The recent discovery of continuous tree-ring series starting as early as 1030 CE has for the first time made possible the reconstruction of historical climates for much of mainland Southeast Asia. Perhaps the most dramatic finding is that wide cyclic fluctuations in the reach and volume of monsoon rains contributed substantially to both the genesis and the collapse of the charter civilizations of Angkor, Pagan, and Dai Viet. From circa 1450–1820 climate continued to influence political and economic development, but its impact appears to have diminished both because the amplitude of hydrological fluctuations decreased markedly, and because new sources of power rendered early modern Southeast Asian states more resilient. A pioneering collaborative effort by a historian and a paleoclimatologist, this paper promises three benefits: It can help to solve a variety of local historiographic puzzles, it can facilitate construction of a synchronized historical narrative for mainland Southeast Asia as a whole, and it can aid comparisons between mainland Southeast Asia and other sectors of Eurasia.

A social problem in one country may often be held up as an example to others, but it is rare for it to bring forth an internationally coordinated response with a world-wide application. One of these rarities is the campaign against ‘hard’ drugs. While liquor laws differ widely from country to country, the modern system of laws against cocaine and the opiates have been established by international convention. These arrangements evolved out of the measures taken to help imperial China with its opium problem, which was regarded, at least in part, as a foreign responsibility arising out of the vast quantities of Indian opium which had been imported by foreigners into China throughout the nineteenth century, often in questionable circumstances. The behaviour of the opium merchants and their governments seemed all the more reprehensible because of the encouragement which it gave to the Chinese to break their own government's laws against opium smoking and poppy cultivation. The first International Opium Commission met in Shanghai in 1909 and passed a number of resolutions to help China; it also laid down principles of co-operation between producing and consuming countries which tended logically to expand in scope and force, leading to a global system of control of all narcotic substances, and to the institutionalization of these arrangements under the League and the United Nations.

Recent accounts of the National Emergency of 1975–1977 concur that the deviations it represented, while genuine, did not represent any fundamental change on the part of the Indian state, and that the period offers little distinct insight on the post-independence period as a whole. This paper seeks to argue, to the contrary, that the Emergency was a watershed in post-independence history. With its ban on dissent and suspension of constitutional rights, the Emergency sought to suppress all political disturbances to governance. By doing so, it forefronted the problems of postcolonial politics in at least three respects. First, the Emergency demonstrated that coercion was inextricably combined with consent in state-led development. Second, this led to a heavy reliance on practices of communication to redefine coercion and to stage popular consent. Third, in the process, the boundaries of the political were reinforced, emphasizing the friend/enemy difference fundamental to politics. Governance in the aftermath of the Emergency placed an overt reliance on consent over coercion, but in ways that are themselves significant. Categories of culture and community, and related forms of social distinction, gained in importance over earlier developmental distinctions premised on an authoritarian relationship between state and the people. The change meant a shift away from the Nehruvian focus on the economy as the crucial arena of nation-building, involving labour as the key modality of citizenship. Instead, culture and community became the categories that gained political salience in the period of economic liberalization. The mass media were central to this redefinition of the political, multiplying in size and reach, and acquiring market-sensitive forms of address couched in the rhetoric of individual choice. These events, I suggest, are critical to understanding the formation of the new middle class in India, as a category that increasingly defines itself through cultural and consumerist forms of identity, and is less identified with the state.

As the universality of political economy has receded before the myriad instances of particular economic rationalities, it has become increasingly clear that most non-capitalist structures are organized around a multi-centric set of dynamics. In this regard one would expect to find that the economic as a category possesses less univocal clarity and its precise sense is only vouchsafed through a cognisance of the broader, integrating set of validating principles. This would be true as much in Mauss's analysis of the Gift as it would be in relation to the dynamics of a feudal economy. In the first instance the transactional medium and symbolic sense of the act contains within it the premises of an entire system, while in the second example the implied free-play of economic indices rests, in reality, on the intervention of extra-economic factors, in this case, the intervention of the seigneury. From the case of one transactional exchange to the dynamics of an entire system, common to both is the reallocation of the category ‘economic’ and its merger with criteria and principles of a wider and more diffuse nature.

This article explores both Western and Asian imaginings of national histories beyond the boundaries of the nation. It seeks to contribute to the history of Asian modernities, and to the anthropological study of nationalism. Its focus is on thinkers and political actors whose visions of both the colonising and decolonising processes were translocal, rather than narrowly territorial in scope.

Many years ago I was asked in a viva voce examination to name the first work which describes the Indian jajmani system. I knew that the jajmani system was of great antiquity, but I had no idea whether it was first described by one of the early European travellers like Bernier, an early 19th century British authority on Indian criminal castes and tribes like Sleeman, or a later authority on castes and folklore like Crooke. So I was rather surprised to learn, after my fumbling, that the first description was that of the Wisers, published in 1930.

This article examines the revival of adat (custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise of adat revivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratization and decentralization which followed the end of Suharto's authoritarian rule. The third is the oppression of marginal population groups under the New Order. The fourth root is historical, having to do with the positive role which adat has played in the country's political imagination since the beginning of Indonesian nationalism. Adat as a political cause involves a set of loosely related ideals which, rightly or wrongly, are associated with the past: authenticity, community, order, and justice. These ideals have been invoked in varying proportions to pursue a wide variety of political ends, including the control of resources and the exclusion of rivals as well as the protection, empowerment, and mobilization of underprivileged groups.

In this paper an attempt has been made to delineate the background of the religious support for the Pakistan movement in the Punjab by looking in particular at the connections between the structure of religious leadership and the structure of Muslim politics in 20th century Punjab. Only the rough outlines of these connections have been provided, but nevertheless some important patterns have emerged. From the time of the conversion to Islam of much of the western Punjab at the hands of sufi saints, religious leadership in the rural areas was focused on the hereditary sajjada nashins of the shrines of these saints. The position of these hereditary religious leaders was tied closely into the political organization of the rural areas, and this produced a considerable unity of political and economic interests between the religious and the secular leaders of rural society. Such common interests were strengthened by the British, who, in molding a system of rural administration in the Punjab, recognized the sajjada nashins of these shrines as part of a single ruling class of hereditary rural leaders. When the Unionist Party emerged in the 1920s as a party of rural interests led by this class of rural leaders, the sajjada nashins as a group were strongly disposed, therefore, to support it and to oppose the religious attacks on the Unionists which emanated from primarily urban reformist leaders.

As a result of a widespread revival of sufi. influence in western Punjab in the post-Mughal era, however, many of the sajjada nashins in twentieth- century Punjab had also developed very strong religious commitments to spreading a deeper awareness of Islam. This revival had spread initially through the Chishti order but was later widened by the development of the Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-Jamaat group of ulama who gave religious legitimacy to the continuing emphasis on the forms of religious influence centered on the shrines. The sajjada nashins who drew on this revival tradition were not satisfied with the secular basis of the political system developed by the Unionists, but due to their structural grounding as sajjada nashins in the rural political milieu, they did not generally give the Unionists active opposition. The Unionist Party was thus able, with tacit religious support in the rural areas, to build a strong system of political authority based on rural control, and this propelled the Party to its sweeping victory in the 1937 elections.

With the emergence of the Muslim League, however, which transcended the political question of rural interests versus urban, the revivalist sajjada nashins saw the opportunity to put rural politics on a more solid religious foundation. The concept of Pakistan was seen by them in traditional terms as the establishment of a religious state, ruled by the traditional leaders of rural society but firmly based on the Shariat. In the elections of 1946 the revivalist sajjada nashins provided the vanguard of religious support for Pakistan and played an important role in carrying the Muslim League to triumph over the Unionist Party. The victory was a sweeping religious mandate for Pakistan and marked the most important step on the road to Pakistan's formation.

The important role of the sajjada nashins in the Muslim League's election victory was also an important pointer to the nature of the Pakistan state which was to emerge. Structurally, the revivalist sajjada nashins were themselves deeply rooted in rural society and their support for the Muslim League in no way represented a repudiation of the class of landed leaders who had long wielded power in western Punjab under the Unionist banner. The victory for Pakistan represented only, a call for a new religious definition of the old rural order, not for a new alignment of political power such as the reformist ulama had called for. The further definition of this system, however, remained to be developed in the new Muslim state.

For too long, considerations of state formation in India have divided on the colonial threshold of history, and the British regime in the subcontinent has been treated as completely different from all prior states. The most important reason for this seems to be that the historiography of the British empire was created by those who ruled India; it was therefore a kind of trophy of domination. Other reasons include the vast and accessible corpus of records on the creation of the British colonial state, the recency of its emergence, and the foundational character of the colonial state for the independent states of the subcontinent. Continuity of the British colonial state with its predecessors is acknowledged only in the case of the Mughals owing, in part, to the prolonged process of separation of the Company's government from its Mughal imperial cover before the Mutiny. Thus, long after they had ceased as a governing regime, the Mughals were considered by contemporaries and subsequently by historians to be the old regime of India.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese, Western, and Japanese scholarship debated the success or failure of the government schools and regional arsenals established between 1865 and 1895 to reform Qing China (1644-1911). For example, Quan Hansheng contended in 1954 that the Qing failure to industrialize after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the major reason why China lacked modern weapons during the Sino-Japanese War. This position has been built on in recent reassessments of the ‘Foreign Affairs Movement’ (Yangwu yundong) and Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 (Jiawu zhanzheng) by Chinese scholars. They argue, with some dissent, that the inadequacies of the late Qing Chinese navy and army were due to poor armaments, insufficient training, lack of leadership, vested interests, lack of funding, and low morale. In aggregate, these factors are thought to demonstrate the inadequacies of the ‘Self-Strengthening era’ and its industrial programs.

Who or what constitutes the dominant power and/or authority in village India today? This sort of question is hardly ever amenable to any generally agreed answer for any society, and the Indian case is no exception. But to say this is already to have made a comment on the main stream of post-independence scholarship on agrarian India. Very soon after independence an academic orthodoxy hardened as to the character of agrarian social structure and power. The argument of this paper is that this orthodoxy is no longer valid and that it obscures what is a profound transformation in the character of agrarian India.

The authors in this volume discuss contemporary Islamic reformism in South Asia in some of its diverse historical orientations and geographical expressions, bringing us contemporary ethnographic perspectives against which to test claims about processes of reform and about trends such as ‘Islamism’ and ‘global Islam’. The very use of terminology and categories is itself fraught with the dangers of bringing together what is actually substantially different under the same banner. While our authors have often found it necessary, perhaps for the sake of comparison or to help orient readers, to take on terms such as ‘reformist’ or ‘Islamist’, they are not using these as terms which imply identity—or even connection—between the groups so named, nor are they reifying such categories. In using such terms as shorthand to help identify specific projects, we are following broad definitions here in which ‘Islamic modernism’ refers to projects of change aiming to re-order Muslims' lifeworlds and institutional structures in dialogue with those produced under Western modernity; ‘reformism’ refers to projects whose specific focus is the bringing into line of religious beliefs and practices with the core foundations of Islam, by avoiding and purging out innovation, accretion and the intrusion of ‘local custom’; and where ‘Islamism’ is a stronger position, which insists upon Islam as the heart of all institutions, practice and subjectivity—a privileging of Islam as the frame of reference by which to negotiate every issue of life; ‘orthodoxy’ is used according to its specific meaning in contexts in which individual authors work; the term may in some ethnographic locales refer to the orthodoxy of Islamist reform, while in others it is used to disparage those who do not heed the call for renewal and reform. ‘Reformism’ is particularly troublesome as a term, in that it covers broad trends stretching back at least 100 years, and encompassing a variety of positions which lay more or less stress upon specific aspects of processes of renewal; still, it is useful as a term in helping us to insist upon recognition of the differences between such projects and such contemporary obsessions as ‘political Islam’, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and so on. Authors here are generally following local usage in the ways in which they describe the movements discussed (thus, Kerala's Mujahid movement claims itself as part of a broader Islahi—renewal—trend and is identified here as ‘reformist’).2 But while broad terms are used, what the papers are actually involved in doing is addressing the issues of how specific groups deal with particular concerns. Thus, not, ‘What do reformists think about secular education?’, but, ‘What do Kerala's Mujahids in the 2000s think? How has this shifted from the position taken in the 1940s? How does it differ from the contemporary position of opposing groups? And how is it informed by the wider socio-political climate of Kerala?’ The papers here powerfully demonstrate the historical and geographical specificity of reform projects, whereas discourse structured through popular mainstream perspectives (such as ‘clash of civilizations’) ignores such embeddedness.

The choice of the word ‘perspective’ in the title of this lecture exploits the ambiguity to which the English language so happily lends itself. For the lecture will, on the one hand, look back over the valley of the years at the research project on technology and agrarian change in two rice-growing areas, one in Sri Lanka and the other in Tamil Nadu, which was organized from the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridgejust over ten years ago, remembering some of its findings (see Farmer, 1977) and discussing certain further changes that have taken place in the study area and elsewhere in South Asia in those ten years. The project, it should be said, was inter-disciplinary; involved both sample surveys and studies in depth; and can claim to have attained the fruitful relationship between disciplines and between techniques of field study that some have described as ‘hard to achieve’ (e.g., Hoben and Timberg, 1980).

This paper examines female education, marriage and honour among upwardly mobile Dalits. Using data collected during fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2004–2005) in a Dalit community in rural Andhra Pradesh, I describe how families who constitute the upper strata of Dalits are educating their daughters in order to marry them ‘upwards’ within their caste to a groom with prospects of employment. Education allows these Dalit girls to become housewives, escaping a life of demeaning agricultural labour, colloquially: ‘hard work in the hot sun’. But as educated wives they must have middle-class virtues to match. Unlike their labouring counterparts, their language, dress, movement and manners must convey shame and modesty. As their responsibility for maintaining family honour increases, they are progressively more scrutinised and controlled. I explore this heightened emphasis on honour among traditionally egalitarian Dalits and suggest reasons for the increasing concern about female sexuality. Education for girls is seen as a particularly risky business: on the one hand it provides opportunities for sexual encounters, but on the other hand it holds the promise of hypergamy. Given their already precarious circumstances, many Dalits choose to cut short the education of their daughters, rather than take the risk.

Looking at an early picture of the French colonial hill station of Dalat circa 1925, one is struck by the centrality of an edifice around which the entire European resort seems to have been conceived. Completed in 1922, this monumental hotel, known at the time as the Lang Bian Palace (since rebaptized the Dalat Palace Hotel), was designed as a site of colonial leisure and power at the centre of Indochina's premier site of French villeggiatura, ‘discovered’ by Dr Alexandre Yersin in 1893, and earmarked for development into a hill station by the Governor General of Indochina, Paul Doumer in 1897–8. According to the geographer Robert Reed, the Lang Bian Palace ‘function[ed] almost immediately as the nerve center of proper Western colonial society in the highlands.’

In recent years there has been a continuing effort to place the history of scientific activity in Europe firmly in the political, economic and social contexts in which ideas and institutions have developed. Hitherto, however, comparatively little attention has been paid to the development of scientific institutions in the European colonial empires, or to the role of scientific activity in the commercial exploitation, civil government, or political development of individual countries.

This article discusses the perpetration of Orientalism in the arena of contemporary South Asian literature in English: no longer an Orientalism propagated by Occidentals, but ironically enough, by Orientals, albeit by diasporic Orientals. This process, which is here termed as Re-Orientalism, dominates and, to a significant extent, distorts the representation of the Orient, seizing voice and platform, and once again consigning the Oriental within the Orient to a position of ‘The Other’. The article begins by analysing and establishing the dominant positionality of diasporic South Asian women writers relative to their non-diasporic counterparts in the genre, particularly within the last half decade. It then identifies three problems with the techniques employed by some diasporic authors which have exacerbated the detrimental effects of Re-Orientalism; the pre-occupation with producing writing which is recognisably within the South Asian genre, the problem of generalisation and totalisation, and the insidious nature of ‘truth claims’.

The first reason [for the coup] is the act of corruption. The national administrative party [i.e. the civilian government] has taken the opportunity to make use of its political posts and authority to vigorously and unprecedentedly seek benefit for itself and its companions. It has become normal practice for most of the cabinet ministers to seek money to build up their status and wealth in order to support their political power base. During the consideration of potential large-and medium-scale projects, politicians at the government level played a role in pushing for them to materialize by claiming that the public will benefit from each project. In fact, it is only a sophisticated way to seek benefits. Despite knowledge of extensive corruption among the politicians at the Cabinet level and among government officials and certain high-ranking state enterprise officials, the prime minister as head of the government has not seriously attempted to solve the problem. Moreover, the prime minister has even committed such inappropriate acts himself, by claiming various reasons to conceal corruption…. Corruption has escalated quickly and vigorously, beyond anyone's ability to stop its spread…

In July 1983 communal violence in the southern towns of Sri Lanka left between 300 and 3,000 people dead, nearly all of them members of the minority Tamil population. While such a disturbing manifestation of social pathology would seem to demand a response from concerned social scientists, there are special difficulties in confronting such events. Dominant trends in the historical study of popular disturbance, for example the concern to recover the rationality and dignity of participants in food riots (Thompson 1971), or the current interest in manifestations of ‘resistance’, may look altogether inappropriate in this context. Explanation can all too often look like apologetic, and this may explain why much of the existing writing on communal violence in South Asia deals with virtually everything except the violence itself. One recent study in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer's Legends of People, Myths of State (Kapferer 1988), has recently tackled this question head on, arguing that there is a clear link between collective violence in Sri Lanka and what the author describes as a ‘logic of being in the world’, or ‘ontology’ to be found in everyday Sinhala life. While Kapferer has earned our gratitude for even raising the issue of the connection between collective violence and everyday life, his specific argument, as I shall show below, is based on a limited reading of the available evidence.

This paper seeks to document and interpret some of the many life forms of the gift of dan in contemporary India. It attempts to be both summative in reflecting on the recent extremely productive literature on dan and programmatic in identifying emergent themes and instances of dan that require more detailed analysis at present and in the future. The paper focuses in particular on highly public forms of dan, and examines the relationship between dan and modernist modes of philanthropy. It discusses the giving of dan online and biomedical variants of dan which foreground sacrifice. The paper is not a final statement but a call to focus attention on new terrains of dan and the continuing vitality of this distinctive set of exchange categories.