These are two very different assessments of Japanese art and artists both published in London during the 1860s. We may argue that both comments are ill-conceived and prejudiced; yet both in their own way are characteristic Western reactions of the time. In this paper I should like to explore the Western image of Japanese art during the period from 1853 to 1867.

This article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.

This article argues that ṣulḥ-i kull (peace for all) as a specific term was introduced in the 1590s by a small group of avant-garde Neoplatonists who worked at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. It was only in the following century that ṣulḥ-i kull developed into the ethos that became the ideological mainstay of Mughal rule both internally, for its administrative elites, and externally, vis-à-vis their main rivals: the Uzbeks in Central Asia and the Safavids in Iran. The early stages in the making of this ideology can be followed in some detail by studying Akbar's neglected millennial history, the Tarikh-i Alfi. In fact, this vast Mughal world history demonstrates that apart from Neoplatonic akhlāq, there was another important building block that so far has been missing altogether in the making of ṣulḥ-i kull, that is, the practical model of the Pax Mongolica, as established under Chinggis Khan, the most famous of Mughal ancestors. Most crucially, it is in the Tarikh-i Alfi that we find the legacies of Persianate akhlāq and Mongol yasa (law) married to each other. In fact, it was through akhlāq that the peace of the Mongols became the Mughal peace for all.

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.

This article provides a commentary on a painting entitled Dancing Girls, Madras, c. 1805, by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey shown in an exhibition of privately owned works from East Anglia at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 18 May-1 August 1999, entitled, ‘In the Public Eye’ (Catalogue No. 95) fig. 1.

In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic.

The initial alignment, by means of the Anti-Comintern Pact, of the Japanese government with the Third Reich in 1936 was made possible by the extraordinary activities of Ōshima Hiroshi, then military attaché to Berlin. Colonel Ōshima, whose diplomatic role far transcended his early rank and authority, moved from the rank of Colonel and position of attaché in 1934 to Lieutenant General and Ambassador by 1938. Ōshima, both daring and enterprising, had the full support of his military superiors and certain pro-Axis Japanese; thus his role in Germany proved crucial to the making of major changes in Japanese foreign policy. He both represented and expressed military and totalitarian tendencies in the Japanese army, government, and society, helping those tendencies to reach dominance in Japan by 1940.

At the moment, India, with two Congress Parties, two Jana Sanghs, two Socialist Parties, two D.M.K.s, two Akali Dals and two Communist Parties (the third Communist Party—the C.P.M.L.—has been declared illegal after the present emergency), presents a picture with ‘splitism’ as the common denominator. The split in the Communist Party of India occurred at a time when the Communist movement all over the world was in disarray, showing polycentric trends on account of Sino-Soviet polemics. In addition to this, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 also put serious strain on the party unity. Therefore, most of the studies that were undertaken on the C.P.I, split ascribed it either to the Sino-Soviet schism or to the Sino-Indian border war, or to both. However, an analysis of the authoritative pronouncements of two factions and an examination of their political resolutions indicate sharp differences on such issues as the character of the Congress Party, the nature of its government and the progressive and reactionary contents of its economic, home and foreign policy. The rightsts in the C.P.I, considered the national bourgeoisie Congress Party and its government as a progressive force and consequently advocated a policy of ‘Unity’ with it, in its fight against the parties of the Right reaction, such as the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra and the two variants of the Socialist Party.

This paper attempts to examine the nature of underground activity in Bihar in the 1940s. It outlines, for the first time, the dynamics of the Congress underground movement as it emerged after the imprisonment of Gandhi and the established Congress leadership in 1942. No historian has, to my knowledge, attempted to study the nature of the underground activity and its implications for the Congress organization in Bihar, or elsewhere, in this period. Most of the studies of the Quit India movement examine only the few days in August when the mass movement erupted with full force and then neglect the more significant following period. This includes the studies of Stephen Henningham and Max Harcourt who have examined the nature of popular protest in Bihar in some detail. This neglect is surprising, for the underground movement was very active and proved to be a major ‘law and order’ problem to the British well into 1944. As an underground activist, Havildar Tripathi, told me in an interview in Patna in March 1986, ‘The mass movement lasted for only 2 weeks in August, we carried it much beyond that’.

Confrontation with the British during the years 1839 to 1842 jolted the Chinese into a more realistic perception of the wider world. Before the Opium War, the Chinese took little notice of the world beyond the traditional Chinese realm; during the course of the war China's inadequate knowledge of overseas countries proved to be a strategic disadvantage. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China's defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small but influential group of Chinese set out to expand China's knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China's survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Wei Yüan (1794–1857) and Hsü Chi-yü (1795–1873) and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective in the decade after the Treaty of Nanking.

The current paper is part of an interdisciplinary project focusing on the intellectual dimensions of the French colonial experience in colonial Viet Nam, particularly in relation to the archaeology of Southeast Asia. As such, the work presented here is intended as a follow-up to the recently published exploration of intellectual movements under colonialism in French-ruled Viet Nam produced by Susan Bayly. Its wider aim is to contextualise the work of the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient in order to better understand why its product, the cultural history of Viet Nam, is now so far out of step with the rest of mainland Southeast Asia that despite more than thirty years of post-colonial fieldwork by Vietnamese scholars, and more than fifteen years of collaboration with Western institutions, our understanding of Vietnamese protohistory has advanced little since, in a now famous review of the then current state of Vietnamese archaeology, Jeremy Davidson opined that ‘our knowledge of Champa remains so fragmentary, vague and inaccurate that the whole subject must be reworked’. The current work has many points of concordance with Bayly's interdisciplinary study. Here too it is argued that the distinctive understandings of race, culture and polity brought to the colony by French scientists, profoundly affected the thought and actions of Vietnamese as well as Europeans, and that the effects of their work were felt both within and beyond the French empire.

This is with reference to the article ‘British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar’ published in Modern Asian Studies 50 (5) 2016. I would be grateful if MAS could publish this letter.

In the winter of 1945, the multinational Chinese Maritime Customs Service opened an inquiry into the cooperation of hundreds of its own employees with Japanese occupation forces in China. This was, as far as the historical record allows us to say, the most thorough investigation undertaken in China into collaboration during World War Two. This paper represents the first historical analysis of the Customs ‘Staff Investigation Committee.’ It argues that the investigation represented a new direction for the Customs Service in China. The investigation's underpinning rationale was that Customs staff, Chinese and foreign, served the Kuomintang government before any other notion of Chinese or Service interests—a dramatic change in direction for an organisation that had been emblematic of treaty-port China. The investigation thus offers historians an insight into the understudied final years of the Customs Service, into the late Republican government's efforts to deal with the legacy of imperialism, and into the extent and rationale of collaboration in Nationalist China.

This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.

Despite being recognized as a significant literary mode in understanding the advent of the modern self, biographies as a genre have received relatively little attention from South Asian historians. Likewise, histories of science and healing in British India have largely ignored the colonial trajectories of those sectarian, dissenting, supposedly pseudo-sciences and medical heterodoxies that have flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century. This article addresses these gaps in the historiography to identify biographies as a principal mode through which an incipient, ‘heterodox’ Western science like homoeopathy could consolidate and sustain itself in Bengal. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives render largely invisible, this article argues that biographies are more than a mere repository of individual lives, and in fact are a veritable site of power. In bringing histories of print and publishing, histories of medicine, and histories of life writing practices together, it pursues two broad themes: first, it analyses the sociocultural strategies and networks by which scientific doctrines and concepts are translated across cultural borders. It explores the relation between medical commerce, print capital, and therapeutic knowledge to illustrate that acculturation of medical science necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of class, kinship, and religion. Second, it simultaneously reflects upon the expanding genre of homoeopathic biographies published since the mid-nineteenth century: on their features, relevance, and functions, examining in particular the contemporary status of biography vis-à-vis ‘history’ in writing objective pasts.