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.

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.

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).

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 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.

It is difficult to distinguish between art and life in South Asian society; they no longer imitate each other but appear to have merged. Political philosophies, social values, group behaviour, speech and dress in society are reflected in the cinema and, like a true mirror, reflect back in society. Furthermore, film stars cross over from their fantasy world into politics to emerge as powerful figures guiding the destiny of millions. It is thus possible to view the cinema as a legitimate metaphor for society; this perception helps us to understand society better.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

There is very little information or analysis on middle class youth in Vietnam. This paper begins to fill this gap in our knowledge by utilising data on urban, educated professional youth from the Survey Assessment of Vietnamese Youth (2003–04) and an ethnographic investigation in Hanoi between 1999 and 2002. It considers some of the conceptual and analytical issues in addressing the character and definition of the middle class in Southeast Asia more generally, and provides contextual information on the emergence of the middle class in Vietnam and the transformation of the class structure there. The information available suggests that the expanding young middle class in Vietnam exhibits many of the characteristics of the middle class everywhere—possession of cultural capital, a firm interest in and commitment to education, an orientation to consumption and to accessing news and information, and aspirations to improve and develop in personal and career terms. However, the continuing close relationship between members of the middle class and the Vietnamese state suggests that there is little evidence as yet of the middle class developing a political identity or of the emergence of civil society. The data demonstrate continuity in state-generated employment and education between the current generation and its predecessor, which arises from the continuing influence of the state on Vietnamese society in its role as provider of employment, career paths, education and scholarships, as well as from the continuing influence of the senior generation on their children.