Relations between the sexes are one of the areas in which a distinctive Southeast Asian pattern exists. Even the gradual strengthening of the influence of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism in their respective spheres over the last four centuries has by no means eliminated this common pattern of relatively high female autonomy and economic importance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the region probably represented one extreme of human experience on these issues. It could not be said that women were equal to men, since there were very few areas in which they competed directly. Women had different functions from men, but these included transplanting and harvesting rice, weaving, and marketing. Their reproductive role gave them magical and ritual powers which it was difficult for men to match. These factors may explain why the value of daughters was never questioned in Southeast Asia as it was in China, India, and the Middle East; on the contrary, ‘the more daughters a man has, the richer he is’ (Galvão, 1544: 89; cf. Legazpi, 1569: 61).

I describe here a nascent ‘Islamic feminist’ movement in India, dedicated to the goal of achieving gender equity under Muslim Personal Law. In justifying their demands, these women activists refer neither to the Indian Constitution nor to the universalistic human rights principles that guide secular feminists campaigning for passage of a gender-neutral uniform civil code of personal law, but rather to the authority of the Qur'an—which, they claim, grants Muslim women numerous rights that in practice are routinely denied them. They accuse the male ‘ulama of foisting ‘patriarchal’ interpretations of the Qur'an on the unlettered Muslim masses and assert their right to read the Qur'an for themselves and interpret it in a woman-friendly way. Their activities reflect an increasing ‘fragmentation of religious authority’ in the globalizing Muslim world, associated with the spread of mass education, new forms of media and transport and a mobile labour force, in which clerical claims to exclusive authoritative knowledge are being questioned by a wide variety of new voices, women's among them. Whether it can ultimately succeed is an open question but the movement is clearly having an impact, even on the clerical establishment itself, insofar as the legal issues it considers most pressing for women are concerned.

Is there a positive symbiosis between the liberal economy and the liberal polity? From the time the question became meaningful, mainstream Western social theory and doctrine has tended to give a positive answer. It has generally been possible convincingly to argue an intrinsic causal connection between the dispersal of economic (and thus political) power inherent in the competitive market economy and the pluralism which is central to all definitions of the liberal polity. At a ‘broad-brush’ level the historical evidence is supportive. There is a strong empirical association between liberal democracy and (successful) capitalist market systems. While there are a number of quite plausible arguments indicating some potential deep and long-term causal connections between capitalism/the market economy and political unfreedom, the balance of long term historical evidence appears to support orthodoxy.

The dark and fatal passage of plague across the Indian sub-continent in the early twentieth-century, and the inability of Western medicine quickly to halt its incursions symptomized disharmonies in the relationship between modernization and Indian society and ecology. The impact of economic development and environmental change on Indian mortality has been examined elsewhere, but the result was the perpetuation or increase of high death-rates from a multiplicity of diseases through the end of World War I. In the half-century 1872-1921 annual mortality ranged between 40 and 50 per thousand, more than twice the death-rates of the advanced West, and life expectancy fell from about 25 to 20 years. The Indian experience was not unique. Epidemics of cholera and the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis in the industrializing West, and the ordeal of mortality in the colonial Philippines also illustrated how development activities induced social and environmental disruptions and sustained or promoted high death-rates.

The foundation of a State in Afghanistan by the Pashtun tribesmen in 1747 posed the question of a religious policy. The issue was not that of proselytism. Most of the Afghans did adhere to one or another form of Islam and the followers of other creeds did not even constitute one percent of the population. But the Islam adhered to by the tribesmen did not have Shari'a (Islamic Law) as its judicial basis and no religious tradition enforced allegiance to monarchs.

As neoliberal restructuring leads to the rise of labour market intermediaries globally, labour contractors are being vilified as unscrupulous recruiters and as wicked figures who exploit and harass. Based on long-term ethnographic research among workers and contractors in the Tamil Nadu garment industry, this article argues for a more careful and grounded analysis of labour contractors’ role and position under neoliberalization. Evidence is presented of contractors’ precarious position at the tail end of global production networks and three conclusions are drawn. First, contractors reveal themselves to be a remarkably unrecognized source of entrepreneurship, flexibility, and skills acquisition, which facilitates manufacturers’ participation in global markets. Second, despite their resourcefulness and resilience, contractors find themselves trapped between management and the workforce, and in an overall situation of vulnerability as a result of the informal nature of their activities and the vagaries of the neoliberal market. For many of them this results in a highly fluid and unstable class experience, in which they struggle to materialize aspirations for upward mobility. Finally, neoliberal conditions tend to undermine rather than enhance contractors’ entrepreneurial success and to weaken rather than intensify their power with regard to both capital and labour.

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

While the growing volume of new long distance oceanic trade which developed during the fifteenth century helped to stimulate an awareness of the wider world in Western Europe, it also had a much more specific enabling effect on the development of natural history and the status of science in the eyes of government. A rising interest in empirical fact-gathering and experimentation led to a growing enthusiasm for experimentation with new types of medical practice and new drugs. Apothecaries' gardens became established at the universities and were increasingly stocked with plants imported from distant lands. These gardens became the sites of the first attempts to classify plants on a global basis. The voyages of the first century and a half after the journeys of Henry the Navigator from 1415 onwards had already begun to transform the science of botany and to enlarge medical ambitions for the scope of pharmacology and natural history. The foundation of the new botanic gardens was, therefore, clearly connected with the early expansion of the European economic system and remained an accurate indicator, in a microcosm, of the expansion in European knowledge of the global environment. The origins of the gardens in medical practice meant that, as a knowledge of global nature was acquired, the Hippocratic agendas of medicine and medical practitioners continued to form the dominant basis of European constructions of the extra-European natural world.

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).

If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

This paper addresses one of the important dimensions of the experience of youth in contemporary urban Vietnam; that is their sexual practices, behaviour and attitudes. Within a conceptual framework that focuses on sexuality and social change in a modernising and increasingly open society, and based on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi from 1999 to 2004, this paper describes an emerging sexual culture among urban youth. It highlights the emerging trends, issues, and activities which constitute youth sex culture in present-day urban Vietnam. It further argues that the emerging trends in youth sexual culture are reflective of rapid and diverse changes in Vietnamese society as well as the impacts of market reforms on its moral codes, values, and perceptions. There has been a continuation of the ‘traditional’ perceptions of gender roles (particularly the expectation of women to uphold propriety and chastity) and, at the same time, a recognition of the increasingly assertive role of young women in ‘modern’ sexuality and hence of increasing gender equality in this regard. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese nowadays form heterosexual relationships based on both the grammar of love and the grammar of the market.

This article explores the politicization of ethnicity in Nepal since 1990. In particular it looks at how ideas of indigeneity have become increasingly powerful, leading to Nepal becoming the first and—to date—only Asian country to have signed International Labour Organization Convention number 169 (hereafter ILO 169). The rise of ethnic politics, and in particular the reactive rise of a new kind of ethnicity on the part of the ‘dominant’ groups—Bahuns (Brahmans) and Chhetris (Kshatriyas)—is the key to understanding why the first Constituent Assembly in Nepal ran out of time and collapsed at the end of May 2012. This collapse occurred after four years and four extensions of time, despite historic and unprecedentedly inclusive elections in April 2008 and a successful peace process that put an end to a ten-year civil war.

The persistence and yet transformation of the office of akhbār nawīs (‘newswriter’) reflected fundamental aspects of the transition from the Mughal to the British Empires. The Mughals appointed akhbār nawīs to collect and transmit specific kinds of information. This office continued, albeit with new functions, through the decentralizing of political power that characterized eighteenth-century South Asia. The expansion fo hte English East India Company meant constant change in the essential nature of political relations, changes mirrored in this office. Indeed, the Company, and its political Residents, subordinated and redefined this office. Under the British Raj, the concept ‘akhbār nawīs’ stood transformed, like the nature of the information it conveyed.

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.

In this paper I want to explore the implications of the rise and fall of Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism from the point of view of tribal policy and tribal politics in Independent India. More especially I want to examine an ideology of tribal economy and society which informs most existing accounts of Jharkhandi politics and which makes the case for a specifically ‘tribal’ policy. The main propositions of this ideology are recounted in Section One of this paper. They are (1) that the concept of a tribe is given and uproblematical; (2) that the tribals of South Bihar are the original inhaitants of the Jharkhand, where they still predominate (see Figure I); and (3) that tribal politics and tribal policies are effective because individual tribes are themselves undifferentiated, united and geographically concentrated. (A corollary of this third proposition is that any decline in Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism since the mid-1960s must be due to factional disputes within the tribal leadership and/or to inter-tribal clashes, perhaps along denominational lines). These three propositions are examined in Sections Two, Three and Four of the paper, where they are measured against the recent historical experience of India's Jharkhand. The implications of any shortcomings in the ideology of tribal economy and society are taken up in the concluding section of the paper where comments are offered, too, on an alternative ‘model’ of tribal policy and politics in the Jharkhand.

On 1 January 1862, the British enacted the Indian Penal Code, and within two decades most of India's law was codified. Ironically, England still awaits a criminal code, and the vast majority of English law remains uncodified, in the form of statute or common law. Hindu and Muslim law was rarely included in these Indian law codes, so the entire codification process represented the transplantation of English law to India, complete with lawyers and judges. A modest historiography has investigated the effect codification had on Indian society; or as Marc Galanter theorized, what happened to India's indigenous law as a result of the formation of a modern Indian legal system. However, Galanter's question implicitly assumed that England's legal system was modern. That assumption has resulted in a misleading interpretation of the Indian Penal Code.

This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called ‘feudal system’ of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have been the objects of Orientalist discourse.

The colonial port cities of Asia have recently attracted renewed attention not only from students of European imperial expansion, but also from others concerned with urban growth and change. These cities, founded by Europeans or developed by them as central links in worldwide colonial political and economic networks, stood apart from precolonial urban centers. Their foreign origins or control, their coastal locations, their central positions within European colonial systems, their emphasis on commercial rather than ritual activities, and their ethnic and cultural heterogeneity are important features which distinguish them from most indigenous cities in Asia. Many possessed a dual social and spatial structure, furthermore, which contrasted with the more unitary and often ritualized order of the noncolonial centers. Products of a changing political world order, these colonial cities became recognized centers of change in their own societies.

Indian labour migration to Burma and Malaya in the late nineteenth century was an important dimension of British colonial rule in Southeast Asia and coincided with the region's greater integration into the international economy. Compared to the Chinese, Indians formed an important minority only in these states where they filled a critical need in the urban manufacturing sector (Burma) and the plantation sector (Malaya). Their importance declined after World War Two, both in absolute and comparative terms. There were fewer millionaires and traders among them and their emigration to these territories was largely regulated by law. Moreover, the specific political and economic relationship between the Colonial Office in London and these territories determined recruitment patterns and influenced employment relations and working conditions. In turn, these impacted on the living conditions and mortality suffered by workers and shaped the structure of health services.

Frontier Wars are but the surf that marks the edge and the advance of the wave of civilization.

—Lord Salisbury, 1892

Like the jellyfish, the absence of a backbone to be broken was the greatest defense of the tribes against the waves of state power which beat upon them.

[Yapp 1983:186]

Introduction

An aphorism occasionally heard today purportedly summarizes the approach the British took to govern the parts of the empire that now constitute Pakistan. Their formula, it says, was ‘Rule the Punjabis, intimidate the Sindhis, buy the Pushtun, and honor the Baloch.’ While doing fieldwork in Quetta, the capital of Pakistani Balochistan and, in recent years the setting for several incidents of serious ethnic conflict, I found that current stereotypes about Baloch and Pushtun held by members of both groups about themselves and each other reflect essentially the same attitudes as those expressed in the aphorism.

This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt to understand how, despite profound social divisions, India's nationhood holds together. The paper advances the proposition that the Indian polity incorporated a deeply divided and conflict-ridden population by offering multiple notions of citizenship upon which a sense of membership in the nation, and a share in the enterprise of the state, could be sought. By negotiating and balancing distinct overlapping conceptions for competing membership claims in the nation, diverse social groups could find a viable place in the nation, without entirely resigning their various group identities. The analysis focuses as a lens on the Muslim citizens who are amongst the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry. It provides perspectives into how even some of the most marginalised members in Indian society found sufficient prospects for a meaningful participation within the nation. Multiple conceptions of citizenship enabled the state to manage its diverse social groups and contain many of their underlying conflicts.