The Qing Myanmar campaign (1765-1770) was the most disastrous frontier war that the Qing dynasty had ever waged. In the beginning, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) of the Qing dynasty had envisaged winning this war in one easy stroke, as he deemed Myanmar no more than a remote barbarian tribe without any power. But he was wrong. After the Green Standard troops in Yunnan failed to bring the Myanmar to their knees, Qianlong sent his elite Manchu troops in. A regional conflict was thus escalated into a major frontier war that involved military maneuvers nationwide. At the front, the Manchu Bannermen had to deal with the unfamiliar tropical jungles and swamps, and above all, the lethal endemic diseases. Not only did one after another commander-in-chief of the Qing dynasty fail to conquer Myanmar, but the Qing troops also suffered extremely heavy casualties. After a gruelling four-year campaign, a truce was reached by the field commanders of the two sides at the end of 1769 with the Qing invading expedition failing to conquer Myanmar and withdrawing in disarray. To rehabilitate itself, the Qing dynasty kept a heavy military lineup in the border areas of Yunnan for about one decade in an attempt to wage another war while imposing a ban on inter-border trade for two decades.

This article draws together two studies: one that explores the intimate relationships of young slum-dwelling Dalit women in Mumbai and the other of young middle-class women in Baroda, Gujarat. Using an intersectional lens, we trace the ways that gendered ideals of respectability shape women's freedom of movement and relationships. The comparison produces new insights into the ways that class, caste, and location cut across gender to shape young women's lives in India. We argue that the distinctive positionings of the women structure the ways in which they react to gender norms and the means with which they strategize around them. Middle-class young women strike a ‘passive bargain’, upholding ideals of respectability by shoring up symbolic capital for a ‘good’ marriage and class privilege. The Dalit women show more active resistance to an ideal that they struggle to achieve, despite heavy control and surveillance over their movement and relationships. However, contrary to previous research, we show that both groups are beholden and lay claim to similar gendered and intimate ideals.

The anthropology of caste was a pivotal part of colonial knowledge in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denzil Ibbetson and Herbert Risley, then the two leading official anthropologists, both made major contributions to the study of caste, which this article discusses. Ibbetson and Risley assumed high office in the imperial government in 1902 and played important roles in policy making during the partition of Bengal (1903–5) and the Morley-Minto legislative councils reforms (1906–9); Ibbetson was also influential in deciding Punjab land policy in the 1890s. Contemporary policy documents, which this article examines, show that the two men's anthropological knowledge had limited influence on their deliberations. Moreover, caste was irrelevant to their thinking about agrarian policy, the promotion of Muslim interests, and the urban, educated middle class, whose growing nationalism was challenging British rule. No ethnographic information was collected about this class, because the scope of anthropology was restricted to ‘traditional’ rural society. At the turn of the twentieth century, colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, had little value for the imperial government confronting Indian nationalism, and was less critical in constituting the Indian colonial state than it previously had been.

This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation.

In general, during the nineteenth century the British were indifferent to the condition of the insane in colonial Burma. This was most apparent in the Rangoon lunatic asylum, which was a neglected institution reformed reluctantly and episodically following internal crises of discipline and the occasional public scandal. However, whilst psychiatry was generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the colonial order. This occurred in the criminal courts where the presence of suspected lunatics was disruptive to the administration of justice. Insanity was also a problem for the colonial regime within the European community, where erratic behaviour was viewed as a threat to racial prestige. This paper shows how, despite its neglected status in Burma, psychiatric knowledge contributed to British understandings of Burman masculinity and to the maintenance of colonial norms of European behaviour.

Even before 9/11, madrasas in India were being vilified for teaching hatred against the majority Hindu community. Such an understanding of madrasas was not restricted to the Hindu Right alone but even among parties of the Left. This paper argues that such a notion, which is fast becoming common sense, is erroneous. Far from teaching hatred against other communities, madrasas are primarily concerned with the ideological reproduction of their own maslak. The paper describes processes and strategies within a madrasa in North India through which such ideological reproduction takes place. The paper contends that sites of ideological transmission are located outside the formal curriculum of the madrasa. It focuses on some key texts and debating forums that are important sites of ideological transmission and play a key role in constituting a particular identity of students. Through an understanding of such pedagogical processes, the paper has shown that for students of this madrasa, the ‘other’ is not a Hindu, but a Muslim from another maslak. It follows from the paper that Islam itself is a matter of fierce interpretative debate ‘within’ madrasas. While it is important to understand how madrasas relate to other religions, an analysis of madrasas from ‘within’ leads us to different results.

This paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.

I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violence vis-à-vis the emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.

This essay raises a single question for which it ventures two kinds of answers, one historical and the other historiographical. On the one hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to express an interest in finding out about transformations over time in the activities, experiences, and social placement of pandits—for present purposes in the context of colonial Bengal. Taken in this sense, the question reflects a desire to examine the diverse experiences of Sanskrit pandits, perhaps to inquire about the degree to which they either may or may not be illustrative of other sorts of changes taking place in colonial Indian society. On the other hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to suggest that it may be worth investigating what we mean by the word ‘pandit’ and how we have come to view pandits as we do. What we're asking thus is really, ‘What's become of the pandit in modern scholarly discourse?’ In this sense, the question is a historiographical or methodological one. It suggests there may be important reasons why scholars tend to conceptualize the life and work of pandits as they do, and reminds us that becoming aware of these reasons might allow us to gain a better perspective on our own field of study.

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between stateand society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classificationof the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization throughpropaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than withtheir Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the keyprovince for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards andwelfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugeesfrom occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propagandacampaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to supportwartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize thepopulation in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant changein the conception of Chinese citizenship.

The Philippines in the immediate post-war years may be described as a nation in search of an identity. This preoccupation with what one journalist has dubbed ‘the question of identity’ spurred a sudden interest in the research and discussion of things Filipino: Filipino dance, theater, literature, language, music, art and cultural traditions. After four hundred and fifty years of colonial rule the Filipino intelligentsia began to wonder if indeed the western legacy of colonial rule was the annihilation of the very essence of Filipino culture. Under the aegis of American rule Filipinos were adamant about proving to their colonizers that they had been good pupils in western democratic ideals and were fit to govern themselves. From the 1920s to the early 1940s, the Filipino had become a sajonista (pro-American). The Japanese colonizers who replaced the Americans in the second world war were appalled not only at the pro-Americanism of the Filipino but at the magnitude of American influence absorbed by Filipino culture. In fact it was the Japanese who promoted the use of Tagalog and the ‘revival’ and appreciation of Filipino cultural traditions as part of the policy of ‘Asia for the Asians’. Once independence was achieved at last in 1946, the focus shifted. The nagging question was no longer ‘Are we western enough to govern ourselves?’ but its opposite—‘Have we become too westernized to the point of losing ourselves?’.

The history of mass political formation in post-colonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilization’ of the ‘poor’. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilization in the terrain of ‘political society’ when some population groups are yet to, or just beginning to, constitute themselves as ‘vote bank’ communities? This article invites us to look into the organizational dimensions of subaltern politics in contemporary urban India. It also prompts us to re-examine the relation between law and subaltern politics. In this light, the article presents some of the major findings of a larger historical anthropology project on the organized mobilization of footpath hawkers in Calcutta since the 1970s. It examines the ways in which the hawkers have acquired and aggregated crucial resources to sustain prolonged anti-eviction movements. In this connection, this article makes a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.

The book Angāre, a collection of ten short stories by Sajjād Ẓahīr, Rashīd Jahān, Aḥmed 'Alī and Maḥmūduzẓafar published in Lucknow in December 1932, marks a major turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Acting as a powerful catalyst, it initiated a major change in the form and content of Urdu literature and helped to lay the basis for the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association, the most significant Urdu literary movement of the twentieth century.

The past twenty years have seen the rapid growth of a new branch of international history, the serious academic study of secret services or ‘intelligence history’ with its attendant specialist conferences and journals. Two main causes for this development can be identified. The first was conceptual, namely the increasing recognition that the study of international history was greatly impoverished by the reluctance of academic historians to address a subject which appeared capable of shedding considerable light upon the conduct of international affairs. Two leading historians underlined this during 1982 in a path-breaking collection of essays on the subject, suggesting that intelligence was the ‘missing dimension’ of most international history. The second development was a more practical one, the introduction of the Thirty Year Rule during the 1970s, bringing with it an avalanche of new documentation, which, within a few years, was recognized as containing a great deal of intelligence material. In the 1980s historians had begun to turn their attention in increasing numbers to the intelligence history of the mid-twentieth century. They were further assisted in their endeavours by the appearance of the first volumes of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the tarmac road network in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China has been greatly expanded. The total length of roads increased from about 30,000 kilometres in 1999 to more than 146,000 kilometres in 2008. Though roads are considered by the state to be instruments of economic development, in multi-ethnic border regions like Xinjiang, the role of an efficient road network in the construction of the Chinese state's imaginary ‘bounded space’ is arguably just as crucial. With the help of Lefebvre's (1991) and Soja's (1999) conceptualization of space, this article explores the multiple spatial figurations of which roads are a part in Xinjiang. The article starts from ‘the mappable’ dimension of the expanding road network, and moves on to discuss perceptions and representations related to this expansion, before finally discussing how individuals creatively explore its fissures and hidden pockets.

In an earlier draft of his essay, Professor Lieberman quoted, with some bemusement, a remark by Edwin O. Reischauer that has flown from the text but stuck in memory. Japan during the Tokugawa era, observed E.O.R., achieved ‘a greater degree of cultural, intellectual, and ideological conformity … than any other country in the world … before the nineteenth century.’ The claim is remarkable—no less for its tone than for its unlikelihood (were we even remotely able to test it). Still, the claim is tantalizing, and versions of it, more hesitant, continue to resonate in the survey literature.

The movement to abolish the unequal treaties was the cause célèbre of Chinese nationalism after the First World War. It was an extension of the late Qing movement to retrieve the rights and interests (shouhui liquan yundong) that had been lost to the powers over the decades. Whereas the quintessence of the late Qing campaign was economic nationalism and the means it employed peaceful, the post-war drive was highly political and at times accompanied by a degree of violence. The Chinese determination, strengthened by Germany's and Austria's relinquishment of their treaty status, was a bond that united the whole nation from Beijing to Guangzhou (Canton) despite their domestic political differences.

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

In 1905, Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon applied well-worn principles of imperial order to reorganize northeastern regions of British India, bringing the entire Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin into one new administrative territory: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. He thereby launched modern territorial politics in South Asia by provoking an expansive and ultimately victorious nationalist agitation to unify Bengal and protect India's territorial integrity. This movement and its economic programme (swadeshi) expressed Indian nationalist opposition to imperial inequity. It established a permanent spatial frame for Indian national thought. It also expressed and naturalized spatial inequity inside India, which was increasing at the time under economic globalization. Spatial inequities in the political economy of uneven development have animated territorial politics in South Asia ever since. A century later, another acceleration of globalization is again increasing spatial inequity, again destabilizing territorial order, as nationalists naturalize spatial inequity in national territory and conflicts erupt from the experience of living in disadvantaged places. Remapping 1905 in the long twentieth century which connects these two periods of globalization, spanning eras of empire and nation, reveals spatial dynamics of modernity concealed by national maps and brings to light a transnational history of spatial inequity shared by Bangladesh and Northeast India.

Three great Durbars, royal assemblages, were staged in Delhi by the Government of British India, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. These are particularly interesting as examples of explicitly political rituals, their purpose being to legitimate and popularize British rule in India. The rituals would therefore exemplify, for many social theorists, a form of political manipulation which employs symbolic action as an adjunct to raw force. Yet, while many anthropologists, at least, would reject, in favor of an analysis which addresses the political aspirations of ritual manipulators, any unreconstructed Durkheimian paradigm that would equate ritual acts with social consensus (Moore and Myerhoff, 1975:9), many would also reject, as Tambiah has, the notion that ritual, by nature, constitutes a ‘diabolical smokescreen.’ The more useful approach, in Tambiah's view, is that ritual is ‘an ideological and aesthetic social construction that is directly and recursively implicated in the expression, realization, and exercise of power.’ (Tambiah, 1979: 153)1 shall be working with a similar theoretical point of view and not, largely, with the opposed view that the ritual form is merely a strategy employed by manipulative agents to perpetuate, in Bloch's words, an ‘institutionalized hierarchy’ or ‘legitimate order of inequality.’ (Bloch, 1977:289)

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century Western missionary activity, like the opium trade, was prohibited by the Chinese government. The Protestant missionaries, however, could not equal the independent opium traders in their evasion of the Chinese authorities. As well, they had to contend with the opposition of the British East India Company, which theoretically monopolized Anglo-Chinese commerce at Portuguese Macao.