A Member of Parliament, representing Orissa State, once said in the course of a debate: ‘My first ambition is the glory of Mother India. I know it in my heart of hearts that I am an Indian first and an Indian last. But when you say you are a Bihari, I say I am an Oriya. When you say you are a Bengali, I say I am an Oriya. Otherwise I am an Indian’ (cited in Harrison, 1960). The same words could plausibly be spoken by a Ceylonese or Burmese with other labels substituted. If we succeed in unravelling the meaning of this statement we shall understand a major aspect of South Asian politics.

The publisher is the bride's parents, the readers are the bridegroom, and the kashihonya is the go-between.

This article analyses the evolving nature and dynamics of the relationship between the centre and the periphery by examining how semi-democratic reforms have shaped and influenced the peace negotiation process between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) since 2011. We demonstrate that while the 2008 constitution has reduced restrictions on political, economic, and cultural activities in Myanmar, it has also inevitably produced a ‘two-headed government’ after the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), took charge in 2016 and was forced to share power with the military. This ‘two-headed’ government is the result of the historical distrust between the NLD and the army, combined with the NLD's lack of a clear strategy in dealing with EAOs. This has enabled the army to assert its well-articulated and hardline approach—without itself having an effective strategy or the capacity to end the country's armed insurgencies or bring the peace process forward. We show that the split at the centre has produced inertia and weakened the ability of the central government to formulate and implement effective policy, and further undermined the prospects for national reconciliation. Situating this case study within the wider literature of centre–periphery relationships and democratic transition, this article offers a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of how specific institutional arrangements at the centre in semi-democratic settings affect relations in both the centre and the periphery, as well as centre–periphery relationships.

The consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

My concern is public representations of individuals and how these were affected by British East India Company courts, judicial proceedings, and the law in Madras city during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that this was a period of dramatic transformation in self-representation, just as it also was in Company rule. My purpose is to trace the transformation of the manner in which individuals represented themselves and others and what this process reveals about the constitution of Madras society and Company rule before and after the establishment of an independent judiciary at the end of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this paper I seek to demonstrate how the transformation of East India Company courts of judicature from interested courts, strictly controlled by the Company, to independent courts is associated with changes that greatly affected the manner in which individuals—both British and Indian—thought of themselves and others in Madras city public life. This transformation was of a piece with the establishment of independent judiciaries in England and North America at the time and indicates how Madras too was influenced by these political developments.

Photographs taken in Lahore in 1946–47 record the mass participation of women in the pro-Muslim League demonstrations against the Khizar Unionist government. This was the first such mass public mobilization of Muslim women anywhere in pre-independent India. The mobilization of women became a vital element in the League's tactics during the dramatic last months leading up to Independence and Partition. A small group of relatively emancipated female Muslim Leaguers from the Punjab who had been at the vanguard of the anti-Khizar demonstrations were also instrumental in mobilizing the unemancipated women of the North-West Frontier Province to protest against the Khan Sahib Congress ministry. This latter mobilization was evidently so successful that the British governor of the province, on seeing the crowds of burqa-clad women, was reported to have declared that ‘Pakistan is made’. It is perhaps no mere coincidence, then, that Jinnah made his statement about ‘awakening the political consciousness’ of Muslim women at the same session of the AIML at which the demand for Pakistan was made official League policy. The political awakening of Muslim women seemed to be inextricably linked to the struggle for a separate Muslim state in India. The question that this paper deals with, however, is whether in fact the Pakistan movement had a surplus of meaning for women over and above the nationalism of the Muslim League and why it was that many Muslim women were, in Begum Jahan Ara's words, ‘more impatient for Pakistan than men.’

The Punjab Boundary Force, which represented the last incarnation of the old British Indian Army, had an operational existence of thirty-two days, from 1 August to 1 September 1947, inclusive. That it failed in its assignment ‘to safeguard the peace in the Punjab’ during the partition of India is evident from the transfer of populations and tens of thousands of deaths. However, the actions of the Force and the circumstances of its failure are of interest to those concerned with the partition process, and have not, it appears, been discussed in any detail.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the three Southeast Asian societies of Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam were confronted rather suddenly with a large and growing foreign demand for their principal product, rice. Without detailing the development of this demand, we may note that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European countries had begun not only to consume large amounts of rice as a cheap dietary staple, but also to make use of it in the brewing industry, as a supplement to wheat in flour products, as a starch for sizing textiles, and as feed for livestock. At the start of the nineteenth century, new milling and processing techniques enabled European consumers to look abroad for their rice needs, and the Indian provinces of Bengal and Madras and portions of the southern United States became major sources of supply. Towards the middle of the century, the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War disrupted these sources at a time when improvements in transportation were making it possible for European importers to purchase their rice in even more distant areas, primarily Southeast Asia.

While a number of in-depth studies have been carried out on the role of the formal financial market (Gurley and Shaw, 1955; Patrick, 1966; Porter, 1966; Goldsmith, 1969; McKinnon, 1973; Shaw, 1973, to mention a few), the informal or unorganized financial sector has largely been neglected. While discussions about the operations of the informal market were popular about 20 years ago (Geertz, 1962; Ardener, 1964; Anderson, 1966; Kurtz, 1973) they have gradually been relegated to the side-lines and this is despite the fact that the said market is neverthel ess of significant size and importance (as will be illustrated elsewhere in the paper).

This paper examines the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ as an ideal-typical pair and shows how they are typically misused as descriptive terms. It discusses the transformation of these terms' use from one of description to one of prescription as they are adopted by ‘developing’ nations. Focussing on Thailand, the paper shows how the term ‘tradition’, which formely stood alone, shifts in meaning as it is put into opposition to ‘modernity’, and how the pair serve as legitimating terms in a political context, tied to ‘nation-building’ and the interests of different political groups. This process and its ambiguities are explored through an examination of ritual, public monuments, and semantic changes.

This paper aims to challenge the disparagement of non-state Islamic systems of law that has established firm roots in contemporary rule of law ideology and practice around the world, from India to Ontario. In this respect, rule of law ideology has tended to ignore actual mechanics and procedures of law, not only in legal venues outside the state's direct control, but also in the state's courts themselves. With respect to non-state legal venues—and especially non-state Islamic legal venues—such ideology understands and describes the practices and procedures that it finds in these non-state venues as crude and underdeveloped at best, and illiberal and in violation of the rule of law at worst. While other scholarly work has vividly demonstrated the various transformations and mutations that any state's ‘ideal legal procedure’ experiences as it is put into real-world practice by a state's courts and judges, this paper makes a converse move. Using a case-study focused on the circumstances and experiences of an Indian Muslim woman, ‘Ayesha’, who recently used a Delhi dar ul qaza to exercise her Islamic divorce rights in India, this paper demonstrates how a non-state Islamic legal venue behaves in ways which are highly evocative of rule of law ideology's idealization of state courts and how they (should) operate procedurally. In doing so, this paper provides evidence for Partha Chatterjee's thesis as to how elite and subaltern domains—understood here to be embodied in both state and non-state legal venues, respectively—are products of ‘mutually conditioned historicities’. In this case, the focus is on the state's conditioning of the non-state. As a result, rule of law ideology's state-oriented critique of the (Islamic) non-state is mistaken because, as this paper demonstrates, the non-state is produced in conversation with the state; one cannot critique the one (non-state) domain without realizing how that critique implicates the other (state) domain.

As they increasingly embrace neo-liberal economic policies (especially since the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis), the Northeast Asian NICs of South Korea and Taiwan are now said to be losing their uniqueness as alternative capitalist models. Central to the neo-liberal project is labour flexibility. This entails the reform of employment legislation and of the wider social settlement between state, business and labour. This article will argue against the ‘homogenization’ thesis by revealing the distinctive political, economic and ideological characteristics that distinguish the recent market-oriented labour reforms in South Korea and Taiwan from neo-liberal transitions elsewhere. The sources of variation in the pathways of labour market reform within the Northeast Asian NICs will also be explained.

The history of the Shaw enterprise in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, is a history of Chinese cinema in a century of business evolution. The Shaw industrial model of “vertical integration”, which combines production, distribution with exhibition, keeps pace with the technological developments and manages to expand its retail outlets from the stage to cinema, television, DVD and the Internet. Although the Shaw organization embraces a western industrial model to expand its business, it retains the very nature of a traditional Chinese family business. The issues surrounding the cultural and institutional evolution of the Shaw enterprise over the past 80 years are profound indications of its time.

In 1829, at the height of Lord William Bentinck's regime of reform, a keen young civil servant in north India took on one of the last of the Company's nabobs and won. It was a clash of a new style of Haileybury civilian with an old Company servant which remarkably prefigured the personal and philosophical dynamics of the Anglicist-Orientalist education debate a few years later. Sir Edward Colebrooke, Bt, was Resident of Delhi, 67 years old and nearly 50 years in the East India Company's service. His youthful adversary was his own first assistant, Charles Edward Trevelyan, aged 22 and, in Sir Edward's words, ‘a Boy just escaped from school’. In June 1829 Trevelyan charged Colebrooke with corruption, and despite being cut by many of Delhi's European residents, saw the prosecution through to its conclusion some six months later when the Governor-General in Council was pleased to order Colebrooke's suspension from the service, a sentence ultimately confirmed by the Court of Directors.

British colonial intervention in India had sought to establish an exclusive sovereignty as was embodied in the modern state of the West. India had a tradition of existence of multiple sovereignties even during the times of strong imperial powers. Pre-colonial imperial powers had enjoyed symbolic sovereignty particularly over forest and hill areas, while local powers had undisputed sovereignty over resources and people in their territories. The British colonial state disturbed this shared sovereignty by assimilating the local sovereign powers into the state through a programme of colonial modernity, treaties, agreements and by force. This process produced contested histories. However, local powers such as the Gond Rajas were, to some extent, reduced to a subordinate position.

On 6 November 1865, Robert Hart, the 30-year-old Inspector General (I.G.) of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, presented to his supervisors in the Zongli Yamen, the Qing Empire's new foreign office, a long memorandum critiquing Chinese administrative practices and offering suggestions for improvement. He criticized corruption and inefficiency at all levels of government, called for tax reform, greater specialization and better technical education of officials, improving contacts with the outside world, and promoting foreign methods and technology. The memorandum, written in Chinese, was entitled the ‘Bystander's View’ (juwai pangguan lun). A few months later it was submitted by the Zongli Yamen to the throne, and together with a similar tract by British diplomat Thomas Wade, distributed to senior Qing officials for comment. It had little impact at the time. But forty years later, when the Empress Dowager Cixi reportedly told the author that she wished she had followed his advice, it became a foundation stone of the mythology of Robert Hart, a symbol of the failure of the Qing court to take full advantage of the Portadown native's wisdom. Hart's premise, encapsulated in the title, was that as an outsider to the Qing system he could see problems that insiders could not. ‘The true face of Mount Lu can only be seen in its entirety by one who stands away from it.’ But the memorandum, for all of its notoriety, was uncharacteristic of Hart.

We use a primary data-set comprising the work-life histories of 90 individuals from Coastal and central Karnataka who migrated for work to Mumbai, Bangalore and other destinations sometime between 1935 and 2005. These migrants were all below the age of 15 at the time of leaving home, and their work-life histories provide a unique platform for studying persistence, change and spatial variation in relation to the incidence and causes of child labour migration, in the intrahousehold agreements and dissent that preceded these migration events, and in the workplace experiences and other outcomes awaiting these very young migrants. While migration prior to 1975 was mostly from the Coastal belt, it was often prompted by financial distress and usually targeted small, South-Indian eating places in Mumbai. More recent migration frequently involves educational ‘misfits’. In spite of their young age when leaving home, our informants typically came to regard migration as a transformative and attitude-changing experience that opened new avenues for acquiring work-related and other skills, languages included. This transformative potential varied across time, destinations and occupations and is, we suggest, intimately linked to leisure becoming a reality. Limitations are identified for those who migrated early, for agricultural labourers whose social lives would often be confined to caste-fellows from their native place and for girls working as domestic servants. This paper illustrates how early migrants to Mumbai were uniquely placed, in that migration for work improved their educational opportunities. Their accounts of the Kannada Night Schools they attended provide a useful corrective to official documents and evaluations.

In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.

The pre-colonial Javanese kingdom was an unstatistical sort of state. Naturally it counted soldiers, taxes, wives, concubines and children, but it rarely kept detailed social and economic statistics. Nevertheless, some statistical records survive, largely through being preserved in Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Comparison and analysis of these, plus one or two leaps of imagination, enable one to build some historical hypotheses upon these materials and thereby to illuminate something of Javanese social history after the mid-seventeenth century and particularly in the eighteenth century. For the period from the mid-eighteenth century to 1812, important demographic and economic data relating to the kingdom of Yogyakarta alone will be made available in a forthcoming volume edited by Dr P. B. R. Carey and to be published by the British Academy.

During the early years of British expansion in Bengal, from the 1770s to the 1840s, British courts ruled on at least three dozen domestic violence cases. In the process of ruling on crimes in which native women were victims of burglary, rape, and murder at the hands of European men, judges on the Supreme Court of Calcutta became intimately involved with enforcing domestic peace and containing the social threat posed by interracial conjugal relationships between lower-class European soldiers and merchants and the native women with whom they cohabited or married. While high-ranking, upper-class men may have also physically abused native women with whom they were intimate, these relationships were rarely the subject of judicial scrutiny. Through criminal trials of domestic crimes or ‘intimate violence’, British judges and magistrates, who were among the highest status positions in the civil service, managed the sexual and familial transgressions of lower-ranking European soldiers, merchants and civil employees, thereby ‘making empire respectable,’ while simultaneously enabling lower-ranking men to enjoy continued sexual access to local women.