the Malay community was $1,463, as against $3,223 in the Chinese community and $2,031 in the Indian. From these figures it is clear that the Malays have lagged behind the immigrant communities in respect of economic development.

How decisions and policies are made and implemented? This classical question in political science has attracted a considerable literature amongst observers of realpolitik in China, with its continental size, 1.3 billion population and five layers of government. Mirroring the move away from the traditional dualism of ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ approaches in the general implementation literature, recent literature on Chinese central–local politics emphasizes the co-participation of central and local actors in decision-making and the dialectical interactive relationship between central and local power. Goodman recognizes, for instance, that central and local actors have differentiated roles to play in decision-making. Li makes the case of interactive central–local power, calling for a reconceptualization of central-local relations in a non-zero-sum schema. Recent studies on the ‘Open Up the West’ national policy augment the claim for ‘disaggregating’ China, and the relevance of the provincial, regional and local as levels and foci of analysis. Against the traditional emphasis over central predominance versus provincial power, this body of literature, adopting a ‘non-dualistic’ approach to power, highlights the co-existence of central and local power in a diffuse, complex decision-making process.

Ethnographic work in an urban kampung in central Java reveals this community form to be both an administrative rationality and a set of locally meaningful social relations. The continued restatement of the relevance of community through the Javanese ritual meal known as the slametan and women's roles in these rituals of commensality are the focus of this consideration. State sponsorship of housewives as community welfare workers extends the long arch of kampung community formation as the ground for the dispersion of rituals of rule into the lives of Indonesian citizens as well as working-class recuperation through rituals of community. State formation conceived as process draws attention to everyday kampung culture as the matrix for reproduction of both rule and working class neighbourhoods, and provides a perspective on the state that is resolutely low, attuned to both the realities of institutional structure and the repertoires and routines of everyday practise.

For many Hindu residents of the great cities of northern India in the mid-nineteenth century, the most powerful figures in the community were members of the wealthy families of indigenous bankers and traders which controlled credit and dispensed patronage for the religious life of their localities. Just as in the smallest bazaar great power lay in the hands of the petty moneylender, so in the cities which remained clusters of bazaars and residential blocs, the banking and trading oligarchies determined the limits of commercial activity with their credit notes, and helped to supply the community through their secondary trades in cloth, grain and sugar.

This paper will build on my ethnographic engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami to explore aspects of a shift in Islamist practice and imagination from the ‘state’ as the inspiration for projects and movements to the ‘market’. In doing so I hope to investigate not just what this might tell us about Islamism in Pakistan, but also about the ability of the state to manage religion more generally. My aim is three-fold: first, to record the particular modalities of changes within Islamism in Pakistan; second, to show that these shifts betray a closer alignment between the global political imagination and Islamism than has previously been acknowledged; and third, in discussing these issues, to explore the implications of the idea of market as an important contender to the dominance of the idea of the state in political mobilizations. While recent discussions about secularism, following Talal Asad,1 have tended to focus on the disciplinary force exerted by the state, this paper suggests that the market has emerged as a potentially more significant, though under-recognized, disciplinary force.

In 1817–21, the Indian subcontinent was ravaged by a series of epidemics which marked the beginning of what has since become known as the First Cholera Pandemic. Despite their far-reaching consequences, these epidemics have received remarkably little attention and have never been considered as historical subjects in their own right. This article examines the epidemics of 1817–21 in greater detail and assesses their significance for the social and political history of the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, it examines the meanings that were attached to the epidemics in the years running up to the first appearance of cholera in the West. In so doing, the article makes comparisons between responses to cholera in India and in other contexts, and tests the applicability of concepts used in the study of epidemics in the West. It is argued that the official reaction to cholera in India was initially ameliorative, in keeping with the East India Company's response to famines and other supposedly natural disasters. However, this view was gradually supplemented and replaced by a view of cholera as a social disease, requiring preventive action. These views were initially rejected in Britain, but found favour after cholera epidemics in 1831–32. Secondly, in contrast to later epidemics, it is argued that those of 1817–21 did little to exacerbate tensions between rulers and the ruled. On the rare occasions when cholera did elicit a violent reaction, it tended to be intra-communal rather than anti-colonial in nature.