In 1947 the fabric of Bengali rural society woven together by a common language and a syncretist popular culture was torn asunder on lines of religion. During the final two decades of colonial rule in India the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Jamuna deltaic tracts of east Bengal increasingly became the scene of tension and violent conflict between a Muslim peasantry and a predominantly Hindu landed gentry. The conflict between rival élites in a plural society over government jobs and positions of vantage in the legislative arena has been a subject of scholarly studies in twentieth-century Bengal. Successive ‘legislative attacks’ of one status and interest group upon another have been carefully identified and documented, and their significance assessed. The inner dynamics of the struggle in the countryside and the periodic outbursts of ‘communal’ fury that rent rural Bengal during this period have not come under the same systematic investigation. Yet, without the agrarian dimension to the Hindu–Muslim problem in Bengal, the politics of separatism would in all likelihood have proved ineffectual and been washed away by the strong tide of a composite nationalism.

In 1947 the British partitioned India and transferred power to two separate Dominions. Partition, however, did not mean the division of India between two ‘successor’ states. ‘India’ inherited British India's unitary centre, while ‘Pakistan’ consisted of areas with Muslim majorities which were merely seen as ‘contracting out’ of the ‘Union of India’. Congress's inheritance of the existing union centre gave it effective control over the joint assets of the two Dominions. The notion of a common Governor-General was, on the face of it, intended to safeguard Pakistan's share in the division of assets. The Indian Independence Bill was drafted on the implicit assumption that Mountbatten would remain as Governor-General for both Dominions until the division of the Indian army had been completed. As common Governor-General, Mountbatten could supervise the reallocation of assets and at the same time encourage co-operation between the two Dominions. But the reallocation of assets could not take place until a new centre had been created for the ‘seceding’ areas. The implication was that if a Pakistan centre was not formed, the assets would not be divided, and a Governor-General with a common touch could guide the Muslim areas back into the ‘Union of India’. Mohammad Ali Jinnah clearly recognized what might happen if there was a common Governor-General for two Dominions, one of which was to be regarded as the ‘successor’ and the other as the ‘seceder’.

An orthodox marriage in the Chinese traditional system was marked by a complex negotiation between the two families concerning the dowry the bride took with her on marriage and the bride price paid by the groom to the bride's natal family. This protracted form of gift-giving posed a considerable economic burden on both families. For this reason, throughout the imperial period, considerable flexibility was exercised in interpreting what constituted an orthodox marriage in order to allow impecunious families to marry off a daughter or obtain a bride for a son. This study will focus on one such form of marriage, one so ‘deviant’ and ‘primitive’ that it is usually relegated to the dawn of the history of the Han Chinese race or placed in the category of ‘objectionable customs’ (lousu) of the imperial past. I am referring to a form of marriage by abduction, commonly known as qiangqin (seizing the bride), which was prevalent in many areas of China until the 1940s. It is argued here that marriage by abduction should be considered less a ‘primitive’ remnant from China's ancient past than a socially acceptable response to the irrationalities of the dowry/bride-price system, in other words, a local ‘institution’.

This paper explores the part that the redistribution of evacuee property—the property abandoned by departing Hindus and Sikhs during the mass migrations after Partition—played in the institutionalization of corruption in Pakistan. By drawing on hitherto unexplored sources, including Pakistan's Rehabilitation Department papers, local police files and court records, it highlights the schemes of illegal appropriation, misappropriation, and paints a wholly convincing portrait of the scramble for millions of rupees worth of abandoned property in the towns and countryside of West Punjab. It shows how politicians, bureaucrats, powerful local notables and enterprising refugee groups grabbed properties, mainly by bribing officers charged with allocating them to incoming refugees, or by utilizing their personal contacts. The paper argues that the fierce competition for resources and temptations for evacuee property encouraged the emergence of a ‘corruption’ discourse which not only contributed to an atmosphere that was detrimental to democratic consolidation in the early years of Pakistan's history, but also justified later military intervention. This not only adds to the empirical knowledge of Partition and its legacies, but also makes a significant contribution towards our understanding of the transitional state in Pakistan.

From millenarian movements to the spread of Hindu rightwing militancy, attacks on adivasi (or tribal) consumption of alcohol have gone hand-in-hand with the project of ‘civilizing the savage’. Emphasizing the agency and consciousness of adivasi political mobilization, subaltern studies scholarship has historically depicted adivasis as embracing and propelling these reformist measures, marking them as a challenge to the social structure. This paper examines these claims through an analysis of the relationship between alcohol and the spread of the Maoist insurgency in Jharkhand, Eastern India. Similar to other movements of adivasi political mobilization, an anti-drinking campaign is part of the Maoist spread in adivasi areas. This paper makes an argument for focusing on the internal diversity of adivasi political mobilization—in particular intergenerational and gender conflicts—emphasizing the differentiated social meanings of alcohol consumption (and thus of prohibition), as well as the very different attitudes taken by adivasis towards the Maoist campaign. The paper thus questions the binaries of ‘sanskritisation’ versus adivasis assertion that are prevalent in subaltern studies scholarship, proposing an engagement with adivasi internal politics that could reveal how adivasi political mobilization contains the penetrations of dominant sanskritic values, limitations to those penetrations and other aspirations, such as the desire for particular notions of modernity.

A contemporary Hanoi newspaper, Viêt-Nam Tân Báo, reported on 28 April 1945: ‘Old men of 80 to 90 years of age that we talked with all told us that they had never before seen a famine as terrible as this one’. The Vietnamese starvation was described in a letter written in April 1945 by a foreign visitor named Vespy:

They roam in long, endless groups, comprising the whole family, the elderly, the children, men, women, all of whom are disfigured by poverty, skinny, shaky and almost naked, including young girls of adolescent age who should have been very shy. From time to time they stop to close the eyes of one of them who has collapsed and who would never be able to rise again or to take the piece of rag (I do not know what to call it exactly), that has covered the fallen victim. Looking at those human shadows who are uglier than the ugliest animals, seeing the shrunk corpses, with only a few straws covering them for both clothes and funeral cloth, at the side of the roads, one could feel that human life was so shameful.

David Washbrook's influential early work on South India set the terms for much subsequent debate about caste, with its exploration of the key role of the colonial state in shaping caste ideologies and institutions. Over subsequent decades, historians and anthropologists have come increasingly to emphasise the ‘colonial construction’ of caste and its enduring legacies in post-colonial India. Yet there were also significant continuities linking the forms of colonial caste with much earlier regional histories of conflict and debate, whose legacies can be traced into the late colonial period. In particular, the juxtaposition between Brahman and non-Brahman itself was anticipated in a tradition of conservative social commentary that emerged in the Deccan Sultanate state of Ahmadnagar, and came to circulate widely through Banaras and western India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition of commentary acquired new salience during the nineteenth century. It entered the colonial archive as an authoritative source of knowledge, and also provoked early ‘non-Brahman’ intellectuals into a fresh engagement with its conservative social vision. In their attempts to rebut this vision, these intellectuals displayed a detailed knowledge of its social history and a deep familiarity with the judicial decisions through which it had been upheld in earlier centuries.

The modern state is interventionist, and planning is an effective means to ascertain its control over the entire social process. As an operational tool, planning seems formidable to structure the role of the state in accordance with its ideological underpinning. Therefore, not only is planning as an instrument tuned to economic regeneration, it is inextricably tied to the regime's political preference as well. The aim here is not to argue for a deterministic network between planning and the ideological slant of the regime and its leadership and viceversa, but to show the complex interdependence which entails, at the same time, an interplay of various pulls and pressures in a rapidly changing social fabric. Colonial India provides us with a political system embedded in both the age-old and primordial value system and various other cultural influences which, inter alia reflected the system's absorption of alien value preferences. This obviously was not a smooth process, for India which drew on loyalties based on primordial ties strove to absorb new stimuli which had their roots in a completely different socio-political and economic environment; the result being tension among those presiding over the destiny of the country which had its reflection in the political discourse of the day. By concentrating on planning which, among other things, strove to transform India from a traditional to a modern society, the paper seeks to explain the difficulty facing the Congress stalwarts, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose in particular, despite their confidence in planning as the only instrument to rejuvenate India after the British withdrawal.

The demand for the creation of Pakistan was based on a historical narrative built around the centrality of the Muslim community in India and its distinctiveness in terms of religious beliefs, cultural traits, and historical traditions. A particular understanding of the past was, in other words, central to the idea of Pakistan. As a result, soon after independence in 1947, a group of eminent historians got together to set up the All Pakistan History Conference. It received official support and patronage as the new state was eager to shape a historical narrative that could strengthen the argument for a distinct Muslim identity. This article looks at the development of this historiography in Pakistan. Unlike existing studies on this topic, which simply point out the ‘flaws’ in the history textbooks used in Pakistan, I will argue that the dominant historical narrative to be found in these textbooks—or even in many scholarly works produced in Pakistan—is a form of master narrative that has a longer history that dates back to the colonial period. Drawing upon such sources as historical texts produced in Pakistan, recently declassified documents of the Cabinet Division, and proceedings of the All Pakistan History Conference, I will delineate the features of this master narrative, the intellectual history of ideas that shaped it from the colonial to the post-colonial period, and the political exegesis whereby it gained structural dominance in Pakistan that was replicated for intellectual, ideological, and statist projects.

This paper examines the sexual composition of the hero (yingxiong) in traditional China and how this sexuality is projected onto the political plane. Existing scholarship on the Chinese hero has provided Sinology with excellent material on a number of issues, from those which link the hero with Chinese concepts of chivalry, to those which discuss the hero as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘mass-based’. One of the major lacunae in all of these studies, however, has been an analysis of the importance of sexuality to the successful construction of a ‘hero’. Before Chinese studies drew on more recent methodologies, such as those developed by feminist criticism, the yingxiong's sexuality was often casually dismissed. It was asserted that, in contrast to Western chivalric romances, where love is often the most important inspiration for heroic deeds, love (and by implication sex) in traditional Chinese chivalric tales ‘plays no such important part’.

In the first decade after Indian independence in 1947, the secular Indian state projected a vision of itself as being guided by universal ethics rooted in the nation's ancient Buddhist past. From the circulation of Buddhist relics in distant lands to the reinvention and incorporation of Buddhist symbols in contemporary state regalia, the government sponsored a wide variety of programmes in the name of world peace, Pan-Asian unity, and enlightened democratic values that promoted Buddhism both within India and across Asia. This more than decades-long effort was entirely the outcome of the political and social visions of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and key members of his cabinet. In its most concise formulation, this Nehruvian-style Buddhism consisted of a two-pronged approach, one concerning the uses of Buddhism in the domestic sphere—that is, for domestic consumption by citizens of the new nation—and one concerning the uses of Buddhism as an instrument of foreign policy. At the heart of these projects was the dual effort to integrate a diverse South Asian populace into a wider national consciousness and yield influence among the post-colonial order in Asia. This article details the strategies and ideologies that Nehru and his cabinet employed vis-à-vis Buddhism from the mid-1940s to late 1950s when their Buddhist statecraft began to unravel due to geopolitical crises and the mass conversions of Ambedkarite Dalits. After tracing these developments, the article briefly considers the continued relevance of the Nehruvian engagement with Buddhism as it relates to twenty-first century Indian affairs.

Despite the serious studies of the past century, the history of Mainland Southeast Asia is still poorly understood. This is not to say that we do not have numerous studies of particular countries and events in individual countries; but, despite the efforts of Victor Lieberman, Anthony Reid, and others, we still lack a comprehensive sense of the dynamics of the premodern history of long periods on a region-wide basis.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar—Fellow of Trinity College and Reader in History at the University of Cambridge—passed away on 23 April 2006. In addition to a rich legacy of books and articles that were published in his lifetime, he left behind an enormous amount of manuscript material, much of which was ready for publication. A selection of this material was published in his posthumous History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge University Press, 2009), but new manuscripts continue to come to light. His wife, Jennifer Davis, recently found this essay among his effects. There is good reason to believe that Raj felt it was ready for publication. Therefore, we publish this essay almost exactly as it appears in his typescript, only correcting typos and minor errors, and adding a map. The editors would like to thank David Washbrook and Jennifer Davis for proofing this article, Uttara Shahani and Binney Hare for researching and adapting the map, and Francoise Davis for the photograph of Raj.

This paper deals with the British policy towards an area adjacent to the Gilgit Agency on the ‘northern frontier’ of British India during the years of 1914 and 1915. It highlights some aspects of the relationships between the British and the inhabitants of this area which was called ‘Yaghestan’ at that time. But my purpose is not simply to offer a contribution to the regional history of a rather neglected part of the Western Himalaya in colonial times. More importantly, I intend to show how the British policy toward that country was entangled in rumours of local as well as almost global scale. Both local rumours, referring to revolts within the area, and global ones relating to the First World War, reporting that the German Kaiser together with his people had converted to Islam and joined the Turkish Caliph in jihad against the British, were perceived as highly threatening by the local British officers on the grounds of their construing the people of Yaghestan as most unreliable tribals, characterized especially by their ‘fanatical’ adherence to Islam. I will show that in spite of all intelligence efforts the British remained unable to subject these ‘fanatical others’ to the colonial regime of control and information. Rumour, as a multidirectional, uncontrolled form of communication, effectively intervened in the British strategies of power, rendering their colonial informational regime in that area almost impotent.

The paper shows how production, marketing and uses of wool changed in colonial India (1858-1947). The changes involved location, products, people, and nature of the firm, and were induced by two circumstances, one arising from the raw material side, and the other from the consumption side. There were limitations on access to common grazing lands, a theme that takes us to those of herding, customary rights, and the economics of wool production. The economic character of weaving was bound with that of wool production. The nature of that bond changed in the colonial period. On the consumption side, imported garments altered tastes and introduced new standards. This latter process encouraged standardization, larger scale, and urban production, and in a more limited way diversification and technological change. Power-looms, hosiery, and worsted were the outcomes of the last process.

In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered ‘other’ by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental ‘other’. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and role has been transformed, while in other cities entirely new Chinatowns have emerged. This article discusses how Chinatowns today are increasingly contested sites where older diasporic understandings of Chineseness are unsettled by newer, neoliberal interpretations, dominated by the pull of China's new-found economic might. In particular, the so-called ‘rise of China’ has spawned a globalization of the idea of ‘Chinatown’ itself, with its actual uptake in urban development projects the world over, or a backlash against it, determined by varying perceptions of China's global ascendancy as an amalgam of threat and opportunity.

This article discusses the way in which assemblages of technologies, political institutions, and practices of exchange have rendered both language and script a site for an ongoing politics of authority among Santals, an Austro-Asiatic speaking Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community spread throughout eastern India. It focuses particularly on the production of Santali-language print artefacts, which, like its dominant language counterparts, such as Bengali, has its roots in colonial-era Christian missions. However, unlike dominant languages, Santali-language media has been characterized by the use of multiple graphic registers, including a missionary-derived Roman script, Indic scripts such as Devanagari and Eastern Brahmi, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. The article links the history of Santali print and graphic practice with assertions of autonomy in colonial and early post-colonial India. It then ethnographically documents how graphic practices, in particular the use of multiple scripts, and print technologies mediate a contemporary politics of authority along vectors such as class and generation within communities that speak and read Santali in the eastern state of West Bengal, India.

Education and assimilation were key components of Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan: assimilation of the island's native Taiwanese population (native islanders of Chinese ancestry) was an important goal; education was an instrument for attainment of this goal. When during their fifty years of rule (1895–1945) Taiwan's administrators altered their interpretation or definition of assimilation, they modified educational policies accordingly. From beginning to end of the Japanese period in Taiwan its government intended education for native islanders to be a major tool of its assimilation policy, which although a consistent policy was not a static one.

Five years after the Meiji Restoration, on the seventh of the second month of 1873, the Japanese Government issued the following decree:

The taking of human life is strictly prohibited by the law of the land, and the right to punish a murderer lies with the Government. However, since ancient times it has been customarily regarded as the duty of a son or younger brother to avenge the murder of his father or elder brother. While this is a natural expression of the deepest human feelings, it is ultimately a serious breach of the law on account of private enmity, a usurpation for private purposes of public authority, and cannot be treated as other than the crime of wilful slaughter. Furthermore, in extreme cases the undesirable situation often arises that one person wantonly and deliberately kills anothe in the name of revenge without regard for the rights and wrongs of the case or the justification for his act. This is to be deplored, and it is therefore decreed that vengeance shall be strictly prohibited. In future, should some close relative unfortunately be killed, the facts should be set out clearly an a complaint be laid before the authorities. Let it be plainly understood that anyone who ignores this injunction and adheres to the old customs, taking the law into his own hands to kill for revenge, will be subject to a penalty appropriate to his offence.

In the United Provinces a few hundred Europeans ruled nearly fifty million Indians. So few were not able to hold down so many by force, they could rule only with the acquiescence and assistance of some of their subjects. Clearly the relationship between government and its allies was the crux of dominion. This essay examines that relationship. It shows who, between 1860 and 1906, government's allies were and how their support was won. It also touches upon the processes of economic, social and institutional change which constantly undermined this support and illustrates how government's techniques of political control developed in order to keep its old allies and to contain new opponents.