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.

This article examines ethnic conflicts in hillside borderlands, with special emphasis on the tradition of headhunting. Moreover, this study investigates how the self-autonomous new settlers negotiated with the aboriginal tribes to establish their living space, as well as the social relationships that were formed as a result. The findings of this study reveal, on the one hand, the multiple meanings of the headhunting custom and its evolution following the influx of new settlers and under Qing statecraft, and, on the other hand, shed light on how immigrants established their living space in the face of complex ethnic relationships and conflicts in the hillside borderlands. Although the practice of headhunting did not have its roots in conflicts between mountain inhabitants (shengfan) and plains immigrants (shufan and Han Chinese), changes in the nature and scale of headhunting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the result of the mass influx of new settlers and state intervention. In borderland regions where government authority was not well established, immigrants were left to fend for themselves and were much affected by the local cultural environment. Hence, when analysing the development of immigrant society or local history, due attention should be paid to the social traditions and characteristics of native inhabitants, which often provided the background and underlying reasons for ethnic conflicts.

This article charts several historical paths, hitherto underexplored, through the Hindi or ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire. Focusing on the ‘long eighteenth century (circa 1695–1808)’, it tracks their remarkable ascendance as an institutional network for mobile and migrant Indian Sufi pilgrims. From Istanbul to the provinces, the article demonstrates how Naqshbandis and Qadiris on the Hajj circuit drew on local channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and inter-state linkages to forge unique identities as ‘trans-imperial subjects’ in an age of decentralization in the Ottoman world. I argue that central to their social success was the creation of new corporate regimes of itinerant piety. But first, I place the little-known lodges at the heart of a specific shift in early modern attitudes to identity, as the story behind ‘Hindi’ beckons wider inquiry into emergent differences among Sufi pilgrims in the Ottoman empire.

While international focus has been on armed violence and Rohingya refugee flows from Rakhine state, this article pays attention to the myriad forms of ‘everyday discrimination’ that Muslim Rohingya people have experienced over a prolonged time. These forms of discrimination were observed by the author and reported by Rohingya informants in three areas of Rakhine state during research conducted in 2015. The article argues that systemic discrimination against Rohingya people can be understood as the violent enactment of bordering processes by both state and non-state actors at multiple scales, thus contributing to border governance. Bordering processes can be observed at the national level through the construction of citizenship in law and documentation; at the sub-national level through the restriction of travel and mobility at the township and village levels in Rakhine state; at the household level through household registrations and the control of births, marriages, and family relationships; as well as at the individual level through arrests, detention, and acts of violence. The border is enacted through such processes, with Rohingya people treated as an embodiment of both a political boundary between Myanmar and Bangladesh, and a social boundary constructing the Muslims as ‘fearsome and disgusting others’ by the country's non-Rohingya groups, particularly by the majority Bamar Buddhist population.

This article concerns the history of economic planning in India in the late 1960s, when a vigorous debate took place on the institutions, instruments, and ‘personnel’ of developmental planning. Examining the years from 1967 to 1971, this article shows how dramatic attempts were made by warring politicians with the help of technocrats to decentralize economic planning, grant states more fiscal autonomy, and drastically reduce the powers of the Planning Commission. This article examines how these critical economic initiatives unfolded but were ultimately overshadowed by political power struggles in which the planning process and the Planning Commission became important tools in attempts for centralization.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and self-contained political entities. Premodern and early modern west and south Asia is most productively approached and analyzed as an interactive continuum.

The rebellion of the Muslim community of Malabar, the Moplahs, in 1921–22 is well known to scholars of Indian history. The violent but small-scale Moplah disturbances which were a recurring feature of the south Malabar interior between 1836 and 1919 have also received attention. The present writer has argued elsewhere that these ‘out breaks’ were attempts by rural Moplahs in the south Malabar taluks of Ernad and Walluvanad to curb the British-fortified power of the high-caste (mainly Brahmin and Nair) Hindu jenmis or ‘landlords’ by means of what were, in effect, ritual challenges to British rule. What is little realized is that defiance of British power by the Moplah agricultural population of interior south Malabar dates from the earliest period of the rule of the East India Company, the decade after the Muslim ruler of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, ceded the province in 1792.

Relying on evidence from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on the private archives of both Aldo Moro and Pietro Nenni, this article shows that from the mid-1950s onwards, important politicians—Socialist Pietro Nenni, Christian Democrat Giovanni Gronchi and Liberal Gaetano Martino—worked to encourage economic exchanges between Italy and China, and were linked with the concurrent initiatives of economic actors like Dino Gentili and Enrico Mattei. It also reveals that this gradual but steady process placed the China question firmly on the agenda of Italian parliamentary debates and government programmes as early as 1964. Finally, it shows that, while American diplomacy was still dominated by the Vietnam War and opposed any initiative towards Chinese recognition, in 1969–1970 the long process of rapprochement between Rome and Beijing came to an end. Thanks to Nenni's and Moro's diplomatic action, Italy recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) before the Americans decided to inaugurate triangular diplomacy and reach out to China.

Pakistan carried out six nuclear explosions on 28 and 30 May 1998 at the Chagai test site in reaction to India's conduct of five nuclear tests about two weeks earlier. Expectedly, the tests provoked strong international condemnation. On the eve of, and following the tests, Islamabad pointed out that its action was basically reactive to the Indian tests and necessary to ensure the survival of Pakistan. Indeed, since the 1960s, if not the 1950s, Islamabad has pursued an India-reactive nuclear policy. India's nuclear activities have basically shaped Pakistan's nuclear policy and postures. Hence, not surprisingly, when India decided to unveil its ’nuclear purdah‘, Pakistan immediately followed suit.

In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’, travelled widely across India to record encounters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān's universalist project reflects a widely held theory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse populations was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article provides a close reading of the Dabistān's shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expressions of ‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān's project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revelation as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the ‘religio duplex phenomenon’ in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period.

The free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance—
Those shackled by seeking liberation are not truly free.
For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?—
There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād).
—‘Mūbad’ Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s ah/1650s ce)1

Was the Madras Army professional in the 1830s? The answer depends largely upon the definition of professionalism. Professional standards in society at large and in military forces have changed over the past two hundred years. Major political decisions with enormous social and economic consequences are made by governments today based upon their understanding of military professionalism. This understanding should incorporate the historical record including nineteenth-century developments outside of Europe.

Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei, reformer and educator, chancellor of Peking University during the hectic first decade of the Chinese republic, is not usually considered a supporter of Confucianism. Since the early years of the 20th century Ts'ai had been an opponent of traditional society and an active member of the small but vocal revolutionary movement in Shanghai aiming at the overthrow of the imperial dynasty. In 1912, as first Minister of Education under the new republican government, he submitted a proposal to implement a programme for a new educational system, in which traditional Confucian elements were to be rigorously weeded out.

This paper attempts to examine Śrīnivāsdās's Parīksāguru ‘Experience is the only teacher’ (1882) generally considered to be the first novel in Hindi,as a novel which draws its subject matter from the extravagant life-styles of the traditional Hindu elites, the rich Hindu bankers and traders, rather than from the peculiar traits of the middle class as is generally asscrted by Hindi scholars.

Love has many meanings. The papers published in this issue and first presented at an interdisciplinary workshop in Cambridge were based on this simple premiss; yet if one starts exploring it, one encounters a host of methodological, historical and generic questions that considerably complicate matters. What relationship do concepts of love have to their own societies? What happens when concepts live on in different socio-historical contexts? Do concepts overlap (śrngāra, ίshq, ‘love’), or do they occupy different areas of meaning? What happens when authors play with a voice of the opposite sex? And when the gender of the author or performer changes, do, for example, female voices reproduce male discourse or introduce elements of heterogeneity? What happens when contexts change, when commercial entertainment and print replace the court or an exclusive circle of connoisseurs? Have pre-modern concepts and tensions survived in modern society, or have new ones arisen? How do modern authors and individuals, female and male, react to and use traditional idioms? Has the modern state and its promise of individual rights made ‘love’ easier or more difficult? What are the actual possible spaces for love in contemporary South Asian society?

INDIAN hill stations have often been portrayed as islands of European settlement, providing colonists with a retreat, both from the heat and the native culture of the plains.British planners meant them to be English enclaves, but the image owes not a little to the innumerable references available in accounts written by the British in India. Hill stations, with their thickly wooded hills and swirling mist, afforded colonists an opportunity to build around themselves a replica of English life. The presence of European women in large numbers at hill stations enhanced the image. They, more than their men, tended to withdraw within the closed circle of European society. It was an endless succession of balls, archery, fetes, picnics and amateur theatre. Their diaries, letters and novels covering almost a century, hardly ever went beyond an account of the rounds of social engagements. The view has been perpetuated by fiction. Simla had its Rudyard Kipling, and that hill station was peopled by larger-than-life images created by the writer in the 1880s. But so vivid was the evocation that British visitors seemed to search for them in Simla even a quarter of a century later.

This paper focusses on the Namasudra leader Jogendranath Mandal (1904–1968), and presents a study of the principal demands submitted by Scheduled Caste legislators over the course of the first half-decade of the Bengal legislative assembly. It seeks to understand these demands and why they were frustrated. It also traces and attempts to explain the withering away of Mandal's initial association with and favourable disposition towards the Congress. In contrast to accepted historiography, it argues that Scheduled Caste politics encompassed demands for representation, education and agrarian reform. It documents how their implementation (particularly the demand for representation) was compromised largely as a consequence of caste Hindu misrecognition.

From the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war.

The main aim of this paper is to trace the changes of syllabus of the Early Ch'ing Provincial Examination, while on the other hand, a rational approach is adopted to account for the changes. The Provincial Examination is chosen for discussion, mainly because its successful candidates (chü-jen) were eligible for office and because the Metropolitan Examination (hui-shih), a more advanced public examination which produced chin-shih, bore a close resemblance to it.

Contemporary comparative political science has regarded Malaysia as the most developed politically of the new of Asia and Africa. A good measure of Malaysia's imputed political development derived from its ‘competitive’ electoral process which had several parties vying freely and actively for political representation and, ultimately, power. Impressive as political performances as they have been, elections are really relatively new to Malaysia, the first having been held at the municipal level as late as 1952. General Elections were first held only in 1955, and then for a small majority of the Colonial Legislative Council. Since then General Elections have taken place for a fully-elected Federal Dewan Ra'ayat (House of Representatives) every five years, in 1959, 1964 and again in May 1969. Although one party, the Alliance, consistently won overwhelming Parliamentary majorities and formed the Government, Malaysian General Elections continue to exhibit a high degree of political vitality. At every election a number of more-or-less well organized political parties and independents competed vigorously for electoral support from the plural political community that is Malaysia.

This article studies borders and border crossers in the area that became Burma, India, and Pakistan from the colonial period through to the immediate post-independence years in the mid-twentieth century. At independence, the new states’ borders not only confused vast sections of their populations by their imprecision but deprived them of their traditional practices of traversing forests, lands, and rivers to use those resources or visit kin. Border crossers’ complaints about the loss of customary access were largely ignored by the states, which tended to view crossers as illegal interlopers or plotters sent over by neighbouring polities. The states redoubled efforts to control such movement by strictly defining citizenship and foreignness, and by militarizing the border police. In addition, the introduction of boundaries between India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar caused conflict between diverse groups within the borderlands and between those groups and the state, often on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which persist to this day and has resulted in the displacement of thousands of people across the borders. An examination of states’ actions and popular reactions shows the evolution of states’ citizenship criteria, their implementation, and challenges to them by mundane or violent ‘transgressions’ of borderlanders. In doing so, it clarifies the mechanics—and the breakdowns—of state-making.