It is a commonplace in modern Chinese history that the twin-concept of t'i–yung espoused a doctrine of cultural conservatism in late-Ch'ing China. Briefly, the dichotomy is seen as a call to preserve the ‘substance’ (t'i) of the Chinese cultural tradition by adopting the ‘function’ (yung) of Western technology, or simply, to strengthen Confucian China by implementing Western-inspired reforms; hence, the famous slogan, ‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application’ (Chung-hsueh wei-t'i Hsi-hsueh weiyung). Both the slogan and the position it reflects have long come under criticism. An early, influential critic was Yen Fu, the well-known interpreter of Social Darwinism in late-Ch'ing China. In 1902, in a published open letter to the editor of Wai-chiao pao (Foreign affairs magazine), Yen expanded on an earlier view of a contemporary schlar, Ch'iu T'ing-liang, that the notion of t'i-yung, when properly applied, refers to the two complementary aspects of a single entity and not to attributes from two different juxtaposed objects. To drive home his point, Yen cites an analogy. An ox as t'i has its yung, which is to carry heavy loads, whereas a horse as t'i has its yung, which is to go long distances. Now the attempt to combine a t'i with an extraneous yung is like ascribing a horse's function to an ox's body, or vice versa, and the result could only be a bizarre mismatch, an affront to nature's purposes.

British rule cut down Muslim power in the United Provinces. Between 1868 and 1916, municipalities and councils acts tempered the rule of officials, many of whom were Muslims, with the rule of the people, few of whom were Muslims. Up to 1916, Muslims felt this loss of power most severely in the towns. But, because the municipalities were electorates for the provincial councils, this decline of Muslim power in the towns was reflected in the province as a whole. UP Muslims directed their politics towards compensating for this loss. They aimed for a protected share of power. This essay analyses the local origins of this Muslim demand.

The problem of regional underdevelopment, particularly in tribal India, has long been recognized and more than one political party has campaigned on this issue. The Indian constitution and state and central government development plans have included special clauses aimed at assisting those groups, the tribals or adivasis, who are most affected by the problem. Reports have been commissioned and investigations conducted, but rarely have these ended in constructive or relevant action. The work of anthropologists over a number of generations since the 1920s has perhaps done most to tell us of the real depth of the problem as it has affected central India. Foremost amongst them was W. V. Grigson, the aboriginal tribes enquiry officer of the government of the Central Provinces and Berar, whose 1944 report stands as the most comprehensive study available of the condition of the tribal peoples of this region at the end of the colonial period.

The paper is divided into three parts. In the first part I discuss ethnographic accounts from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries which concern the tribal Kurumbas of the Nilgiri Hills in South India. In the second part I present a brief profile of the Naiken, one of the Kurumba sub-groups with whom I conducted anthropological fieldwork between September 1978 and October 1979. The name Naiken is used by the people themselves and their immediate neighbours. In the literature they are often referred to as Jenu Kurumbas. In the final part of the paper, I critically re-examine the literature in the light of my field material and experience. Prior to my work none of the Nilgiri Kurumba groups have been subjected to intensive anthropological studies, although there are references to them, and in particular to their role visà-vis the other Nilgiri tribes in numerous accounts, including such seminal works as The Toda by W. H. R. Rivers (1906) and ‘Culture Change among the Nilgiri Tribes’ by Mandelbaum (1941). I suggest that the much-criticized early accounts by ‘amateur’ travellers, administrators, and planters may be more accurate than has been thought and perhaps even more revealing than the subsequent references up to the present offered by ‘professional’ anthropologists.

In the wake of European colonization, Muslims across the globe have wrestled with the problem of intellectual dualism, or the bifurcation of knowledge into the distinct Islamic and modern Western spheres. This article examines the career of Pakistani intellectual and University of Chicago professor, Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988), who emerged as a particularly significant figure in this debate over intellectual dualism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguing that academic methodologies were integral for Muslim understandings of Islam, Rahman broke down the dichotomy between Western and Islamic knowledge in favour of a merging of the two, an approach I term ‘fusionism’. He propagated this fusionist vision, with mixed success, in his native Pakistan and across the Islamic world. In his position as a respected professor at the University of Chicago, Rahman furthermore re-imagined and utilized the Western university as a valuable space for modern Islamic thought, thereby challenging any sharp boundary between the two discourses and their respective institutions.

By charting the activities of Ottoman experts in Afghanistan from 1908–23, this article demonstrates how their arrival precipitated a series of state-building practices rooted in the particular historical experience of Ottoman reform projects. The country thus became the object of an Ottoman mission civilisatrice and the beneficiary, in the eyes of certain figures within the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, of an avowedly Ottoman-Turkish modernity. Sharing this conviction were members of the Afghan royal family and its chief ministers, especially Maḥmūd Ṭarzī, who first invited the Ottoman advisers to Kabul. The provision of Ottoman technical assistance took a variety of forms, but is most evident in military, educational, and public health reforms enacted in Kabul in this period. Through the study of previously unexamined Ottoman, Afghan, and British sources, the aim here is to incorporate these events into discussions of Ottoman informal empire, Afghan developmentalism, and pan-Islam.

Focusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their ‘physical programme’ aiming at the training of responsible and self-controlled citizens and therefore supposedly offering an alternative to British imperial sports. The study demonstrates that the Y indeed exercised a considerable influence by acting as adviser to provincial and ‘princely’ governments as well as through the graduates of the Madras College of Physical Education (MCPE), many of whom became physical directors in educational institutions in India, Burma, Ceylon and other Asian countries. At the same time, it also makes clear that North American models could not be transplanted in a simple or straightforward manner to South Asian contexts. For one, in spite of its representation as a ‘school for democracy’, the Y's supposedly inclusive and emancipatory discourses and practices of physical fitness remained over-determined by the powerful influences of the colonial discourse of race, and the programme of the Indian Y continued to be rife with the imperial tropes of somatic Orientalism predicated on the idea of fundamental difference between Westerners and South Asians. Likewise, the Y's sports mission turned out to be less American than its advocates had hoped: ‘sportified’ versions of local games and physical exercises played an ever-increasing role in the numerous institutions of the Y in South Asia, leading eventually to a thorough ‘pidginization’ of its fitness regime.

The district histories should not become [. . .] a series of unrelated facts without any narrative which can be linked with national history, [. . .] the facts that raised problems should invariably come in the gazetteers if they are to be taken as faithful registers of the country. (Chaudhuri, History of the Gazetteers of India, 1964: 163)

After India became free, it was felt that a new edition of the Gazetteers should be brought out. The life of a people never stands still. Any account of a country—and a gazetteer is no exception—must therefore be revised from time to time (Gazetteer of India: Indian Union, 1965: ii).

How does a nation ‘imagine itself into existence’ (Anderson 1983), particularly after it has been subjected to colonial rule? How does it (re-)appropriate its history, and what are the means at its disposal for creating and asserting an identity or specificity of its own? India has since independence achieved some political and ideological unity: from north to south and from east to west of the peninsula, although they have contested it in a number of cases, people have developed some consciousness of being Indians, ‘sons of Mother India’.

When is a modern religious education also a modern democratic education? Drawing on research conducted in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (2003–2005), this question is addressed with reference to the views of those who draw upon the resources of local maktabs and madrasas to provide their children with religious and, more specifically, Islamic instruction. Within this group—a group that, I argue, constitutes a clear majority in Pakistan—concerns about religious and sectarian diversity are given special attention. Most parents, stressing the importance of religious unity, conformity, and consensus, believe it's better to ignore these differences ‘for the sake of the nation.’ For those with an interest in combining the terms of Islam, Islamic education, and democracy, however, I argue that these differences cannot be ignored; instead, they must be acknowledged and engaged.

In the past twenty years or so the history of Sri Lanka has become a site of vibrant controversy, largely because the current ethnic conflict has loaded any kind of reflection on the historical boundaries of political, ethnic or religious identity with an immediate emotional charge. The intellectual reverberations of post-colonialism and the vigorous contributions of anthropologists have added rich strata of theoretical thinking. However, despite one or two calls to the contrary, the periods of Portuguese (1505-1658) and Dutch influence (1658-1796) in the island have tended to moulder on the periphery of these debates. The purpose of this article is to bring some of this thinking to bear on the evidence from the sixteenth century in order to stimulate fresh perspectives on both the events of that time and the models themselves. With the arrival of the Portuguese and their increasing involvement in the affairs of the island during the long reign of Bhuvanekabahu VII (1521-51), the darkness of the Kotte period is suddenly illuminated by wonderfully detailed flashes of events. The flurry of letters written by contemporary Portuguese settlers, officials and missionaries, and the attentions of Portuguese chroniclers such as João de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Gaspar Correia and Fernão de Queirós bring quite new forms of evidence into the historian's purview.

One of the more famous episodes in the narrative of British colonial expansion in India, and one that has been extensively mythologized, is the death in 1799 of Tipu Sultan and the fall of his capital, Srirangapattana. British troops, supported by their Indian allies—in particular, the forces of Hyderabad—stormed the island fortress on 4 May, bringing to an end the Mysore kingdom's role as the last significant indigenous power in the south. The old Hindu Wodeyar dynasty was reinstated and the kingdom itself was reduced to a landlocked state, with much of its territory redistributed among the victors. It is not the purpose of this article to attempt an analysis of why Tipu was defeated. Rather its aim is to underline the importance of returning to sources and re-examining evidence, even, or perhaps especially, if beliefs about a certain event have been held for so long. This is particularly true in the case of such an evocative and contentious figure as Tipu Sultan, whose life and legacy have been appropriated by interests in polemical debates over at least the last 150 years. As the following discussion will show, if one is to achieve a better understanding of an event such as the fall of Srirangapattana and its aftermath, a return to the sources is imperative.

This paper adds to a relatively new line of research investigating inadvertent transformations of urban colonial space generated by collective trauma. To the now classic iterative, and racial dynamics of Neild's ‘accommodation’ in the development of Madras,1 and of Yeoh's ‘contesting’ of the built environment in Singapore2—specifically in the tugging and pulling between local and colonial influences within the spatial discourse of colonial port cities—needs to be added that of single or multiple-event collective trauma. Such trauma, perceived as brought upon by unexpected external causes, might consolidate, perhaps accelerate, or even sever a previous sequence of spatial negotiation, particularly if that sequence was politically vulnerable or immature. The paper is a focused account of such an occurrence: the small-scale yet intensely traumatic events of Hong Kong Island while still in its colonial infancy in 1843, the year of the ‘Hongkong Fever’. It argues that a new conception of malaria—considered then a miasma—now linked both to location and construction, led to the first reactive, yet decisive, reconfiguring of a previously improvised urban colonization process, consequently salvaging Hong Kong's position within a wider imperial context.

‘Communist, Revolutionary, most capable and most implacable of the enemies of the British connection with India,’ this is how Winston Churchill described Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937. Most British politicians, and the ‘guardians’ of the Empire would have agreed with the verdict.

These people, called badagàs, though of the same colour and quality as the other peoples of India, are more valiant and powerful in war; because, as I have said, they are a wealthy people, and of great chivalry, and behave with greater dignity than the others, and they have all their cities and towns sheltered and encircled all around with walls of mud or of stone, with their bulwarks, rather like our fortresses, in which too they differ from the other peoples of India, who in general do not live together and encircled in this manner.

In the summer of 1857 British power throughout much of northern India was suddenly and violently subverted. Yet in spite of the fact that the uprising has perhaps commanded more attention than any other single event in Indian history the debate over its nature and causes still rages and 1857 remains a sensitive and highly controversial issue.

Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.

The Provision of housing for the urban poor has been a problem of long standing in the Third World. In some countries efforts at housing supply go beyond events which began forty years ago after World War II when large numbers of people began moving to the cities of Latin Amercia, Africa, and Asia giving rise to uncontrolled urban settlements and causing crowded living conditions in the already built-up areas. In Southeast Asia some colonial governments recognized the housing problem at the beginning of the twentieth century and began programs to ameliorate housing shortages and to improve living conditions for the urban masses. The investigative housing commissions in Singapore beginning in 1907 and the faltering efforts of the Singapore Improvement Trust perhaps are the best known examples. They were the precursors of the Housing and Development Board established in i960 in whose structures live some 85 percent of the Singapore population today. Urban officials in colonial Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, also had concerns for the housing of the masses. The Dutch colonial government eventually passed legislation which in a mild way supported housing and- was concerned to some extent with housing construction. For their part, the large cities on Java were more active.

UNESCO's founding in 1946 coincided with the resumption of hostilities between China's ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) and their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rivals for power. The new international organization's officials in Paris and its representatives on the ground in China were thus forced to navigate a fractious and fluid set of national circumstances that would result in an ambiguous outcome in 1949, with regimes on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan both claiming to represent ‘China’. Although the KMT-led Republic of China continued to claim membership in UNESCO until the 1970s, the international organization nevertheless continued to operate within the People's Republic of China (PRC) for a number of years. Exploring the relationship between the issue of Chinese representation in UNESCO and the organization's on-the-ground presence from the mid-1940s through to the early 1950s, this article argues that domestic and international factors were inescapably intertwined in shaping the trajectory of Chinese relations with international organizations during this period. While CCP officials demonstrated a mixture of ideology and pragmatism, similar to their handling of foreign entities and groups present in the PRC after its founding, engagement with UNESCO was significantly shaped by the complexity and depth of the KMT's engagement with the international organization from its inception onwards. The CCP's relations with UNESCO underscore the extent to which the emerging Cold War—and China's place within it—was ultimately characterized by complexity and contingency.

This article focuses on the working of developmentalism as a disciplinary strategy in Bangladesh. The formation of groups or cooperatives of traditional agriculturists/peasants may be seen as the first attempt in establishing the ‘development gaze’ over the peasants of Bangladesh. An examination of various techniques used in the cooperative formation process reveals that they are clearly interventionist in nature and are based on the modernist approach to development. Development deployed in the rural villages in Bangladesh resembles the deployment that took place in European societies when what Foucault (1991a) refers to as ‘disciplinary power’ was established.

The informal sector and informal employment relations occupy a prominent place in India's economy: one of their key features is the apparent absence of the state from labour regulation. This article seeks to trace the emergence of the division between the formal and informal sectors in India's economy from a historical perspective: it shows how the state, far from being absent, played a fundamental role in creating the dichotomy. This is done through a close study of labour legislation and the politics around it, taking South India as a case study. The article examines the enactment of four laws in Madras province in the late 1940s, ostensibly aimed at protecting workers, and their subsequent implementation by the Madras government. It shows how these laws ended by excluding workers from small unorganized industries (such as beedi-making, arecanut-processing, handloom-weaving, and tanning) from legal protection. It explores the ramifications of this exclusion and argues that the reinforcement of the formal–informal divide was the outcome of a complex political struggle between employers, workers' unions, and the state during this formative period.