What, in detail, do Indian peasants do when famine looms? How do they defend themselves, who succumbs and who survives? Recently several talented economic historians have given these questions a vigorous airing. Morris D. Morris in particular set off the discussion by suggesting that South Asian peasants are well prepared for periodic drought famines. He argues (I compress him almost to parody) that long experience with the monsoon's periodic failures has taught the Indian cultivator prudence: when crops begin to fail the cultivator draws upon previously stored substances—his wife's jewelry, grain, cattle, etc.—and sells them or barters them to keep up his usual level of food consumption. Thus, while his assets are cyclically depleted and replenished, he can usually stave off the most feared effect of drought, which is starvation. N. S. Jodha, however, has partially contradicted Morris by adducing evidence from Rajasthan and elsewhere which shows the peasant cultivator to be more likely to cut back his current food intake rather than risk a loss of future production by depleting his capital assets. Like Morris, Jodha sees that farmers are rational and plan for the future, the disagreement being whether they plan for crop failures in the midst of good harvests or plan for good harvests in the midst of crop failures In fact these two views, suitably softened, are not incompatible, and one can imagine both operating at different phases of a worsening episode of drought.

In the Theravāda Buddhist polities on the mainland of Southeast Asia, abiding concerns about the proper structuring of the relationship between the ‘two wheels of dhamma’ (i.e. the realm of religion and the realm of politics) have had a profound influence on processes of state formation and political legitimation. This article explores one such religious ‘effect’ on the constitutions and electoral laws of modern Burma/Myanmar, Siam/Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, namely the official disenfranchisement of Buddhist monks (and, in some instances, Buddhist ‘nuns’ as well as non-Buddhist clergy). The article traces the historical evolution of this Buddhist exception to the democratic principle of equal and universal suffrage, and assesses the extent to which dominant theoretical approaches in the social sciences help us to understand the politics of religious disenfranchisement in Southeast Asia. It finds that neither secularization theory nor the religious-economy approach can explain observed patterns. Instead, the article offers an account of the politics of religious disenfranchisement that emphasizes the role of ideas and historical context.

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.

It is immediately apparent to anyone who juxtaposes those two massive works of scholarship and patient investigation, Sudō Yoshiyuki's History of Land Tenure Systems in China, which is mostly concerned with the Sung dynasty, and John Lossing Buck's Land Utilization in China, which describes the early 1930s, that in the intervening thousand years the character of Chinese rural society changed, and changed radically.

This paper uses a historical ethnography of the construction of Korangi Township outside Karachi to analyse the configuration of power in the post-colonial Pakistani state of the late 1950s and 1960s. Foucault's distinction between ‘sovereign’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘security’ power helps to reveal how possibilities of non-interventionist control were deliberately discarded in favour of an (often theatrical) exercise of ‘raw’ power. The way in which the township was conceived by the international architect and city planner, C. A. Doxiadis, often stood in contrast and tension with the ways in which it was executed by General Ayub Khan's military regime (1958–1968). Rapid early success—tens of thousands of refugee slum dwellers were resettled within six months—went hand-in-hand with equally-quick failure and abandonment later on. The Pakistani regime was only interested in demonstrating its ability to make decisions and to deploy executive power over its territory, but it made no sustained effort to use spatial control to entangle its subjects in a web of ‘governmentality’. In the final analysis, the post-colonial Pakistani state was a ‘state of exception’ made permanent, which deliberately enacted development failure to underscore its overreliance on sovereign power.

The problem of controlling and taxing the countryside is one which has remained with all governments in Asia, or indeed in the whole developing world, up to 1972. Government has inevitably tended to be essentially urban-based, centred on military power-bases, whether they be ‘Pacified Areas’, towns or mud forts, backed by military power normally concentrated in these centres. Outside the towns, however, lived the great mass of the population, and the great mass of the potentially taxable wealth, and it is upon its ability to control the rural areas that the credibility and survival of any régime must ultimately depend. It is perhaps an indication of our preoccupations with the problems of pacification and control in Asian societies that increasing interest is being shown in the patterns of rural control, in systems of traditional deference, which are usually seen as surviving much longer and much more strongly in the countryside than in the towns, and in problems of income distribution through social structures based on land. In such a situation, then, the role of the ‘estates’—of traditional and institutionalized systems of dependence and of control, of systems which were commonly used and hence studied by governments—is one which demands to be considered.

The Cultivation System, introduced by the Dutch in Java in 1830, was grounded on peasant coercion. Capitalizing on the colonial government's ability to force peasants to produce large, cheap and regular quantities of tropical agricultural goods and to labour unrelentingly at a great variety of other tasks, the System succeeded in its aim of transforming Java from a financial millstone around Holland's neck into a highly profitable resource. Coercion, in the eyes of the Cultivation System's founder and guiding light, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch (1830–33), was the most appropriate and effective means of creating wealth from Java's peasant masses. The power of incentive alone, he argued, had failed in the recent past to spur the Javanese to greater productive activity because the peasant had not reached the required stage of social development. ‘Never forget’, he remarked in 1830, ‘that the javan has progressed no further in intellectual terms than our children of 12 or 13 years old, and possesses even much less knowledge than they do. They must be led and governed as children…’. Van den Bosch's branch of coercion, however, was not a blunt instrument. It was based upon the time-worn notion of domesticating the indigenous elite and employing its customary authority over the peasantry to achieve Dutch ends. Under the overall direction of the colonial authorities and their officials, then, peasants were to be ‘led and governed’ by their own leaders, for whom, Van den Bosch claimed, they possessed a ‘childlike respect’.

This article examines the history and effects of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka, by which is meant the inclusion of special protections and status for Buddhism in the island's 1972 and 1978 constitutions, alongside guarantees of general religious rights and other features of liberal constitutionalism. By analysing Sri Lankan constitutional disputes that have occurred since the 1970s, this article demonstrates how the ‘Buddhism Chapter’ of Sri Lanka's constitution has given citizens potent opportunities and incentives for transforming specific disagreements and political concerns into abstract contests over the nature of Buddhism and the state's obligations to protect it. Through this process, a culture of Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation has taken shape. This article also augments important theories about the work of ‘theocratic’ or religiously preferential constitutions and argues for an alternative, litigant-focused method of investigating them.

This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa 1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of ‘knowledge’ in this period? After addressing these questions on ‘modes’ of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of ‘means’ of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘bibliocentric’ attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge or takiyya.

By the grace of the Almighty an extraordinary species of sentient life has been found on earth in the nineteenth century: they are known as modern Bengalis. After careful analysis zoological experts have found that this species displays the external bodily features of homo sapiens. They have five fingers on their hands and feet; they have no tails; and their bones and cranial structures are indeed similar to the human species. However as yet there is no comparable unanimity about their inner nature. Some believe that in their inner nature too they are similar to humans; others think that they are only externally human; in their inner nature they are in fact beasts.

Which side do we support in this controversy? We believe in the theory which asserts the bestiality of Bengalis. We learnt this theory from English newspapers. According to some redbearded savants, just as the creator had taken atoms of beauty from all beautiful things to make Tilottama, in exactly the same way, by taking atoms of bestiality from all animals he has created the extraordinary character of the modern Bengali. Slyness from the fox, sycophancy and supplication from the dog, cowardliness from sheep, imitativeness from the ape and volubility from the ass—by a combination of these qualities He has made the modern Bengali rise in the firmament of history: a presence which illuminates the horizon, the centre of all of India's hopes and future prospects, and the great favourite of the savant Max Mueller.

The Chinese migrant's strong sense of attachment to the guxiang (native place) is well recognized, and literature on overseas Chinese generally proceeds on this assumption. There is, however, little discussion on the mechanisms which have bonded the migrant to the native place, either by helping him express his longing and concern for it, or by reminding him of his obligations as a native son. Family ties, ownership of land and business connections as well as pure sentimental attachment, so poignant in centuries of Chinese poetry, naturally make migrants feel concerned for its well-being and eager for its news. Overseas Chinese in most cases continue to communicate with the native place on an individual basis, for there are levels of activities where the scale and complexity are such that only organizational efforts would suffice. At the same time, an easily identifiable institution enables those at home to contact and rally more effectively its migrant fellow-regionals, when the need for spiritual or material help arises.

This paper critiques current academic usage of the analytic category of ‘civil society’ in recent studies of contemporary China. The problem is not the lack of good empirical work (which abounds), but rather the way in which understandings of ‘civil society’ as applied to China have remained insulated from wider theoretical debates emerging from other parts of the world which have queried the productive utility of these understandings. Specifically, recent studies of China continue to define civil society through its alleged autonomy from the state. This definition has led to unsettling discrepancies between theory and empirical knowledge about Chinese society. Moreover, it has caused researchers to pay little attention to the equally complicated question of whether there are sufficient horizontal linkages among various social actors to constitute a civil society in China in the first place. This paper will argue that lessons learned from the rich civil society tradition and scholarship from other parts of the world may be adapted fruitfully to generate more meaningful and nuanced analyses of Chinese associations.

This paper follows the careers of ‘outlawed’ Indian Muslim subjects who moved outside the geographical and political space of British India and located themselves at the intersection of nineteenth century trans-Asiatic politics: Hijaz, Istanbul and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and Burma and Acheh in the East. These areas were sites where ‘modern’ Empires (British, Dutch, Ottoman and Russian) coalesced to lay out a trans-Asiatic imperial assemblage. The paper shows how Muslim ‘outlaws’ made careers and carved out their transnational networks by moving across the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century. British colonial rule, being an important spoke in the imperial wheel, enabled much of this transnationalism to weld together. Webs of connections derived from older forms of Islamic connectivity as well: diplomacy, kinship ties, the writing of commentaries on Islam and its sacred texts in unique ways, oral traditions, madrasa and student contacts. These networks were inclusive and impacted by the tanzimat-inspired scriptural reformist thought in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They were not narrowly anti-colonial in tone as they derived from a complex inter-play of imperial rivalries in the region. Rather, they were geared towards the triumph of reformist Islam that would unite the umma (community) and engage with the European world order. The paper shows how this imperially-embedded and individual-driven Muslim transnational network linked with Muslim politics rooted within India.

The Crimean War (1854—56), as its name suggests, was fought mainly on and around a peninsula jutting out from the northern shores of the Black Sea. Names such as the Alma River, Balaclava, and Inkerman are generally conjured up at the mention of this costly conflict. Strategic planning and operations on both sides, however, were not confined to the Crimea and the Caucasus. Far from Sebastopol, hostilities between Russia and the allied powers of Britain and France erupted in the seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and in the North Pacific Ocean. Accorded relatively little attention at the time, almost forgotten today, this Far Eastern1 theatre of the war offers insights into the growing role of Europe in East Asia. Whereas in the Crimea, the Allies achieved a victory of sorts while making immense human sacrifices, in the Far East they failed in many of their objectives but without incurring a great loss of life. The tragi-comic nature of tactical operations in the Far East should not obscure the war's broader implications: (1) the advance of Russia into the Amur River basin and Maritime Provinces then part of the Chinese Empire; (2) the intensification of British anxieties regarding Russian penetration into Manchuria and Korea; (3) the growing role of Japan in international relations; and (4) the progress of cartographical knowledge through surveys conducted in response to the demands of war.

This article focuses on Meiji Japan's policies towards the Ryukyus and the Taiwanese aboriginal territories in the early 1870s. The Meiji Government incorporated the Ryukyus by abolishing the kingdom in 1872 and sent expeditionary forces to the Taiwanese aboriginal territories on the pretext of the massacre of the shipwrecked Ryukyuans by the aboriginal tribes in 1874. Many Japanese and non-Japanese historians have argued that Japan started aggression on China by annexing its tributary state and invading its territories. In this article, I contend that the Ryukyu–Taiwan policies in the early Meiji period grew out of Japanese concerns over national security and prestige in a Western-dominated international environment but had no intention to secure Japan's independence and to aggrandise its national prestige by encroaching on China's territorial sovereignty.

More than 800 years ago—at approximately the same time as the founding of the first European universities—the renowned monastic institution known as the Nālandā Mahāvihāra disappeared from historical records. Since 2006, a transnational Asian initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as ‘Nalanda University’ in Bihar, India, has been embraced at the highest government and philanthropic levels by a consortium of South, Southeast, and East Asian nations. Nalanda, described as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’, and the issues surrounding its revival raise important questions about how a new interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and a newly imagined vision of ‘Asian’ education are seen as converging to promote Asian interests. First, I consider the ambivalent relationship of the revival and its pre-modern namesake against the Nālandā Mahāvihāra's known history. Then I characterize two kinds of discourse on the contemporary project: one that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and frames the revival as serving transnational Asian goals; and another that is Indic and imagines Nalanda as advancing Indian national concerns. While, for the various stakeholders, serious fissures are evident in the symbolic values of Nalanda—as an exemplar of Asia and of India—both types of discourse, taken together, reveal important insights into the development of an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’.

There can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography. Within this larger area of neglect, urban history occupies a special place. The indifference with which Indian historians have approached the urban heritage of the subcontinent is all the more difficult to understand because to contemporary European visitors, the merchants and other travellers, the towns and cities of Mughal India held a profound fascination. From the time of Tomé Pires and his highly perceptive Suma Oriental down to the end of the eighteenth century, stories of Indian travels and the accompanying descriptions of Mughal urban life continually entertained the popular literary audience. Not all of them understood or reported accurately what they saw. As the Scottish sea captain and country trader, Alexander Hamilton, who had an unrivalled knowledge of the sea ports and the coastal towns of India, pointed out with some candour, one great misfortune which attended the western travellers in India was their ignorance of the local languages. But the manifest contrast between the physical appearance of the European cities and those of Asia provoked some considerable and sensitive analysis of the nature of the urban processes in the two continents. Perhaps the most able and penetrating comments on the Mughal political, economic, and civic order came from the pen of the Dutch merchant, Francisco Pelsaert, and the French physician, François Bernier.

By a general consensus among historians, the modern age is characterized as the age of nationalism. Despite this general agreement, however, the phenomenon of Muslim nationalism in India, which finally fulfilled itself in establishing the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has remained misunderstood. In the first decade after the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan was explained away in terms of the divide and rule policy of the British and/or the religious fanaticism of the Muslims. This was so because Indian nationalists of all descriptions had assumed that Indian nationalism was a single and unified movement working for the unity or homogeneity of Indian civilization.

My main concern in this article is with statistics relating to such basic matters as the sizes of farm-holdings, the output and yield of crops, household income and expenditure, occupational statistics, cattle ownership, the sizes of villages, etc.—though I shall also range more widely. While the distinct and professional field of demographic statistics is necessarily outside my scope, I shall criticize some features of the Karnataka population census.Although since 1953 most of my fieldwork has been undertaken in the West African countryside, I am obliged to take most of my examples of bad statistics from south India, since West African statistics, which were never abundant, are now scantier than ever. Throughout my discussion I take it for granted that the lack of reliable statistics gravely impairs our understanding of the working of tropical rural economies.

Current scholarship is replete with the praises of princely Baroda, the ‘ideal and progressive’ state which emerged and prospered under the enlightened rule of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III in the early twentieth century. For example, V. B. Kulkarni notes in his Princely India and Lapse of British Paramountcy that ‘It is . . . enough to end this heart-warming story of wise princely governments by recalling the achievements of Sayajirao of Baroda . . . [in part] because he gave an enlightened government to a chronically-misgoverned state . . .’.