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 . . .’.

. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.

Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57

This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the words ‘curious’ and ‘puzzling’ deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

Debates on Islam, citizenship and women's rights have been closely interconnected in Pakistan, from the time of the state's creation in 1947 through to the present day. This article explores the extent to which during the 1950s campaigns to reform Muslim personal law (which received a boost thanks to the outcry against 1955 polygamous marriage of the then Prime Minister, Muhammad Ali Bogra) were linked with wider lobbying by female activists to secure for women their rights as Pakistani citizens alongside men. Through a close examination of the discussions that were conducted on the pages of English-language newspapers, such as Dawn and the Pakistan Times, it highlights in particular what female contributors thought about issues that were affecting the lives of women in Pakistan during its early, and often challenging, nation-building years.

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The really important ‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.

First authorised in 1987, local village elections in China have been much studied by China scholars to assess the emergence of democracy in the People's Republic. Elected village committees were to manage ‘local affairs’, including village lands, as a step towards local self-governance. In place of democracy, this article highlights access and control over natural resources in relation to a local village election first held in Mengsong village, Yunnan, in 2000. A comparison of resource access in 1997 and 2002 shows that over this period, Mengsong villagers lost access to forests, agricultural lands, pastures and mineral resources—‘local affairs’ that an elected committee might have managed. National and local events from 1998 to 2002 signalled a recalibration of people of high and low ‘quality’ (suzhi) in China, with Mengsong shifting cultivators emerging as ‘low quality’ people who threatened China's environment and economic development. These changes in status signified a dramatic shift in who was qualified to manage resources, run local affairs and contribute to China as it entered the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. The discourse of ‘quality’ resulted in Akha farmers being blamed, and blaming themselves, for their own poverty and resource loss, deflecting attention from the political economic processes that caused their dispossession. Far from the emergence of democracy, the local village election in Mengsong entailed increased state control over people and resources, as China geared up for environmental protection and engagement with the global economy.

This article is concerned with the role of kinship and kin morality in contexts of work in South Asia. It focuses on the highly ambivalent nature of kin morality when mobilised outside the household and the family. Ethnographic evidence from a small-scale industry in Tamilnadu, South India, shows how employers frequently invoke the morality of kinship and caste in an attempt to secure a reliable and compliant labour force and to avoid overt class confrontation. However, employers’ efforts to promote kinship—real or fictive—and its morality in the workplace appear inadequate in the face of high labour turnover and frequently collapsing employer-worker relationships in small-scale industries. While employers’ repeated use of kin ideology succeeds in silencing the workers on the shop floor, it is much less effective in securing a stable labour force in the long run. The argument put forward here points to the limits of kin morality and questions its effectiveness in informal contexts of labour employment. The discussion sheds new light on the role of caste and kinship in recruiting, retaining and disciplining labour in India's informal economy.

Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imperial rule, analogous to the Hindu-Muslim communalism which emerged in north India? Or, as one opinion has it, was the ideological change an opportunistic maneuver on the part of a group of politicians, encouraged by British officials anxious to foil the nationalist movement? This paper takes an approach more in line with the first alternative and sees the propagation of an ideology of ethnic antagonism as a result of processes of the reformation of group and personal identities. I link the reformation of group identity to the confusion in rules regarding group behavior which resulted from the imposition and operation of the imperial system of dispute management, the Anglo-Indian legal system.

After half a century of intense debate, landlordism in traditional China continues to be one of the most controversial subjects in Asian Studies circles. The earlier literature on this topic tends to be contradictory and, at times, highly polemical. Two loosely defined schools of thought have emerged since the 1930s: (A) those scholars who argue that landlord-tenant relations were primarily exploitative with the balance of power passing increasingly to urban-based absentee landlords, and (B) those who maintain that a high rate of tenancy is not particularly unique to the twentieth century and that the relationship between landlord and tenant was not uniformly exploitative. The present paper does not fit neatly into either school, although specific elements of the following argument can be isolated to support opposing sides of the debate. I intend to explore one form of traditional Chinese tenancy, known in the literature as ‘hereditary’ or ‘permanent’ tenancy, which was common throughout many parts of Southeastern China until the Communist land reform campaigns of the early 1950s. The tenants were hereditary in the sense that the usufruct passed patrilineally from father to son while the actual title to the land remained in the hands of powerful lineage corporations. The tenants lived in satellite villages near the landlords' communities and were overshadowed in every way by their dominant neighbors.

When in August 1933 the German Minister to China, Dr Oskar P. Trautmann, reported to Berlin, ‘daβ die Völkerbundsmelodie politisch hier ausgespielt hat’, he had jumped to a conclusion too soon. When two years later the Journal Round Table commented, ‘to-day the League of Nations is no longer a political factor in the Far East’, this assessment was vindicated by evidence of every description. The two years between had witnessed the peak and decline of the League of Nation's ‘technical co-operation’ with the National Government of China. This episode plays its part as one of the major accomplishments of the League during the dismal second decade of its existence. It figures, however, only marginally in the history of twentieth-century China. Western works on modern Chinese history tend to neglect it altogether, and the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of China's foreign relations during the Republican period does not even deem it worth a reference in passing. On the other hand, the one authoritative textbook on modern Chinese economic history published in the People's Republic of China devotes ample space to the denunciation of the League's Chinese enterprise.

This paper examines two linked cases of abortive Imperial expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian winter expedition to Khiva both took place in 1839, and both ended in disaster. These events were linked, not merely by coincidence, but by mutual reactions to intelligence received in Orenburg, St Petersburg, Calcutta, London, and Tehran. British and Russian officials shared similar fears about each other's ambitions in Central Asia, similar patterns of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, and a similar sense of entitlement as the self-conscious agents of two ‘Great Powers’. By examining the decision-making process which preceded these twin cases of expansion, and the British and Russian attitudes to Central Asian rulers and informants, the paper provides not only a deeper understanding of what provoked these particular disasters, but also of the wider process of European imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. This was the most dramatic Malaysian acquisition of a foreign company during the restructuring of the country's post-colonial economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Guthrie Dawn Raid remains a celebrated but, at the same time, contested juncture in contemporary Malaysian memory. Drawing upon a variety of sources—including original interviews and correspondence with key participants in, and observers of, the Guthrie Dawn Raid, as well as newly released British documents related to the Anglo-Malaysian events of September 1981—this article presents a new interpretation of the origins of this most iconic of Malaysian corporate takeovers. In particular, it stresses the long-term aspirations of a key (but often overlooked) figure within the late and post-colonial Malay bureaucratic and economic elite, Ismail Mohamed Ali. At the same time, the article emphasizes the specific requirements of Malaysia's New Economic Policy against the backdrop of burgeoning intra-Malaysian ethnic business competition.

Following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992, the discipline of archaeology has been increasingly exploited for meeting the demands of religious nationalism in India, for offering material proof for the primordiality of Hindu dharma, and for substantiating claims that the ‘Vedic Hindu’ had an indigenous origin within the subcontinent. Over the last decade, statements such as ‘new astrological and archaeological evidence has come to light which suggests that the people who composed the Vedas called themselves Aryans and were indigenous to India’ (Prinja 1996: 10), have not only propped up the doctrinaire of Hindutva, but have also acquired an official sanctioning from many within the professional community of Indian archaeologists (e.g. Lal 1998), who are actively involved in a programme of promoting the premise that it is possible to unearth true histories objectively through archaeological means (Gupta 1996: 142).

An important branch in recent debates on the nature of the judiciary in colonial south India has focused on the extent to which the judicial institutions—and the social transformations mediated through them—were controlled by the colonial state. This debate is of interest not only from the point of legal history. From the broader perspective of social and cultural history the debate is important because it draws attention to issues such as indigenous agency, conceptual negotiation and the hybrid nature of institutions under colonial rule. It is these issues I intend to address through an analysis of indigenous litigation in the Mayor's Court in late eighteenth-century Madras. The analysis falls in two parts. First, I analyse how indigenous agents availed themselves of the court, despite an official colonial policy of excluding disputes between Indians from its jurisdiction. In the second part, I focus on the ways in which the nature of property was contested and negotiated in complex dialogues between indigenous litigants and representatives of the colonial judiciary. Both parts of the analysis indicate that important aspects of the litigation in the Mayor's Court were largely beyond the control of the colonial authorities.

Like most research on Japanese involvement in Korea in the latter years of the Meiji period, this article is deeply indebted to the pioneer work of Professor Hilary Conroy. I have also drawn heavily on the work of Eugene and Han-kyo Kim. However, a detailed study of the railways of Korea does not come within the framework of Professor Conroy's book, and there is little material on the subject available in English. In Japanese there is the official government history, the Chōsen Tetsudō Shi, but the purpose of this essay is to show the views of the business world on the subject, and so contemporary articles in the leading economic journals have constituted the most important source. A consideration of those articles which comment on the changing state of affairs will perhaps clarify the reasons underlying dōmestic pressure for Japanese involvement in the construction of Korean railways.

Nationalism postulates the existence of a people and declares its right to take over an old state organization or establish a new one. A nationalist movement attempts to do this in the name of the people so postulated. Usually, the leaders of such movements come from the centre, or more precisely, the large urban areas of the envisaged state.

Among anti-colonial nationalists, Bhagat Singh and M.K. Gandhi are seen to exemplify absolutely contrasting strategies of resistance. Bhagat Singh is regarded as a violent revolutionary whereas Gandhi is the embodiment of non-violence. This paper argues that Bhagat Singh and his comrades became national heroes not after their murder of a police inspector in Lahore or after throwing bombs in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi but during their practice of hunger strikes and non-violent civil disobedience within the walls of Lahore's prisons in 1929–30. In fact there was plenty in common in the strategies of resistance employed by both Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. By labelling these revolutionaries ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’, the British sought to dismiss their non-violent demands for rights as ‘political prisoners’. The same labels were adopted by Gandhi and his followers. However, the quality of anti-colonial nationalism represented by Bhagat Singh was central to the resolution of many of the divisions that racked pre-partition Punjab.

This article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality.