This is an essay about the establishment and expanding roles of the colonial state in India, and their probable correlation with developments of Indian identity. As I have argued elsewhere, identities are always multiple, contingent and continuously constructed, so that traditions, also continually reinvented, are shared and reiterated practices and beliefs which reflect the collective memories of previous constructions. There is no analytical contradiction therefore between long-term civilizational continuities and emerging forms of ‘constructed’ identity. This paper is about a particular form of identity that is currently associated with concepts of public space and rights, and with the nation-state, or at least political and territorial units. For convenience I refer to it as ‘modern Indian identity’ because it has been defined and been growing in significance in the modern era; but no inference should be drawn that I consider it to be the only form in India.

The embrace of markets and globalization by radical political parties is often taken as reflecting and facilitating the moderation of their ideologies. This article considers the case of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, in India. It is argued that, rather than resulting in the moderation of Hindu nationalism, mainstream economic ideas are adopted and adapted by its proponents to further the Hindutva project. Hence, until the 1990s, the Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh, and the grass-roots organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), adopted and adapted mainstream ideas by emphasizing the state as the protector of (Hindu) society against markets and as a tool of societal transformation for its Hindu nationalist support base. Since the 1990s, Indian bureaucratic and political elites, including in the BJP, have adopted a view of the market as the main driver of societal transformations. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in particular, the BJP has sought to consolidate a broader support base and stimulate economic growth and job creation by bolstering the corporate sector and recreating the middle and ‘neo-middle’ classes as ‘virtuous market citizens’ who view themselves as entrepreneurs and consumers but whose behaviour is regulated by the framework of Hindu nationalism. These policies, however, remain contested within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society generally. The BJP's discourse against ‘anti-nationals’ and the use of legal sanctions against dissent is an attempt to curb these challenges.

The notion of ‘banker's trust’ has a paradoxical quality, like ‘burning cold’ or ‘military intelligence.’ Common sense (another paradoxical notion) tells us that bankers have no trust. Perhaps this explains the appeal of Marxist and Weberian assumptions that capitalist economies tend to destroy pre-capitalist social formations based on trust. From the classic perspective, ‘primordial’ social ties mandate relations of trust (or something like them) in kin groups and castes only so long as the members of these groups do not operate directly—as bankers do—within a capitalist economic system.

From late 1956 onwards, British colonial officials spoke of the postwar influx of Chinese refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong as a ‘problem of people’, with serious consequences on housing, social services and even political relations. The problem was also one of an international concern: both Communist and Nationalist China and the United States saw it in the wider context of their Cold War struggles. At first, the Hong Kong government was ambivalent about providing massive relief for the refugees, either by itself or by the United Nations. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political importance of turning potential rioters into responsible citizens, and the Cold War implications of great powers' involvement convinced British colonials that the only lasting solution to the problem was not overseas emigration (with outside aid) but full local integration (through trade and industrialization). The international history of the Chinese refugee problem epitomizes the local history of the Cold War over Hong Kong.

We commonly find in the literature on pre-colonial mainland Southeast Asia a tendency to treat the principal ethnic groups—Burmese, Mons, Siamese, Cambodians, Vietnamese—as discrete political categories. This tendency is particularly marked in the historiography of the Irrawaddy valley, where the recurrent north—south conflicts of the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries have usually been interpreted as ‘national’ or ‘racial’ struggles between the Burmese people of the north and the Mon, or Talaing, people of the south. In writing of the last major ‘Mon—Burmese’ war, that of 1740—57, historians have characterized the 1740 uprising at the southern city of Pegu as an expression of ‘Mon nationalism’. The ensuing conflict reportedly became a struggle between Mons and Burmese each ‘fighting for the existence of their race’; and Alaùng-hpayà, said to be a champion of ‘Burmese nationalism’, allegedly made vigorous efforts to destroy the Mon culture and people once he had triumphed.

If to Gandhi goes the credit of having drawn out Indian women from their cloistered protected environment to join the national movement for freedom, to Jawaharlal Nehru surely goes the credit for having recognized the need formally to grant equality between the sexes and to enshrine it in the Fundamental Rights drawn up at the Karachi Congress of 1931.

With the exception of a few anthropologists working on gender, much of the recent literature on emerging intimate modernities in South Asia, and the middle class in India in particular, seems to support a view of social relationships evolving in a kind of linear development towards free choice, individualism, and identities based on sexual preference. This imagery is particularly prominent in the representation and self-representation of metropolitan, educated middle-class youths, whose views dominate popular media representations and are associated with secularism, individualism, and independence from family and community. In this article I argue that apart from the ostensibly overwhelming transformations that discourses on coupledom, love, choice and self-realization bring in their wake, new ways of choosing a spouse and of conducting conjugal relations among middle-class urbanites have to be interpreted in relation to much more subtle and long-standing social transformations as well as existing institutional forms, in particular the practical implications of patrilocality and the ideology and reality of the joint family. Based on fieldwork with Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Kolkata spanning two decades, the article charts continuities and subtle shifts in the way ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are related in conversations, and how young women and their parents negotiate marriage in the context of middle-class consumerism, status competition, and uncertainty.

Karachi is a city of migrants and an important commercial hub, which provides Pakistan with a window on the world. But Karachi is also a deeply fragmented city, plagued by an acute urban crisis that takes roots in the failure of the development plans that successive Pakistani governments have delegated to foreign experts. The transnationalisation of the Afghan jihad, in the 1980s, also fuelled social and ethnic antagonisms in the city and contributed to the proliferation of violent entrepreneurs and ethnic parties. Both criminal elements and ethnic activists contributed to the ever-increasing fragmentation of urban space in the city, and to the multiplication of ethnic enclaves controlled by private militias. This extreme fragmentation of the city has benefited local jihadis and foreign terrorists who have taken shelter here since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. However, Karachi will never be a “sanctuary” for jihadi militants, due to the hostility of local ethnic parties, whose activists see themselves as enlightened secularists at war with the most retrograde elements of their society and their foreign allies.

This article examines the way in which legal codification, the scrutiny of the high courts, and the expansion of the ‘native Bar’ restructured colonial ‘preventive policing’. Habitual Offender legislation in England targeted the ex-convict, but in India the bad-livelihood sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC sections 109–110) permitted a far more flexible construction of ‘habituality’. They illustrate the degree to which summary judicial powers wielded by the executive head of the district were incorporated into the code, not excised from it. Educated Indians critiqued this combination of executive and judicial powers in the hands of the district magistrate, yet CrPC ‘preventive sections’ proliferated. Furthermore, in 1918 the Punjab province passed a Habitual Offender Act which, drawing upon the pattern of the Criminal Tribes Act (Act XXVII of 1871), permitted CrPC section 110 to be used to restrict the suspected ‘habitual’ to a certain area as well. Hitherto amendments to the CrPC were supposed to be matters for central not provincial legislation. The Punjab Act inaugurated an era of provincial enactments to intern or release ‘habituals’, structured around essentialist contrasts between urban and rural space. Under the surface of drives to codify colonial law a striated jurisdictional topography continued to re-form.

That people get the governments they deserve is a saying born out of the expectation of citizens to influence the choice of rulers, or that societies mould states. Perhaps, conversely, when governments are imposed on people, especially by outsiders, they are likely to be more than usually influential. Certainly, in India, social and religious changes are thought to have occurred under British rule. Official records provide much of the evidence for this. Yet British policy and attitudes in this area have not been very fully analysed. This essay is an attempt to start closing the gap, and it is hoped will provide some insight indirectly into how the records were produced and what was seen of social and religious change in the later nineteenth century—both matters ultimately of importance to the understanding of the period. Special attention will be paid to the cow-protection movements between 1880 and 1916.

Communal violence wracked the state of Gujarat and the city of Ahmedabad once again in 2002, leaving some 2,000 people dead. Because the ruling BJP party had proclaimed Gujarat the ‘Laboratory of Hindutva’, analysts throughout India saw the violence as BJP policy and debated its possible spillover effects elsewhere. This paper finds that in a period already marked by stressful economic and cultural change and attended by political uncertainty, some BJP leaders gambled that an attack on Gujarat's Muslims, and on the rule of law in general, would attract followers and voters. Their gamble proved correct at least in the short run. This paper examines the cultural, social, geographical and educational restructuring that is occurring, through legal and illegal struggles, and the impact of the violence upon these processes. It examines the declining status of Muslims as a result of continuous propaganda against them. It analyzes the degree to which the state was damaged as a result of the decision for violence and asks about the degree to which leaders do, or do not, wish to ‘put it behind them’, and suggests that Ahmedabad's problems are widely shared in both the developing and developed worlds.

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that ‘modern’ India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was ‘traditional’. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little ‘orientalist’. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. ‘The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding’, Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written.

This essay tries to understand a particular pattern of the relation between social movement and political party. By analyzing the development of the anti-nuclear protest in Taiwan, the author puts forth the concept of party-dependent movement. This term denotes an awkward situation where the fate of a social movement is bound to the electoral performance of a certain political party. In Taiwan, the rise of anti-nuclear voice is closely related to the democratic opening. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) adopted an unequivocal anti-nuclear stand ever since its founding in 1986, thus helped to collect the increasing support from the broad movement constituents. But the growing DPP has other political priorities, which means the anti-nuclear goal is often shelved to the disappointment of movement activists. As a consequence of the early convergence, the movement has not been able to re-assert its autonomy.

The study of federal political systems, particularly parliamentary or representative federal political systems, such as those in the United States, Canada, or India involves complexities that do not exist in unitary states such as Great Britain or France. In the first place, there are three or more institutional levels in such systems, each of which has its own arena in which political struggles take place. Second, the balance of power among the levels in federal systems varies in different systems and in the same system at different times. Third, the study of the extraparliamentary organizations, such as political parties, and of social movements, also becomes a more complex task since it cannot be assumed that a political party or social movement with the same name is the same sort of formation in New York and Mississippi or in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Moreover, in federal systems with a high degree of regional cultural diversity, each federal unit in the country may have a distinctive configuration of extraconstitutional political formations and social forces. This is certainly the case in India, the most culturally diverse of all existing federal parliamentary systems in the world today. Fourth, politics in federal systems takes place between levels as well as within levels, again in far more complex ways than in unitary systems.

General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the eight divisions that constituted the Chinese 33rd Army Group, was killed at approximately 4:00 P.M. on May 16, 1940, in fighting at Shilichangshan (‘Ten li mountain’) near Nanguadian in Northern Hubei. The battle was one engagement of the Zaoyang-Yichang campaign that rumbled through late spring of that year. Surrounded by the Japanese, his forces had refused either to retreat or to surrender. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, General Zhang had been wounded seven times in all, by grenade, bullet, and finally by bayonet. The victorious Japanese realized Zhang's identity only when a major discovered, in the left breast pocket of his blood-soaked yellow uniform, a fine gold pen engraved with his name. The major quickly summoned senior officers; they ordered a stretcher brought and the body was carried away from the battlefield. (This was observed, through half-opened eyes, by Zhang's long-time associate, the Chinese major Ma Xiaotang, who lay nearby, bleeding from a bayonet wound, and who later gasped out the story to Chinese as he died).

The term ‘crony capitalism’ describes the close relationship between the state and big business in contemporary Southeast Asia. Yoshihara argued in 1988 that cronyism produced an entrepreneurially weak, ersatz capitalism. Crony capitalists were ‘private-sector businessmen who benefit[ed] enormously from close relations’ with leading officials and politicians, obtaining ‘not only protection from foreign competition, but also concessions, licences, monopoly rights, and government subsidies’. Yoshihara's thesis has been subject to some criticism, but, in summarizing that debate, Ian Brown states that ‘there are…substantial areas of the South-East Asian political-economic landscape where government and business remain bound to the protection of inefficient vested interest, to the defence of monopoly and preference, and where speculations and short-term profit-taking are rife’. Entrepreneurial weaknesses in Southeast Asia appeared fully exposed by the financial crisis of 1997, when the economies of the region could not withstand the cruel buffetings of the international economy.

The JVP (Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna—the People's Liberation Front) first came to the attention of the world outside Sri Lanka when it launched an abortive insurrection in 1971. In 1987, the JVP made another bid to come to power by force of arms. The insurrection of 1987–1989 was better-prepared and more deeply-rooted than that of 1971; the human costs and societal consequences of its extirpation were correspondingly greater. Although the JVP came close to achieving state power both in late 1988 and mid-1989, it was thereafter destroyed very rapidly.

Brajbhasha literature is a domain of Mughal culture seldom investigated by scholars, to the detriment of our understanding of both. While the Mughal court is famed for its lavish support of Persian writers, a surprising number of Brajbhasha poets also attracted the notice of Mughal patrons. In this paper I look at the lives and texts of important Braj writers who worked in Mughal settings, with a view to uncovering the nature of the social, political and cultural interactions that this kind of patronage represents. Why these poets have been largely lost to social and literary history is another concern, along with the challenges of trying to recover their stories.

I. Sewage Under Capitalism

The preservation of the wealth and welfare of nations, and advances in culture and civilisation depend on how the sewage question is resolved.(von Liebig, 1850s).

Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’, merchandised it, revenue it, and spoiled it all. (Emily Eden, 1838).

Veena Oldenburg argues that after the Rebellion of 1857 British colonial officials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following three imperatives: safety, sanitation and loyalty. To make the cities of India safe, clean and loyal, the colonial regime exerted a measure of ‘social control . . . In an era when tinkering with the structure of society had been officially and unambiguously forsworn.’. If the highest offices of the colonial regime proclaimed its remove from society, she argues, the ‘lowest levels of decision making and action’, intruded effectively to reconstruct the social fabric of urban life. In this essay, we will examine this lowest level of the colonial regime in the local government of Delhi (the Delhi Municipal Corporation [DMC], the commissioner's office, the army, the Public Works Department [PWD], the railway officials) and its relations with the local nobility (the rais and amirs), the merchants, and working people.