Ceylon is one of the few non-European members of the Commonwealth which has been reasonably successful in adapting the Westminster-style government to suit its own requirements. There are difficulties in operating the system—a heterogeneous population comprising religious, cultural, linguistic and caste groups whose differences are not seldom accentuated by the island's slow rate of economic growth—but despite these, it could be said from the experience of nearly twenty years of Parliament's working, that the willingness of parties and groups to differ on a constitutional plane with all the necessary corollaries of elections, political meetings, a legally established government and a recognized opposition is the generally accepted norm of political behaviour in Ceylon today.

Following the adoption of 8 August resolution at Gowalia tank in Bombay, Indian masses rose to revolt, which became famous as the Quit India movement. It was a call for freedom. ‘Nothing less than freedom’, to quote Gandhi. Unlike the 1920–21 Non-cooperation and 1930–32 Civil Disobedience movements which were basically peaceful campaigns against the British rule in India, the Quit India movement was the ultimatum to the British for final withdrawal, a Gandhi-led un-Gandhian way of struggle since the Mahatma exhorted the people to take up arms in self-defence, and resort to armed resistance against a stronger and well-equipped aggressor.

In 1609, Satsuma, at the southern tip of Kyūshū, conquered Okinawa (then called the Ryūkyū Kingdom). Throughout the subsequent Tokugawa period, Satsuma was said to have kept the Ryūkyūans in a state of virtual slavery by plundering the profits of the lucrative Sino-Ryūkyūan trade and imposing an excessively heavy tribute-tax on the native products. This exploitation of Ryūkyū's trade and native resources was reported to have been one of the important financial resources for Satsuma; and one that made possible Satsuma's vigorous political and military activities in the middle nineteenth century leading to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In spite of such claims, no study of this topic has been made except those that have been strongly colored by the sympathies of the writer.

The Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

In the late 1970s, a modest scholarly clash took place between James C. Scott and Michael Adas over the extent to which, if at all, the British administration in Burma had granted tax remissions to the rural population of the province during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This formed an important part of their wider debate on the causes of the major rebellion—the Hsaya San rebellion—which erupted in Lower Burma in the closing days of 1930. First into the arena was Scott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, published in 1976. On this issue, Scott's starting point was the observation that the colonial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a very marked increase in the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues from rural populations. The decisive strength of colonial administrations in this respect lay in paperwork, in ‘the inexorable progress of cadastral surveys, settlement reports for land revenue, censuses, the issuance of land titles and licences, identity cards, tax rolls and receipts . . .’, in other words, in the creation of ‘nets of finer and finer official weave’ that trapped rural taxpayers with increasing thoroughness.

The Maithil Brahmans of Bihar and the Bengali Brahmans of Bengal, two of the five great North Indian Brahman castes, had, as of the early nineteenth century, closely similar systems of ranked grades and hypergamously marrying lineages. In addition, fundamental concepts—of purity and pollution, of coded substance, of sattva, rajas, and tamas (Dumont 1970; Inden 1976; Davis 1983)—form a shared construction of reality for both groups of Hindus. Yet despite a common ideation and similar patterns of organization up to that point, the ‘Kulin system’ of Bengal virtually disappeared in the middle of the last century, while among the Brahmans to the east in Bihar, the system faltered during the same period, then corrected itself, grew more complex with greater refinements of rank than at any time in the past, and has survived into the present.

An incidental aside in one of my books has become the focal point of a small controversy. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947 was a brief work which attempted to give a more precise and particular account of the events which led up to the transfer of power. Most attention has been paid to my interpretation of the celebrated episode at Simla in May 1947 when Nehru reacted violently to Mountbatten's plans for transferring power. I suggested that the crisis was not an external confrontation between British and Indian views over whether India should remain united, or be divided, or split into fractions, but was essentially an internal crisis in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru. To try to explain why Nehru was so upset by a plan which he had, in all essentials, previously (however reluctantly) accepted, I made a comparison with his later reaction to Chinese activities on the Indian border. Nobody adopted the slogan Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are Brothers’) more ardently than Nehru and so the revelation that they were enemies came as a profound personal shock. Speaking on the morrow of the Chinese invasion, Nehru said that he now realized that they had been ‘out of touch with reality’, in an ‘artificial atmosphere of our own creation’. The Times printed this observation under the sardonic heading ‘The Dreamers’ (26 October 1962). I suggested that at Simla Nehru exhibited ‘much the same apparent amnesia’.

The city of Melaka, owing to her occupation by the Portuguese, has the privilege of being the most thoroughly described sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Southeast Asian urban centre, both in textual and iconographic sources. There are some ten to twelve known Portuguese sketches depicting various aspects of the city; ground plans of the fortress, plans of the whole city, maps of the city and its surroundings, or else panoramic views representing specific events in Melaka's history, such as the sieges by Aceh in 1568 or in 1629.

Already between 40 and 50 percent of the military contribution is derived from the sale of opium. I say nothing about the Imperial Government thus drawing any revenue from what it is committed to regard as a tainted source.

This article argues that the Mongol empire's famous religious tolerance cannot be explained solely through its adoption of Inner Asian imperial political traditions of ruling over ethnically and religiously diverse subjects. Instead, this pluralism can be ascribed to a wider religious pattern of the Mongols. The first part argues that the analytical category of immanentist religions explains not only the inter-cultic transparency exhibited by the Mongol courts, but also the few explicit instances where the Chinggisid rulers reacted with ‘religious’ violence. The article further explores the strategies employed by the religious vectors, mainly Buddhists and Muslims, to address, accommodate, and subvert the Chinggisids’ patterns of religiosity and primarily their pluralism, and the Mongols’ deified mode of sacralizing kingship. Focusing on the Mongol-Ilkhanid court in Iran, the article examines how religious representatives used conceptual affinities and equivalences between the Mongol traditions and certain principles of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favour, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to the new religious affiliation. Employing this assimilative approach, they manoeuvred within the religious, immanentist paradigm of their nomadic patrons while moulding and manipulating it to their own religious, transcendentalist ends. The article further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Chinggisid patterns became an arena of Buddhist–Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization.

Museums have long been thought to be vital contributors to nation building and the creation of identity narratives, yet the stories they tell must be negotiated within the constraints set by differing levels of interpretive freedom. This paper examines how museum exhibitions changed between 1982 and 2009 at the museums serving the five capital sites of the non-Chinese Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125). While some of these places, such as Beijing, have now become unquestionably central to the national narrative, others are deep in rural areas and are peripheral even to provincial concerns. Exhibitions at these five museums vary considerably in the degree to which they either consider the Kitan and the Liao dynasty in their own right or attempt to place them within a national narrative. The wide range of approaches reflects the differing present-day concerns of the museums’ host locations, as well as the new multivocality that is developing in—among other places—China's regional cultural institutions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Vietnamese were confronted with the harsh realities of French colonialism, while simultaneously engaging with a flood of new concepts and the language that came with them. Among these concepts was that of ‘society’, whose import was enhanced by its linkages with the discourse of social Darwinism. This article explores the Vietnamese neologistic project of the early twentieth century through a close examination of the ways in which the concept and labels for ‘society’ were brought in and understood. I argue that the arrival of ‘society’ in conjunction with social Darwinism profoundly shaped the Vietnamese understanding of the term, implicating it in a notion of struggle and contestation. By illustrating the introduction of ‘society’ through early modernist school textbooks I suggest the ways in which Vietnamese conceptualized it as they embarked on their own struggle with the threats posed by colonialism.

Early modern Siam is usually portrayed as a predominantly rural, peasant society. This picture is assumed from the worldwide trend of rural-to-urban transition, rather than from study of Siam itself. The available sources have a striking lack of any evidence on rural society. This article explores the possibility that this absence may reflect a real-world difference, not just perception. Unlike in temperate zones, enough food could be produced without dedicating the efforts of a majority of the population to agriculture. Rice could be grown by part-time ‘commuter’ agriculture, and other foods found by everyday hunting and gathering. Cultural preference based on the instinct for survival may have reinforced an affinity for urban residence. The scant data on Siam's demography suggest the majority of the population lived in urban places. Descriptions of the capital portray a commercial and industrial centre, capable of employing many in non-agricultural pursuits. The state systems for raising resources were tailored to an urban rather than a rural society. While the scarcity of data on early Siam makes any ‘proof’ impossible, the thesis that Siam was a predominantly urban society is worth exploring. From the early eighteenth century on, Siam was subject to a process of ‘ruralization’ that created the familiar peasant society that historians have projected back into the past.

Masjid Manzilgah forms a chapter in a biography of Mohammed Ayub Khuhro on which the author is currently working. Khuhro (1901-80) was an important politician of Sind whose political career spanned over fifty years from 1921 to the end of the ‘seventies. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council from 1923 till the severance of the connection between Bombay and Sind in 1935 when the latter province attained autonomy under the Government of India Act of 1935. He was in the forefront of the political struggle for the ‘separation’ of Sind and after 1936 became a front-ranking Muslim League leader who helped organize the party in Sind and put it behind the Pakistan movement. Khuhro was the first Premier of Sind after independence and held that office altogether three times. He came into confrontation with Jinnah over the issue of severing Karachi from Sind and became identified as the protagonist of states' rights (or provincial autonomy) and as a champion of politicians' supremacy in the fight against the domination of the bureaucracy which bedevilled Pakistani politics for nearly half a century of its existence. This fight resulted in his repeated enforced exile from the political field depriving Pakistan of one of its most experienced public men during its formative years.

This paper examines the case of a Shiite practitioner of Tibetan medicine in Ladakh, North-western India. It recounts the story of a Buddhist family converted to Islam, for which the abandonment of religion has not led to the discontinuation of a lineal medical practice known to have Buddhist overtones. This situation provides an invitation to explore the social consequences of maintaining the practice in a region characterized by religious conflict, as well as the criteria of sameness and difference, technique and genealogy that make a marked ‘other’ a practitioner of Tibetan medicine. These religious overlaps are, however, not only apparent at the social level; they are also present in the preparation of medicines, in etiological narratives or in the physical regimes of bodily care. The composite nature of medical practice helps us to observe from a new angle the role of religion in the practice of Tibetan medicine. The way medicine is enacted and performed in this context provides empirical materials to study the paradigms that both structure and confer motion to Tibetan learned medicine. The ethnography of a remote region in the Himalayas opens up research paths for the anthropology of Asian medicine amongst new categories of healers and renewed contexts of practice.

This article explores how marriage practices and intimate relations are being refashioned in reform-era China in the context of increasingly entangled intersections between private negotiations and public dialogues in law, state policy, science, and the media. Based on long-term field research in impoverished rural areas, the article focuses on the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and large-scale projects of social engineering aimed at turning ordinary ‘peasants’ into ‘modern civilized citizens’. The article draws particular attention to the important role played by the Birth Planning Policy in shaping local reproductive practices and intimate structures, but the approach developed here to make sense of the impact of globalized neo-Malthusian state interventions on local realities considers also the perspective and the agency of ordinary individuals and communities. Instead of assuming that changes in local practices follow primarily from the impact of external forces such as state policies and technologies of birth planning, the article suggests that local practices and global forces co-produce each other through ‘frictions’ of various kinds. This focus on the micro-macro intersections of what I call here the ‘techno-politics of intimacy’ joins recent efforts in the humanities and social sciences to move beyond conventional top-down approaches to global intimate transformations.

The ethnic and sectarian divisions that were part of General Zia's (1977–88) political strategies in Pakistan were resisted not only through street protest and political opposition, but also in the realm of culture. In particular, poetry was a vehicle through which to express discontent as well as to mobilize the population. By offering an analysis of a number of poems and the biographies of the political poets who wrote them, this article offers another perspective on the question of resistance in this period of Pakistan's history. Whilst the outcome of the policy of ethnic division was to divide the struggle against General Zia into a broad anti-Punjab front, this article highlights how it was class division and the securing of elite consent that were the major achievements of the Zia regime. In contrast to previous research, we highlight how resistance came from all groups in Pakistan as reflected in the poetry and literature of the time.

In the 1970s the Gandhian movement split over fundamental philosophical issues and twenty years later it has not yet recovered. While the generally presented reasons for the decline of the Gandhian movement since Gandhi's death show substantial depth of analysis, they nevertheless overlook one essential aspect. They focus on issues such as whether a movement that was effective against a specific enemy, for example the British, can continue when the focus of the movement has been removed, and whether such a movement that stresses selfsacrifice can survive in an emerging consumerist and ‘democratic’ society, whether it is really anachronistic and inapplicable as we move towards the twenty-first century. Or perhaps, it is argued, that the movement was not able to survive the passing of a charismatic leader, especially when that leader's philosophy was adopted by the populace as a policy because of its instrumental value rather than as a creed and, further, that the leader was determined not to set up a sect of the chosen faithful around himself.