This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration.

This article documents Adivasi resistance to the ‘loot’ of their land and resources since 1980, especially during the Kalinganagar movement in Odisha, roughly between 2004 and 2010, and the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, between 2016 and 2018. Using the lens of trauma and testimony, the article represents a combined effort by Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi activist, journalist, and writer who has borne witness to events during these years; Felix Padel, an anthropologist; and Vinita Damodaran, a historian. The land grabs are mainly oriented towards mining and metals production, justified in terms of ‘development’, which leaves many dead and destroys landscapes that Adivasis have cared about for countless generations.

This paper looks at Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's political involvement in the Kashmir crisis of the 1930s under its second and most influential khalīfat al-masīh, Mirza Bashir al-Din Mahmud Ahmad, who took over the movement in 1914, six years after the death of his father, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Communal tensions springing from the Kashmir riots of 1931 provided Mirza Mahmud Ahmad with an opportunity to display the ability of his Jama'at to manage an international crisis and to lead the Muslim mainstream towards independence from Britain. Mahmud Ahmad's relations with influential Muslim community leaders, such as Iqbal, Fazl-i Husain, Zafrulla Khan, and Sheikh Abdullah (Sher-i Kashmīr), enabled him to further both his religious and political objectives in the subcontinent. This paper examines Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's role in establishing a major political lobby, the All-India Kashmir Committee. It also shows how the political involvement of Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya in Kashmir during the 1930s left Ahmadis susceptible to criticism from opposition groups, like the Majlis-i Ahrar, amongst others, in later years. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how Mahmud Ahmad's skilful use of religion, publicity, and political activism during the Kashmir crisis instantly legitimized a political platform for Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's entrance into the mainstream political framework of modern South Asia, which thereby has facilitated the development of the Ahmadi controversy since India's partition.

In this paper I take the women's movement as the site for unpacking some of the strains and tensions involved in practical interpretations of secularism in present-day India. Several sources within and outside the movement point out that there has been a tendency to take the existence of secularism for granted, and that the supposedly secular idioms and symbols used for mobilizing women have been drawn from Hindu religio-cultural sources. Women from Dalit and religious minority communities have felt alienated by this. Hindu nationalists have cleverly appropriated these idioms and symbols to mobilize women as foot soldiers to further religious nationalism. Through a case-study of a grassroots women's NGO working in Uttar Pradesh, I seek to explore how women's organizations may be reshaping their agendas and activism to address this issue. Specifically, I will examine how and why the 2002 Gujarat riots affected the NGO, the ways in which it has started working on the issue of communal harmony and engaging with Muslims since the riots, and the challenges with which it has been confronted as a result of its efforts. In doing so, I will show how the complexities of NGO-based women's activism have become intertwined with the politics of secularism.

The short history of the Taiwanese Communist Party (Taiwan gongchandang 台 灣 共 產 黨) (1928–1931) offers a window into the negotiative polity of international communism during the Third Period (1928–1934). The Party was established during the time when the Comintern intensified its operations in colonies and promoted the organization of communist parties there. Its demise was the result of government suppression that occurred as a reaction to their increased public activity in 1931, allegedly at the direction of the Comintern. This paper examines the Comintern's role in the Taiwanese communist movement and shows that the Taiwanese communists were active agents (rather than passive tools) in their relationship with the Comintern.

“The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”

Martin Heidegger

“Historical monuments, we can argue, live their modern lives primarily as images.”

Tapati Guha-Thakurta

The goal of this article is to provide conceptual and historical orientation useful for thinking about the emergence of philanthropy in modern South Asia. Conceptually, the article suggests the need to approach the expression of philanthropy in early colonial Bengal in terms of processes of imitation. To do so, we must overcome the stigma attached to the idea of imitation within both nationalist and post-colonial thought. In the particular context of early colonial Calcutta, local actors entered into intimate relationships with Europeans and these relationships provided occasions to borrow, translate, and retool a range of ideas and practices relevant to new modes of public charity. The importance of attending to historical context is suggested by reading such early colonial developments against the grain of late nineteenth-century perspectives—a time when Bengalis grew anxious about cultural imitation. Rather than deferring to these late-colonial anxieties over imitation, we need to situate them within a critically informed historical framework. To do this, the present article draws on the writings of the Brāhmo intellectual Rajnarain Bose, who pondered the relationship between an earlier colonial moment (‘then’) and his own late-colonial ‘now’. Close reading of Bose allows us to plumb the nature of late-colonial anxiety about cultural borrowing while opening up a new perspective on imitation and intimacy in early colonial Bengal that is not predicated on the teleology of the late-colonial modern.

This paper examines the arguments whereby the Brahman priests of a Hindu temple in the town of Kalugumalai, South India, claim exclusive rights to perform worship in that shrine. For comparison, it also deals briefly with the priests of a much larger temple in the nearby city of Madurai, whose arguments partly contradict those used in Kalugumalai. This discrepancy will be explained by treating both sets of arguments as strategic statements, which legitimize the self-interests of their respective protagonists.

British financial interests in China, since 1895, had been closely linked with political and strategic considerations. As the political and financial rivalry between the European powers intensified, the link tightened, becoming increasingly essential for mutual preservation. European finance meant railways, mineral rights, arms, and support for the ailing Manchu Dynasty; it was clear to successive British governments that British political supremacy in China could not survive the passing of such important financial concessions into foreign hands. In 1898, with the international scramble for concessions at its peak, the leading representatives of British finance in China co-operated fully with the Foreign Office to gain the bulk of Chinese railway contracts and concessions. Such respectable British enterprises as the British and Chinese Corporation and the Pekin Syndicate received active diplomatic support at Peking and the encouragement of the Foreign Office in London. Short of actually negotiating financial contracts on behalf of private companies British diplomacy could do little more to improve the competitive standing of these leading British firms vis-à-vis their foreign rivals.

One consequence of the democratization of Eastern Europe has been a sharp reduction in the provision of development assistance by the former Communist countries. At its high point in the mid-1980s, aid from Communist Eastern Europe to the developing countries is estimated to have peaked at between $516–537 million a year, supplementing Soviet aid of some $4–4.5 billion. Taken together, it is estimated that Soviet and East European Communist aid represented nearly 10% of total world Official Development Assistance (ODA) disbursements during that period. Following the political changes that wrought democratization to Eastern Europe, these aid flows declined drastically or even ceased. This downward shift in aid reflected a profound and widespread aversion to any ongoing East European role in international development.

Two of the main practical problems which confronted the Xinzheng reforms (1901–1911) were, on the one hand, financial issues, and on the other, personnel issues. In this paper, I will concentrate on the latter. When one thinks of the reforms in relation to administrative personnel, the main aspects generally brought up are centered upon innovations introduced at that time. Among other things, we could mention the new schools or, to be more general, the new educational system that was built up around the empire—mostly after 1900—to prepare a new generation of officials trained in specific fields of ‘modern’ knowledge. They, in turn, were expected to fill in the positions in the newly set up administrative institutions at the central and local levels. Their new training was to allow them to be in charge of the new responsibilities the reformed Qing bureaucratic apparatus had set out to perform in such fields as justice, fiscality and finances, the military and police, education or public health, to name but a few. To summarize, the search for talented men, a Chinese age-old principle for sound government, was trusted to that for new talents. The 1905 disbanding of the traditional examination system did much to reinforce this trend. During the first decade of the 20th century, the steady increase in the number of Chinese young men going abroad to study—especially to Japan—can serve as a testimony to this `new knowledge and new talent fever' of the late Qing. The fights against one another to which some of the central and provincial administrative offices resorted in order to secure for themselves the services of those deemed of talent are but another exemplary illustration of this aspect.

This paper examines the growth of the British commercial communities in the Straits Settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes how they emerged as a coherent commercial and political interest group, separate from the Indian empire, with their own network of allies and commercial partners in Britain. As such, the Straits merchants emerged as a significant political lobby in their own right. It contends that in the process, they revived earlier notions of Southeast Asia as a discrete geographical region, in which political and ethnic diversity was bridged by the flourishing of maritime commercial networks.

This article investigates the tensions that emerge when transnational identities are juxtaposed against claims of multiculturalism and de facto assimilation processes. The article focuses on the resettlement of co-ethnics who arrived in China through forced migration between 1949 and 1979 and the generational transitions of their descendants. The Chinese state resettled these forced migrants from Southeast Asia on state-owned farms known as the ‘overseas Chinese farms’ and gave them preferential treatment as ‘returnees’ rather than ‘refugees’. They retained transnational cultural identities which set them apart from the China-born Chinese and suffered further stigmatization during the Cultural Revolution. This article highlights the limitations of using ethnicity as a lens for understanding how ‘difference’ is negotiated in China. In contemporary times the (multi)cultural identities of the refugee-returnees are promoted for the purposes of tourism to help reinvent the farms for economic sustainability. Yet the identity transitions experienced by the children and grandchildren of the refugee-returnees suggest that they are assimilating a national identity that subsumes their overseas Chinese cultures, serving to normalize a Chinese identity associated with the locally born Chinese instead. The article argues that the objectification of overseas Chinese heritage and assimilation ideology work together to selectively highlight China's historical connections to its co-ethnics abroad while simultaneously projecting a new national narrative of contemporary Chinese identity that is distinct from the overseas Chinese. This article on Chinese forced migration and resettlement provides useful insights concerning the negotiation of transnational identity with respect to multiculturalism and assimilation, and further suggests new directions for overseas Chinese studies today.

The Naning War, long dismissed by historians as a ‘little war’, was part of a more expansive drama in the history of the Malay world. The war expressed traditional modes of power-broking and opposition, as well as anticipated later political developments in Malaya. From the wider perspective of imperial history, this important but neglected episode of British expansion in the East merits a modern treatment. This article seeks to rectify deficiencies of existing histories of the Naning War by exploring the nature of indirect rule and formal control from the metropolis, and authority and conflict at the ‘periphery’. It sets the war both within the cultural context of Malay warfare, and within the regional context of indigenous resistance and Islamic protest against British incursions.

The peasant farmers of Taishan County in southern China's Guangdong Province have created a pattern of village settlement which, using very limited resources, has produced an agricultural landscape and village environment that is a model of ecological integration. The pattern serves both the social and functional needs of the inhabitants by taking advantage of simple microclimatic modifications and the efficient use and recycling of resources. The result is a pattern of small dense villages set in a landscape that is highly evolved both aesthetically and ecologically.

There were two main reasons for writing my original article. The first was to show that man's economic environment is not the only variable (or set of variables) in economic development and that man does have some control over his own economic destiny. The second was to attempt a multi-disciplinary explanation of the Malays' economic retardation.

Much can be learned about the character of a political movement by examining the personal relations between its principal members as well as their political writings, speeches, and ‘formal’ activities in the movement. This is all the more the case if the movement is politically radical, for radical politics often generate a radical subculture which has as its chief function the moulding of an ideal revolutionary personality which will serve the movement in all of its vicissitudes and be a model for the type of citizen the movement wishes to create in society.

The decade preceding the First World War, with the Younghusband expedition, the Chinese forward movement in Tibet of 1909–11, and the Simla Conference of 1913–14, is naturally the period of Anglo-Tibetan relations that has been most thoroughly covered by historians. It could indeed be argued that, on the surface at least, the relationship forged between British India and Tibet by the conclusion of the Simla Conference remained unchanged and largely unchallenged until the transfer of power to an independent Indian Government. This seeming stability, however, masks a debate over Tibetan policy within the British and Indian Governments that was particularly intense during the years 1919–21, and which reflected Britain's nervousness over the political instability of north Asia as a whole during and after the First World War. Before the First World War, the ‘problem’ of Tibet was largely a parochial issue for the British Indian Government, but at the conclusion of the First World War this ‘problem’ had become an important ingredient of a much wider debate on the overall direction of post-war British policy in Asia.

Within a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place.