This article explores the acceptance of Marxism by a non-Marxist Chinese philosopher, Feng Youlan, before and after 1949. Previous studies have largely focused on establishment intellectuals in the study of Marxism and intellectuals in China, and this article seeks to fill the lacuna on the intellectual potential Marxism offered to non-Communist intellectuals in China. This article finds that for Feng Youlan, a non-Marxist Chinese intellectual, Marxism was able to provide meaningful venues for his attempt to modernize Chinese knowledge and transform Chinese culture. A Marxist emphasis on universal rules governing all human societies on the same stage of development, Marxist presentist approaches to history, and most of all, a Marxist emphasis on praxis, aided Chinese intellectuals like Feng in constructing new approaches to learning the Chinese past. The Marxist emphasis on praxis helped deepen the discussion of experience, a concept central to a reconstruction of Confucian learning in modern China, after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Eventually the state monopoly of the definition of Marxist praxis stifled the spontaneous search for a new understanding of experience in Communist China. Nonetheless, Marxism had a transformative and lasting impact on modern Chinese scholarship, as seen from the example of Feng Youlan.

Drawing on ideas from ecocriticism, literary animal studies, and post-colonial studies, as well as anthropology and cultural studies, this article examines the representations of animals in contemporary Sino-Mongolian literature and art, and the various connections between these representations and issues related to ethnic and environmental politics. I propose that the intensive engagement of Chinese-Mongolian writers and artists with animals is related first and foremost to the central role that animals, both wild and domesticated, have traditionally played in Mongolian nomadic pastoralist culture. However, I also argue that it is closely connected to two interrelated processes that are currently taking place in Inner Mongolia: the severe degradation of the Inner Mongolian grassland and the rapid sinicization of China's Mongols. I suggest that in the context of this environmental and cultural crisis, the engagement with animals reflects anxiety about the fate of the Inner Mongolian grassland, the fate of real animals, which, for centuries, have been closely associated with this landscape and Mongolian nomadic culture, and, most importantly, the fate of Mongolian culture itself. I also argue that Sino-Mongolian writers and artists use literary and artistic animals to construct and assert Mongolianness as part of their search for an ‘authentic’ ethnic identity, and to comment critically on the impact that Chinese domination has had on the Inner Mongolian grassland, its indigenous human and non-human inhabitants, and Mongolian culture and identity. Finally, I propose that through their ethnic environmentalism, Chinese-Mongolian artists and writers have made an important contribution to the development of China's environmental movement.

The purpose of this article is to examine what was involved when the great linguist George Grierson framed the history of Indian bhakti in terms of ‘the four churches of the reformation’ in one of his most widely read publications, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, an entry in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1910). This was his translation of the concept of catuḥ (or cār) sampradāy, which plays a significant role in Nābhādās's Hindi Bhaktamāl (circa 1600). The weight of the target language and its enveloping culture (‘church’, ‘reformation’) raise obvious red flags. Grierson did not submit them to the sort of self-critical scrutiny we might today, nor did he examine the adequacy of Nābhādās's historiography. But did he get it all wrong? I will suggest that there are in fact some intriguing, if distant, analogies between the early modern world out of which Nābhādās wrote and its contemporary Protestant European counterpart, and I will ask whether Nābhādās may have been encouraged to adopt the framework he did because of precedents established in contemporary Muslim historiographical practice. In outlining his four sampradāys, Nābhādas played a role in creating a set of assumptions that long survived his own time in North India—and not just because Grierson would later be listening.

On 10–11 December 2007, a conference was held in Trinity College, Cambridge, in honour of Dr Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953–2006), at which a large number of his former doctoral students and closest colleagues offered research presentations. This special issue of Modern Asian Studies brings together a selection of these papers, revised and extended for publication. It is intended to offer a partial record of the event, and the breadth of research covered within these eight essays is itself testament to the diversity of scholars whom Raj influenced, and the wide array of subjects upon which his work has continued to have an impact.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. The Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance of zielverkopers (labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.

As the Qing state launched its full-scale educational reform at the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of new schools mushroomed all over China. Their urgent and enormous demand for textbooks created a thriving new market that attracted both Chinese and foreign publishing firms. Nurtured in China's traditional book trade, Chinese print capitalists had local knowledge of distribution networks and cultural politics, but not a real command of producing educational Western knowledge. To keep up with Chinese students’ increasing demand for Western knowledge, they pirated textbooks published by foreign companies. Meanwhile, leading American and British publishing corporations were expanding their international business by targeting developing countries that had recently established a modern general education system, like China. Drawing from government and company archives, as well as personal papers and legal documents, this article traces the multinational competition, copyright disputes, and business collaborations between a leading textbook provider in China and their Anglo-American competitors between the 1900s and the 1930s. It illustrates an unexpected and uneasy partnership some foreign publishers formed with Chinese pirates in order to gain better access to China's textbook market. Chinese publishers, on the other hand, used piracy and their local knowledge to bargain for better import credit and deals with their foreign rivals. Both sides were dependent on each other to gain the advantage in their transnational business operations in the globalizing Asian textbook business.

This article examines the Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal's appropriation by three Nadwat al-‘Ulama scholars: Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (d. 1953), Abu'l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (d. 1999), and ‘Abd al-Salam Nadwi (d. 1956). It argues that the particular depictions of Iqbal by the Nadwa ‘ulama can be mapped onto larger evolutions within the institute. The early Nadwa ‘alim Sulayman Nadwi imagines Iqbal as a Muslim leader par excellence. A more conservative understanding of Islam emerged with the later Nadwa ‘ulama. They emphasize traditional theological ideas, particular modes of piety, and ritualistic actions. The article suggests that the later Nadwa ‘ulama’s writings on Iqbal are reflective of this particular understanding of Islam and morality, although there are two distinct responses to the poet. The above examination of the Nadwa is placed within its broader historical context. In so doing, the article contends that the impact of the political milieu in India must be taken into account to understand shifts in the Nadwa and South Asian Islam more broadly. It also asserts that the political environment in South Asia influenced Iqbal's reception by the Nadwa ‘ulama as well as by Muslims in South Asia and beyond. Additionally, this article argues that all three works by the Nadwa ‘ulama are subjective portrayals informed by the social imaginaries of their authors. In fact, in a broader sense, all works of narrative historiography are subjective accounts. This realization problematizes the boundaries between the categories of historiography and hagiography, and this research calls for a rethinking of these tensions.

Japan's early postwar leadership and American occupiers alike asserted that democratization was a new lesson that the Japanese public would have to learn. In fact, the ideas of democratic reformers had been broadcast to a large audience as feasible programmes decades before 1945. Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of Democracy in 1919, outlined the benefits that democratic reforms might provide in a post-World War I world. Decades later, Japanese people faced a new postwar struggle, not as victors but as the vanquished. Gaikotsu, writing in 1945, reflected on democracy in these new circumstances in his study, Amerika-sama. Although the situation was vastly different, victory and defeat in world wars had opened paths to new possibilities. This paper examines Gaikotsu's prewar writings as prescient prescriptions that he revisits in his essay Amerika-sama, or ‘Honourable America,’ at the point they begin to be played out, in some instances only partially and at times for ill as well as good, in occupied Japan. These reflections strikingly demonstrate the continuity of ideas during the prewar past and postwar present. Amerika-sama is a representative expression of many programmes Gaikotsu and likeminded humanistic activists attempted to put into practice from the late nineteenth century until they were suppressed during the wartime years. Mainstream political parties, prewar and postwar, often found it difficult to embrace Gaikotsu's ideas and political programmes. Nevertheless, the general public embraced them and they now find legal support in the Constitution of Japan.

A network of seaside and hill resorts created by foreigners gradually took shape in China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Such places were both a touristic novelty in China and the focal point of a type of tourist experience that was modern in a variety of ways. This article examines tourist accounts, tourist guidance material, and other sources, in an attempt to understand the major habits, norms, perceptions, and meanings of tourism to the seaside and hill resorts as a new type of tourism in China, from its inception to the downfall of the Nationalist government in 1949. For this purpose, it explores three aspects that were central to resort tourism: its strong association with an idea of refuge, its identification as an ideal experience, and its important physical component. While the article aims at an overall analysis of this new element of tourist culture in China, it also seeks to locate it within the wider contexts of tourist culture and of the broad motivations and anxieties of this period.

This article explores the language politics of Manchukuo and the implications reflected in the literary texts of the Japanese writer Hinata Nobuo and the Chinese writer Gu Ding. Through the close examination of communicative failures, such as lexical misunderstandings, linguistic barriers, lies, and rumours in Hinata Nobuo's ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ and Gu Ding's ‘The Wilds’, this article illustrates the authors’ different responses to the impact of this language politics. While both authors were aware of the mutable nature of language, Hinata perceived the Japanese language as a symbol of colonial power and thus the miscommunications between Japanese and Chinese in his story address the ethnic hierarchy embedded in language in the specific context of Manchukuo. Gu Ding, on the other hand, did not see language as a defining element of the culture of a nation, and therefore tried to construct a new type of language and community that were not restricted by the discursive notions of the Chinese and Japanese nations. Gu Ding's primary concern was the modernization of his native place and, to him, adherence to traditional language forms was insignificant and deleterious.

Boundaries were smashed and broken as modernity struck its first blows in Asia in the nineteenth century. The British and the French chipped away at the borders of China, and the USA ripped open the seal that enveloped Japan in sakoku. Imperialism, or neo-imperialism, represented a way of overcoming boundaries, of decreasing the salience of other territorial units. However, it was also a way of expanding boundaries, of projecting one's own territory and sustaining the priority of these new (modern) borders over the claims of (allegedly pre-modern) indigenous peoples. Boundaries themselves began to take on a distinctly modern persona–and they were the property of the modern, Western powers.

This article explores the ways in which Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (1754?–1794) has been panegyrized as the quintessential benefactor of our times in Tamil prose, poetry, and pictures over the course of the past century and a half. In the bureaucratic and legal documents of the colonial state, he appears as a rapacious moneylender and behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, a member of that hated class of ‘Madras dubashes’, a ‘most diabolical race of men’. In contrast, Tamil memory work since at least the 1840s has differently recalled this shadowy eighteenth-century man as a selfless philanthropist whose vast wealth financed some of the earliest educational institutions in the Madras Presidency. I track the posthumous fate of Pachaiyappa's bequest to argue that even as the founding of the public trust and its educational philanthropy departed radically from his willed intentions, a new complex of living, dying, and giving for the sake of native education was put in place in the Tamil country in the age of colonial capital and pedagogic modernity.

This article introduces this special volume on the Mughal policy of sulh-i kull by situating the collection of articles in relation to broader developments across Eurasia.

This article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

This article seeks to address a thematic thread that remains relatively unexplored in historical disaster research—victimhood—through an analysis of publications by disaster relief funds and their supporters in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar in northern India. By examining the representations of victimhood, I aim to explore the historical significance of perceptions and constructions of victimhood in the late colonial period. Based on photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of suffering in images and texts, the article suggests that constructions of victimhood effectively relied on imagery that contained, on the one hand, an absence of bodies and, on the other, a feminized anthropomorphization of suffering. The narratives underlying such depictions of earthquake victims are based on a constitution of victimhood that relied on contemporary historical and culturally founded imageries. The analysis of images and texts focuses on how representations of disaster victims were effective in communicating suffering to audiences. I tentatively argue that historically and culturally founded tropes of what constituted a victim formed along two narratives of victimhood that appealed to a colonial and a nationalist readership respectively. These conceptualizations of victimhood formed the basis for collecting aid for relief and reconstruction, rather than the loss of life, dispossession, social marginalization, and displacement suffered by victims of the earthquake.

In the late 1950s, work began on the Kaptai hydroelectric dam, a massive project in the verdant Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an area bordering northeast India, east Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and Burma (now Myanmar), largely populated by indigenous hill communities. At the time, the CHT was situated in newly created East Pakistan, and Kaptai had become a focal site for the development of hydroelectric power. In the process, Pakistan relied upon international networks, including global aid organizations and American multinational construction firms, to fulfil its development dreams; in return the United States found a useful ally to contain Soviet influence and the growth of communism in Asia. In the high stakes exchange of economic aid for political alliance-making, East Pakistani administrators, US State Department officials, and American corporations became inherently entwined in a shared vision of development, to the detriment of local ecologies and the indigenous peoples who lived within them. This article will explore how both the public and private sectors used the language of primitivity, wildness, and atavism to marginalize minority ‘tribal’ populations in the devastating name of development and modernity.