This article examines changing conceptions of the Himalaya in nineteenth-century Bengali travelogues from that of a sacred space to a spatial metaphor of a putative nation-space. It examines sections of Devendranath Tagore's autobiography, written around 1856–58, before discussing the travelogues of Jaladhar Sen and Ramananda Bharati from the closing years of the nineteenth century. The article argues that for Tagore the mountains are the ‘holy lands of Brahma’, while Sen and Bharati depict the Himalaya with a political slant and secularize the space of Hindu sacred geography. It contends that this process of secularization posits Hinduism as the civil religion of India. The article further argues that the later writers make a distinction between the idea of a ‘homeland’ and a ‘nation’. Unlike in Europe, where the ideas of homeland and nation overlap, these writers imagined the Indian nation-space as one that encompassed diverse ethno-linguistic homelands. It contends that the putative nation-space articulates the hegemony of the Anglo-vernacular middle classes, that is, English educated, upper caste, male Hindus where women, non-Hindus, and the labouring classes are marginalized.

This paper examines the changing reputation of one village in Himachal Pradesh, India, looking back over 30 years. This village has long had a singular identity and local notoriety for its association with jadu (‘witchcraft’). I argue that in this village today the idea of ‘witchcraft’ as a potent malignant force is losing its old persuasiveness, and with this change the village is also shedding its unwanted reputation. Against claims for ‘the modernity of witchcraft’ in various parts of the world, I argue that, in this case at least, witchcraft is construed as distinctly unmodern. The capacity of jadu to cause fear and, equally, its value as an explanatory idiom are, I suggest, being overwhelmed by social changes, the cumulative effect of which has been to reduce the previous insularity of this village and greatly widen the social networks of its members. I pose two main questions. Why should this village have held such a particular reputation? And why should it now be on the wane? Linked to the second question is the relationship between this decline and local understandings of ‘modernity’. In developing my argument around the specificity of an unusual village, I also consider the significance of ‘the village’ as both social entity and, formerly, one cornerstone of the anthropological project. Finally, I reflect on the methodological opportunities of long-term familiarity with a setting, exemplified in the iterative nature of learning ethnographically, as the children known initially in early fieldwork become the adult conversationalists of today, partners in interpreting their own village's past. In exploring their explanations for the decline in the salience of jadu, the pivotal impact of education and the pressures of ‘time’ created by the ‘speed’ of modernity are both salient.

This study of China's relations with Algeria and India shows that the Mao-era emphasis on the transnational function of class made it fundamentally sceptical of the privileged status of the nation-state and transformed Beijing's posture towards the Third World in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beijing's sense of a growing matrix of transnational class forces damaged relations with India, a key Third World moderate, and spurred closer ties with non-state, revolutionary movements like the Algerian Front Libération Nationale (FLN). Thus Beijing retreated from the post-Korean War phase of moderate diplomacy during which it had eschewed support for revolution abroad under the rhetoric of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’. This article relates Beijing's class analysis of the growing challenges in its relations with India to the arc of interactions between the communist Chinese, the FLN revolutionaries, and the newly post-colonial Algeria. It demonstrates that because of Beijing's understanding of how the domestic class category ‘comprador’ facilitated ‘neo-colonialism’ (an emerging Third World concept), China's anti-imperialism must be understood through its perception of the transnational function of class forces. This understanding of the post-colonial dilemma—how far to maintain or sever ties with the West, which grew partly from Chinese perceptions of Indian politics—explains the curious difficulty that Beijing faced in maintaining cooperative relations with many newly independent nations like Algeria. The emphasis on transnational class struggle also provides an interpretation of Beijing's foreign policy which is intimately linked to domestic politics and affirms the contribution of ideology to the Sino-Soviet split.

The interwar period has recently been described as a highly internationalist one in South Asia, as a series of distinct internationalisms—communist, anarchist, social scientific, socialist, literary, and aesthetic1—took shape. At the same time, it has been argued that the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 drew to a close various opportunities for international association (at least, temporarily). Taking into account both these contradistinctive developments, this article deals with another—and thus far largely overlooked—South Asian internationalism in the form of wartime Indian humanitarianism. In 1938, the Indian National Congress helped organize an Indian medical mission to China to bring relief to Chinese victims of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By focusing on this initiative, this article traces the ideas, the practices, and the motives of Indian political humanitarianism. It argues that such initiatives, as they became part of much wider global networks of humanitarianism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, created new openings for Indian nationalists to establish international alliances. This article also examines the way in which political humanitarianism enabled these same nationalists to perform as independent leaders on an international stage, and argues that humanitarianism served as a tool of anti-colonial emancipation.

This paper considers the extent to which Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA) contributed to India's liberation from British imperialism. The fundamental issue examined is why leaders of the Indian National Congress appropriated the INA legacy, contrary to two decades of non-violent struggle and regardless of the incompatibility of Bose's ideology and strategic vision. Drawing on published sources that chart policy decisions and illustrate the attitudes of leading actors in the formulation of Congress policy, this paper hypothesizes that Congress leaders defended INA prisoners-of-war and questions why the Congress apparently abandoned its long-established principles for immediate political gains, only to re-prioritize anew India's national interests once the public excitement over the INA had quietened. It illustrates that the Congress's overt and zealous defence of the INA was intended to harness public opinion behind an all-India issue rooted in sentimentalism and patriotism. The paper concludes that such support was crucial to the Congress's post-war electioneering campaign and was designed to counter the Muslim League's equally emotive electoral messages.

Refugees have been largely overlooked in analyses of Myanmar's transition, apparently considered peripheral to more prominent topics such as negotiation with armed groups, economic reform, and political elections. By analysing approaches to return and repatriation in three distinct contexts—refugees in camps in Thailand, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Chin refugees in Malaysia and India—this article shows that proposals for the return and repatriation of refugees are a form of ‘border governance' (that is, governance in, of, and through borders). This operates at three scales: (1) global border control by keeping refugees in their region of origin or returning them to their country of origin, (2) national border control by reinforcing boundaries between Myanmar and its surrounding states, and (3) the governance of political transition by reinforcing the Myanmar government’s narrative of peacebuilding by recasting continuing conflict as conditions suitable for refugee return. Premature promotion of repatriation has a number of harmful outcomes for refugee communities: encouraging the withdrawal of international aid, escalating fear and uncertainty, and political bolstering of a Bamar-dominated government and military vis-a-vis ethnic minority groups. This analysis supports a broader understanding of repatriation and its consequences, recognising that the promotion of refugee return can have significant political implications that are apparent even before mass returns have been carried out and which may reverberate far into the future.

In this paper I examine British policy towards the Yuan Shikai government in China between 1912 and 1914 through a consideration of the role of Britain's ‘men on the spot’ in China (i.e. British diplomats and bankers resident there). In doing so, I synthesize two bodies of literature that rarely interact: British imperial history and work by China historians. Three main elements shaped British policy in China: first, British policy-makers were determined to support Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power in China; second, in the making of its China policy, the Foreign Office relied heavily on Britain's men on the spot; and, finally, these men were anxious about the vulnerability of the Yuan Shikai government and were therefore manipulated to a certain extent by Chinese politicians. I suggest that British policy-makers were reacting to, rather than controlling, Chinese politics and that in this period collaboration with British imperialism was a rational choice for the Yuan Shikai government.

This paper examines the relationship between ethnic configuration and state social policy in a Chinese context. Why did the Chinese communist government have to implement a preferential policy towards ethnic minorities, and to what extent has this policy come to reshape peoples’ consciousness of their group membership? As well as analysing the reasons and intents of the Chinese Communist Party when dealing with the minority issue before and after it attained power, this paper argues that categorizing of the population served to establish the state apparatus. Why the project of ethnic identification was first initiated in Fujian (a province best known for its overwhelming Han culture) is also discussed. By unfolding the process of searching for ethnic representation in Fujian in the early 1950s, this paper further argues that the major concern of the party-state regarding ethnic minorities is to hold onto its power. Finally, this paper documents how government agents, when investigating ethnicity, interacted with the local population. The Fujian case implies as well as exemplifies how ethnicity can be invented, constructed or reconstructed as a particular representation in relation to state formation.

Current discussions on the development of modern literary genres and aesthetic conventions in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal have tended, perhaps because of its relative neglect in the modern day, to ignore the seminal role of poetry in formulating the nationalist imagination. In academic discourse, the coming together of the birth of the novel, the concept of history and the idea of the nation-state under the sign of the modern has led to a collective blindness toward the forceful intervention of poetry and song in imagining the nation. Thus Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a chapter devoted to poetry in Provincializing Europe, ironically elides any mention of it at the crucial instance of the formulation of national modernity, when he takes his argument about the division between the prosaic and the poetic in Tagore further to say, without mentioning the seminal role of poetry, that: ‘The new prose of fiction—novels and short stories—was thus seen as intimately connected to questions of political modernity’. Partha Chatterjee discusses, in the introduction to The Nation and Its Fragments, the shaping of critical discourse in colonial Bengal in relation to drama, the novel, and even art, but ignores completely the fiercely contested and controversial processes by which modern Bengali poetry and literary criticism were formulated. ‘The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national’, to use his words, ‘was shown in its most exaggerated shape’ not, it is my contention, in the Bengal school of art in the 1920s as he says, but long before that in the poetry of Rangalal Banerjee, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Madhusudan Dutt, and Nabinchandra Sen, and in the literary criticism and controversy surrounding their work.

The Cultural Revolution has reached its fortieth anniversary (1966–2006), but many questions about it remain unanswered or the answers themselves are controversial. Among the questions, why Mao and Maoist ideologists went such an extreme in seeking their political goals, and how they would justify the chaos and disasters the Chinese society suffered from 1966 to 1976, are perhaps the most fundamental one. To answer this question, Mao and China scholars have provided interpretations from political, economic, social, and cultural perspectives.

For perhaps a quarter of a century, from the mid-1930s to the year 1960, the Indochinese Communist Party—later the Workers' Party of Vietnam and now the Vietnamese Communist Party—celebrated the anniversary of its foundation on 6 January each year. The thirtieth anniversary (6 January 1960) was given special prominence in Hanoi and was marked by the publication of an official Party history in Vietnamese, French, English and other languages. Then, quite abruptly in September of the same year, the Party's Third National Congress approved a resolution to the effect that in future the anniversary would be commemorated on 3 February, which thereafter was held to be the ‘correct’ date.

The Indonesian revolution was a costly affair. Not only was it accompanied by the extensive destruction of life and property, but the actual logistics of fighting a protracted revolution placed enormous financial demands on the new Indonesian Republic, founded on 17 August 1945, three days after the Japanese surrendered, at a time when the revolutionary government was decidedly ill-equipped to meet them. The Republic was unable to take over immediately all the revenue sources of the colonial government and faced major difficulties in rapidly building up an alternative taxation structure. Needing a ‘soft’ form of taxation which was easily collected and which did not fall too obtrusively on the shoulders of its citizens, it turned to opium. The sale of opium to addicts had been used by colonial governments in Southeast Asia as a source of revenue, although its importance had greatly declined in the twentieth century. The Republic, however, not only maintained the colonial distribution and sales network but expanded its use of opium to make the drug an important source of government revenue and, for a time, a major source of foreign exchange.

It is almost common knowledge by now, thanks to the penetrating research by several scholars in the field, that Bengal silk was an important commodity in international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the general assumption so far has been that it was the Europeans rather than the Asians who played the major role in the export of raw silk from Bengal.As a corollary to thi and taking into consideration the dominant position of the European Companies in Bengal textile trade, historians have maintained even in recent studies that around the mid-eighteenth century, European trade was the most important factor in Bengal's commercial economy. 1 There is no denying the fact that the Companies were the most dominant factor in Bengal's seaborne trade but that does not necessarily imply that they were far ahead of Asians in Bengal's export trade as a whole. For the above does not take into account Bengal's export trade by overland routes which had always been extremely significant. It is generally assumed that with the fall of the great empires–Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman–and the consequent decline of ports like Surat, the overland trade was doomed. The reason for this sort of assumption, it seems, was mainly the lack of data regarding India's overland trade compared to the abundance of quantitative material in the Company archives on European exports from Bengal. It is also possible that the fascination of the sea and preoccupation with the European market, as also the nature of the surviving evidence, have obscured the significance of the traditional and continuing trade through the overland route from India. Moreland thought that India's overland trade in the seventeenth century was of small importance and that the important development took place at sea.2

Despite the attention that has been given to the role of economic sanctions in Japan's decision to launch the Pacific war, Australia's decision to ban iron ore exports to Japan has been given little attention, even though this was one of the earliest economic sanctions imposed onimperial Japan in the 1930s. To a degree this neglect can be traced to a preoccupation with the actions and objectives of the great powers and a failure to consider the opportunities available to small nations to take significant initiatives. The following article traces the origins of the iron ore embargo back to 1934 when Essington Lewis, the Managing Director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd (BHP), Australia's iron and steel monopoly, visited Japan and subsequently advocated the development of an Australian armaments industry to counter probable Japanese aggression in the Pacific. In Japan Lewis crossed paths with J. G. Latham, the Minister for External Affairs, who was leading the Australian government's Eastern Mission. Latham returned to Australia with conclusions that differed fundamentally from those of Lewis, who came up with a plan to take advantage of Japan's dependence on imports of iron ore and other iron products to finance investment in Australian armaments manufacturing. In explaining this outcome the article discusses interactions between a number of conflicts: between Latham and Lewis; between the British Treasury and the Foreign Office; and between the Japanese army and navy. In London the Treasury wanted to focus on the European theatre, while also holding down military spending in order to achieve balanced budgets. The Treasury believed that the way to best defend British commercial interests in Asia was to appease Japan. On the other hand, the Foreign Office was committed to the protection of British interests in the Far East by a more forceful diplomacy, although it was only willing to counten-ance behavior short of military action. Consistent with Latham's recommendations to his government, the emerging consensus in London was that while a settlement in China would help to safeguard British interests there, as long as the Japanese were bound up in their war in China they were less likely to attack British colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 1936 this orientation was challenged by a shift in the balance of power in Tokyo away from the army and in favor of the navy. Although priority continued to be placed on winning the war in China and guarding against an attack from the Soviet Union, now the navy's plan for southward expansion was given more careful consideration and credibility.

The rural history of modern India has been and is being written for the most part within the terms of that dictum of Louis Dumont, that ‘a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life’. Even the scholar who has most recently questioned the distributions of power between sections of the community in North India, arguing for inter-dependence of landlords, peasantry and traders, has still emphasized village controllers, and ‘momentum towards social differentiation’, ‘to produce groups of rich peasants, or rather to continue their existence’. The identity of such rich peasants remains obscure or at least specific to the region being studied; but obviously it would be very useful to have similar generalizations about social stratification in the study of modern Bihar. Hitherto the foundation at least of political histories there has been caste or caste groups, yet economic hierarchy, that related but more enigmatic pecking-order, is surely equally important. In this paper I seek a basis for making such generalizations. Grave difficulties stand in the way. My conclusion throws doubt on the applicability to Bihar of the idea of stable hierarchies, and suggests an alternative approach.

One must always bemoan the lack of adequate statistics when discussing population problems in Afghanistan.1 Few nations in Asia, however, have adequate data-collecting procedures: only 9 of the 41 Asian nations, encompassing about 8 per cent of Asia's total population, according to a recent UNO survey.

For nearly 100 years the Indian Congress organization has flourished in and through the press. Of the 72 representatives who gathered in Bombay at the first Congress meeting in 1885, more than a dozen were professional journalists. Not only did the early and subsequent nationalist leaders collect news for, editorialize in, or own outright, important vernacular and English-language newspapers—one thinks of, among others, Tilak's Kesari, Surendranath Banerjea's Bengalee, Motilal Nehru's Leader and Mahatma Gandhi's Young India and Harijan—but they readily submitted themselves to the curious, often naive probings of foreign correspondents from Europe and America. It was Gandhi who taught the Congress both how to spin its cotton and how, when it served a purpose, to wash its linen in public. Jawaharlal Nehru, when prime minister, brought to a high art the interview granted to the favored Indian or foreign correspondent.

In the last 15 years, India has witnessed the expression of a variety of new non-conformist religious practices performed by Muslim women. A range of vibrant campaigns has been pioneered by Muslim women's associations, asserting women's claims to hold and lead congregational prayers, enter and manage mosques, visit shrines, officiate Muslim marriages, and issue shari‘ah-based legal decisions. This article explores the twin questions of why these experimental remodellings of women's Islamic observance and leadership have been so pronounced in the Indian context compared with much of the Islamic world, and furthermore, why Muslim women's rights activists have put such confessional matters at the centre of their work. Exploring a series of specific female-led assertions of religious agency centring upon mosques, shari‘ah councils, and a Sufi shrine, the article argues that India's variant of ‘secularism’, which has normalized the state's non-intervention in religious institutions and laws, has given women the freedom to embark upon overhauls of Islamic conventions denied to their counterparts elsewhere. Simultaneously, this same framework for handling religious questions has historically given intra-community and clerical voices particular influence in regulating Muslim community affairs and family laws, compelling activists to seek women's empowerment in individual and local community contexts to further their objectives, including through the assertion of experimental forms of religious conduct.

This article will evaluate how the experience of participating in the Tabligh Jama‘at affects the formation of Chinese Muslims’ subjectivities in relation to their local, national, and global communities by using data gleaned from interviews with participants in the movement and participation in Tabligh activities in and around Xining, Qinghai Province. Intensively structured practices make the movement seem restrictive, but observing the variety permitted in individual performances and autonomy allowed by grassroots governance reveals that the movement imbues participants with a high degree of agency. A sense of belonging in a pious transnational community grants individuals the means and confidence to reshape their everyday behaviours and comportment in a way that transcends traditional sectarian structures of authority and conflicts with the predominant materialism of modern China. The movement's inward focus and apolitical stance make the movement a subtle and peaceful means of tacitly undermining both atheist state and Muslim hierarchies, reinventing oneself, and expressing membership in the global ummah.