This article explores the processes by which medieval Sufi masters and holy men established themselves through their physical and spatial settings and left their mark on the religious and sacred topography. Focusing on Damascus from the mid-6th/12th to mid-8th/14th centuries under the reign of the Zangids, Ayyubids and early Mamluks. The article offers observations on three parallel developments: the genesis and growth of a local space around masters of the Path, the spread of endowed establishments designed by their founders to support the mystics and their rituals, and the incorporation of venerated shaykhs' tombs and shrines into a growing inventory of regional and local sacred sites. Special emphasis is placed on the variations in the very nature of the local sites and spaces that came to be associated with Sufism, their patterns of development and geographical spread, the functions they served and their symbolic message. Through this investigation, the article casts light on the concrete signs of the creation of diverse Sufi spheres in pre-modern Damascus and develops an understanding of the tangible material manifestations of the overall prominent status that Sufism came to hold during a period of intense religious activity.

The Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī (‘A Qaṣīdah on Hindī Terms’), composed in the early sixteenth century, is an unusual example of the niṣāb genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, providing Persian glosses for various terms drawn from a language the text labels Hindī. The author of the vocabulary, Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī ‘Yūsufī’, was a physician who followed the first Mughal-Timurid emperor, Bābur, from Afghanistan to India. This paper examines the content and the arrangement of Yūsufī's vocabulary, paying particular attention to the means through which ‘Yūsufī’ was able to assert semantic equivalences between lexical terms and the materials with which they correspond. It concludes by contrasting the Hindi to Persian glossing directionality of this work with the Persian to Hindi directionality prevailing in later examples of the niṣāb genre, arguing that the Qaṣīdah reflects a period when practitioners of the Persianate yūnānī system of medical knowledge engaged with Indic counterparts in dynamic and especially fruitful ways.

The rise of Khwāja Isḥāq, one of the most influential figures in the history of Central Asian Sufism, has often been explained by the patronage of particular royals. This “royal patron” model has, however, been based on a flawed reading of hagiographical sources by which crucial questions of genre are overlooked in the effort of mining these complex narratives for apparent historical facts. New evidence, presented here, allows us to question the “royal patron” model, along with the commonly-accepted chronology of Khwāja Isḥāq's life, and calls for a different approach to Sufi hagiography as a historical source.

This paper analyses the use of religious folklore among the Meitei people of Manipur in northeastern India in the creation of a racial identity. After the Meiteis, who are ethnically Southeast Asian, were forced to convert to Hinduism in the early eighteenth century by the Manipuri king Garibniwaz, they were provided with a number of folklores regarding their origin that combined Hindu and indigenous Meitei deities and myths. Recently, the rise of anti-Hindu sentiment in Manipur—spurred by a movement to revive the indigenous Meitei religion and a strained political relationship with India—has led to the questioning of the validity of these stories by Meitei academics. As a result a new cannon of literature is being developed by scholars that link the origin of the community to its Southeast Asian roots. Discovering the racial identity of the Meitei people has motived this movement. This paper analyzes the multiple meanings that mythologies concerning origin hold in contemporary Meitei society and challenges the modern notion that historical consciousness is absolute truth.

This article contextualises and compares the Urdu and Hindi versions of Premchand's 1924 short story The Chess Players. Close examination of the two texts offers fascinating insight into the challenges of adjustment for Premchand as he moved from his Persian/Urdu literary home-base to the world of modern Hindi that he did so much to help create in the early decades of twentieth-century India.

This article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.

The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

The History of a Loyal Heart (Xin shi) is allegedly a work by the Song loyalist, Zheng Sixiao, written to bemoan the fate of the Song empire after its conquest by the Mongols. There have always been doubts about its authenticity, however, and many scholars have believed it to be a forgery. The arguments for and against this have remained inconclusive, and the work has been commonly used as a source for the history of the Song–Yuan transition period. This article adduces compelling evidence to show that there can be very little doubt that it is a late-Ming forgery. Some of the implications of this conclusion are briefly addressed.

On 13th November a panel appointed by the Royal Asiatic Society's Publications Committee decided that the Barwis Holliday Award, for an article on an East Asian topic, should be given to Dr George Mak for his article ‘Without Note or Comment’ Principle in Late Qing China’.

This paper examines how the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) struggled to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle in late Qing China, which was a vivid case attesting the tension between the ideals of Protestant missionary societies and the reality of mission fields. The BFBS regarded the ‘without note or comment’ principle as its fundamental principle, since the principle not only embodied its biblical ideology but also helped solicit interdenominational support. However, Protestant missionaries in China urged the BFBS to modify the ‘without note or comment’ principle so as to publish and distribute Chinese Bibles with readers’ helps explaining the biblical world to the Chinese people, who belonged to a non-Christian culture. Having refused the missionaries’ request for several decades, the BFBS eventually published an edition of the Gospel of Matthew in Chinese including explanatory readings called translational helps in 1911, as the BFBS was concerned about the loss of support from missionaries in the face of increasing competition from the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), which began to publish and distribute annotated Chinese Gospels in the 1890s in response to demand. However, this paper argues that the BFBS did not abandon its ‘without note or comment’ principle but instead, by adopting a minimalist approach to compiling its translational helps, the BFBS made use of its Chinese Bibles with translational helps as an expedient means to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle.