Introduction

The Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.

Colonial transformation of the relations of production contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices, and tastes for the Bengali Hindu middle class. These cultural values, together with the political and economic conditions of colonialism, formed the habitus of this class. This paper tries to understand this self-fashioning by the middle class through their construction of a ‘Bengali’ cuisine. A distinct enthusiasm for new gastronomic possibilities defined this cuisine, and yet, at the same time, it possessed important elements of continuity from pre-colonial times, evidenced especially in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. The resultant cuisine was cosmopolitan yet still Bengali.

Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called ‘political transition’ has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests from groups who felt their needs were marginalized in the final version. In this article we are concerned to probe how struggles over different technologies of government help throw into relief the various terrains within which public authority is claimed and contested, and, as a result, help to expose the limits of the state. Using the forestry sector as an ethnographic lens, we argue that there is both a profound failure by the state to provide services and stable governance as well as an ability to reproduce itself and to function in some contexts. It is therefore important to understand public authority during this period as both stable and unstable—and at times, instability is what helps to perpetuate particular imaginaries of the Nepali state.

A valedictory lecture is usually an anodyne statement—at its best a summing up of one's life-work, rich in wisdom and scholarship. The present exercise does not belong to that category, not merely because the speaker lays no claim to wisdom or scholarship, but because the present moment is unsuited to anodyne statements on India. Besides, the concern of this lecture has only peripheral links with my areas of professional expertise. It is addressed to a political-cum-cultural phenomenon in contemporary India which, in the opinion of many, portends a grieveous threat to the cherished values on which Indian democracy is based. We also believe that this threat, if not neutralized in time, may yet destroy the structure of polity and society which the Indian nation-state has sought to nurture; and done so, despite its many failures, with at least a modicum of success. A struggle is on for the hearts and minds of the Indian people. The present exercise is meant to be a modest contribution to the debate which is at the very heart of that struggle.

Although 1949 is not a magical year in Chinese history in the sense of marking a total break with the centuries-old traditions and culture, it is appropriate to say that 1949 is the year which symbolizes the end of Chinese sociology. In this paper we attempt to give a socio-historical account of the genesis, development, struggle and then death of sociology in China, covering a period of more than half a century. The first part of the paper will deal with the institutionalization of sociology as a transplanted Western flower in Chinese soil; the second part describes and analyses how Chinese sociology struggled for its legitimacy for survival under Chinese Communism and how the battle was lost.

This essays deals with a neglected and significant strand of Indian political thought by describing and analysing the corpus known as nīti in the context of medieval and early modern South India (in particular with reference to the Telugu-speaking region). Works of nīti are presented here within a larger context, as they evolve from the medieval Andhra of the Kakatiyas into the Vijayanagara period, the Nayakas, and beyond. They are also opposed and contrasted to other texts written within the broad category of dharmashāstra, which seem to deal with a far more conservative project for the management of society and politics within a caste-based framework. Authors and compilers dealt with include Baddena and Madiki Singana, but also the celebrated emperor-poet Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29). An argument is made for the continued relevance of these texts for the conduct of politics in South Asia, into and beyond the colonial period.

The time appears due for a reappraisal of the economic argument in the imperialism debate. For decades the standard procedure has been first to refute Hobson and Lenin on empirical grounds and then to present a non-economic explanation for the European overseas expansion during the era of modern imperialism (1870–1914). Presently a new paradigm is gaining acceptance. It is an approach which puts the emphasis solidly back on the economic side but without its Marxist connotations. Cain and Hopkins took the lead with their theory of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’; they link the landed South and City finance with Imperial policy thus explaining overseas expansion by referring to macroeconomic changes at home. Davis and Huttenback associate the profitability of Empire investments with their ‘two-England hypothesis’ for British business: London investors stood apart, profited more and exerted a greater influence. It is my intention to show that a similar type of non-Marxist economic argument applies also to the case of Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago at the time of modern imperialism.

Three or four decades ago it was a consensus among scholars in Chinese history that China before the advent of the Western impact was a stagnant economy under the yoke of a pre-modern regime and that the opening of China to foreign trade exacerbated the predicament of peasants by forcing commercialization on them, while the inflow of Western manufactures destroyed the handicraft industries of China. This perception has since been largely contradicted. According to Hans van de Ven, ‘The greatest achievement of China scholarship in the past decade has been the discovery of the eighteenth century. New vistas have been laid out that make clear how dynamic the period was.’ In response to this dynamism, there emerged two kinds of financial institutions serving the needs of the economy. One was the so-called Shanhsi banks (Wade-Giles mode of spelling is used throughout this paper in order to preserve consistency with Chinese words in quotations), that is, p'iao hao, which deployed nation-wide networks of branches and was engaged in long-distance remittances, and, after the T'aip'ing Revolution, remittances of provincial tributes to Peking came to be handled by them. At the end of the nineteenth century there were 32 of them, having 175 branches in all the major cities of China. Their main function, however, was remittance business and their spare cash was lent to the provincial authorities, to individual officials and to the ch'ien chuang. That is, they did not lend money directly to commerce and industries.

There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that have been asked, and also to identify some of the shortfalls in the existing literature and propose some lines of research to be pursued by future scholars.

Inspired by E. P. Thompson's modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata company town of Jamshedpur, an industrial working class was constructed during the late colonial period from labour migrants, whose employment became heritable within families. In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanization, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of India's steel towns. We suggest that such processes demand a class concept that engages more subtly with the work of E. P. Thompson.

Drawing upon interviews with individuals in Pakistan who cannot be identified as heterosexual or be contained by the gender binary, I argue that in recent years post-colonial legacies of colonial laws have been challenged in Pakistan in ways that suggest a complicated relationship among sexuality, gender, and modernity. I draw upon Partha Chatterjee's notion of political society to situate this relationship. As such, I seek to strengthen prior discussions located in India and Pakistan. Further, this article challenges the problematic assumptions in mainstream queer politics that Muslim societies are static and ahistorical assumptions that appear to assume progress and struggle for sexual rights to be a Western attribute. In so doing, I extend earlier critiques arguing for a more complex understanding of the rule of non-normative sexualities in Muslim societies and suggest that colonial policies that regulated and criminalized the more fluid forms of sexuality in Muslim societies were incorporated in the imperial project of civilizing non-European cultures. The stability of colonial policies regarding sexuality was challenged in 2009 when the Pakistani state gave political recognition to trans* communities, identifying them as citizens of a modern state. These changes, I argue, pave the way for a potential shift from the fluid sexuality and irreverence that khwaja sara are usually associated with middle-class norms of respectability and encouragement towards assimilation into the social order.

The earliest writings of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), the famous Muslim social reformer and educationist, were in the field of History, including two books on the monuments and history of Delhi that bear the same title, Asar-al-Sanadid. This paper compares the first book, published in 1847, with the second, published in 1854, to discover the author's ambitions for each. How do the two books differ from some of the earlier books of relatively similar nature in Persian and Urdu? How radically different are the two books from each other, and why? How and why were they written, and what particular audiences could the author have had in mind in each instance? How were the two books actually received by the public? And, finally, what changes do the two books reflect in the author's thinking? These are the chief questions that this paper seeks to explore.

Korea under the Park regime (1961–1979) is known as a typical example of the East Asian developmental state. Many students of development, both economists and political scientists, have studied it, producing a substantial accumulation of knowledge. However, most writers have, in fact, focused on the policies and politics of the first half of the era. The second half was, politically, a notoriously authoritarian dictatorship, through which the regime strongly pushed its controversial heavy and chemical industrialization program. This program is frequently criticized for being based upon irrational industrial targeting that generated great inefficiency in the economy. The explanation for such irrational policy has been attributed to politics, or the authoritarian nature of the regime, which actually does not explain much.

This paper was first presented by Academician Natsagdorj at the XIV International Congress of Orientalists at New Delhi in 1964. As it was presented in Russian, one of the internationally recognized languages at the conference, I have translated it here from the Russian text rather than the underlying Mongol original. The translation has been approved by the author.

On 12 November 1970, the Bhola Cyclone swept across the southern districts of East Pakistan, killing over 300,000 people. Small islands were swept away and dead bodies of humans and cattle lay strewn across the devastated landscape. Following the news of the destruction, journalists, students, artists, and political workers rushed to the affected area with basic relief supplies, without waiting for the Military Law Administration (MLA) to intervene. The cyclone's occurrence just three weeks prior to the first general elections in Pakistan added a new dimension to the already simmering political crisis. The extensive media coverage of the disaster brought the pitiful state of infrastructural development and lack of governance in East Pakistan under local and global scrutiny. The cyclone and the corresponding issues soon became embroiled within the larger political demand for regional autonomy. The MLA came under attack from sections of East Pakistan's politicians, press, and public, as well as international political actors, for its poor disaster governance. This article uses the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 as the lens to explore the complex interconnections between environmental disasters and a key issue of governance. While the Bhola Cyclone has been a subject of recent discussions, this article uses a disaster-politics analytical framework to understand the disaster's role in the subsequent political turbulence and the emergence of Bangladesh.

Mayawati's recent victory, in May 2007, in the Uttar Pradesh elections has been hailed as a ‘spectacular display of subaltern power’. The questions remain: who are these subalterns? To what extent do they form a coherent block, with similar fears, hopes and aspirations, and how are subalterns’ visions of the state, social justice and equality articulated? This paper explores some of these questions, by examining the example of the boatman community in Banaras, belonging to the Mallah (Nishad) caste, and the strategies they use to be heard as legitimate citizens of the state. Such strategies and techniques reveal a sophisticated and organized apparatus of caste and community associations that call into question some recent theoretical formulations of the Indian state as one dominated and manipulated by powerful elites, while subalterns remain passive or, at best, compliant.

Anxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which not only imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, but prompted an extension of military space. This paper specifically examines the methods and levels of control—both of which existed and were attempted in and around the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves as well as the numerous others who occupied the land. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering. However, as this paper argues, social and class perceptions of the men—and the fear of provoking their wrath—dictated what officers and officials felt was legally possible. The various ways in which the military and government imposed order on the cantonment (or attempted to do so) had serious implications for the shaping of the empire itself and European understanding of its inhabitants.

There are two lemons in the larder of Modern China's history. Stalin's, dating from April 1927, is certainly the better known:

Chiang Kaishek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of revolutionary parliament, with the Right, the Left and the Communists. Why make a coup d'etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?… Also, they have connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.

The north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has the dubious distinction of being the heartland of communalism in India. The years between the two world wars, in particular, saw the most widespread and unprecedented outbreak of communal conflict in this state. One of the significant factors underlying this escalation of communal tensions was Hindu religious resurgence and a gradual, but radical, transformation in the nature of Hinduism. Hinduism became increasingly militant and martial in its public expression. Indeed, some of the roots of so-called ‘muscular Hinduism’ that characterizes Hindu nationalism of recent years can be traced back to the 1920s and '30s. The public face of Hinduism, from this period, appeared less and less to be that of devotion and religious worship and more and more that of aggressive chants and armed displays. The dominant image of Hinduism emerged to be one of very large crowds of people, wielding staffs, flags, swords and other arms, marching in processions during religious festivals. These festivals imparted an aura of triumphant and aggressive expansionism to Hinduism, which in turn, elicited counter Muslim reactions, and contributed to the aggravation of communal tension and violence. The spread of communalism in north India in this period was marked by another, equally significant, development. Communal conflicts came to be increasingly concentrated in urban centres and a section of the urban poor came to play a pivotal role in the upsurge of Hindu martial militancy.

This paper evaluates in detail the policies adopted and the religious ideas held by the power elite of Pakistan during the years from 1947 to 1969. It has been argued that the religious worldview of the power elite was shaped by the discourse of Islamic modernism which allowed envisioning of a state in which (at least theoretically) democracy, rights of minorities, sovereignty of the parliament and flexibility of Islamic laws could be propagated as the guiding principles of the state. Also, by focusing on the life and ideas of Ghulam Ahmad Parvez and by disclosing the details of his close connivance with General Ayyub Khan during the 1960s, the paper will highlight the steps taken to institutionalize Islamic modernism in Pakistan.