Turkic Runic inscriptions, discovered in Mongolia during the second half of the 20th century and especially in the last decade, are remarkable. The Bombogor, consisting of five-lines, is one of them. This article is an attempt to re-read the mentioned inscription which was first published by Ts. Battulga. According to my proposed reading, the text was written on a tombstone which was erected in honour of a Turkish qunčuy (“princess”) who might have been married into the Karluk tribe.

In the introduction to his article, entitled “The Murder of Ibn abī l-Ḥuqayq: On the Origin and Reliability of Some Maghāzī Reports”, Harald Motzki summarises “special biases” by which western scholars deal with the Muslim sources concerning the life of the Prophet. For Motzki, one of the most important biases held against the Muslim sources is that “The background is theological, in that the traditions tried to create a specific theology of history, or in that the Muslims simply tended to put a halo around the founder of their religion”.2

This article considers the Islamic-era sources that report the history of the last Sasanian kings. It focuses on scenes that seem to indicate Christian influence and asks what this tells us about Christian transmission of the Middle Persian royal histories and about the position of Christians in the empire more broadly. In particular, it discusses three scenes from al-Ṭabarī: his presentation of Hormizd IV as a ‘pluralist’ monarch; the changing attitudes of Christians to Khusrau II and the presentation of Khusrau's short-lived successors.

Notwithstanding a recent resurgence of scholarly interest in what one may call “Mappila Studies”—the body of scholarship on the Muslims of Malabar in the Malayalam-speaking South Indian state of Kerala—research on this community still leaves too much to be desired. As for the fate of Mappila literary culture within this incipient field of study, scholars have either given short shrift to or painted in broad brushstrokes the impressive literary legacy of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar despite its enormous historic/al and socio-cultural value.2 That said, even the tiny array of scholarly works, mostly by Malayali scholars, that seeks to treat of Mappila literature has largely approached the subject, I argue, from a provincialised “literary” vantage point, thereby reducing the whole of Mappila narratives to mere aesthetic artifacts having no bearing upon the lives of Mappilas. I call this dominant paradigm of doing Mappila literature “literarisation”—that is, fetishising the “literariness” of text by privileging its formal, stylistic, and aesthetic features over its social tone and life. This view assumes text to be a domain of symbols separable from a domain of practice and disregards the social production of text which cannot be abstracted out from the materialities giving shape to it.3

This article sets out to delineate the process that led to the establishment of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore in 1875. It lays down the context within which the plan to set up art institutions in India was conceived. Contrary to Krishnan Kumar's view whereby the coloniser and the colonised constituted an adult-child relationship the coloniser, in that particular relationship took the role of the adult whereas the native became the child which had been a salient feature of the educational and academic landscape of British India. By challenging Krishna Kumar, this article while drawing on the inferences of Partha Mitter and Hussain Ahmad Khan, argues that in the realm of art instruction the analysis of colonial strategies of adjustment and readjustment provide useful insights about the administrative constraints and cognitive failures of the colonial administrators in the nineteenth-Century Punjab. Challenges like space-selection for MSA campus, appropriate Curriculum for the students and their inadequate language skills stared its founder Principal Lockwood Kipling (1837–19011) in the face. This forms the major focus of the article.

In the colonial anthropology of India developed in connection with the decennial censuses in the late nineteenth century, caste and religion were major topics of enquiry, although caste was particularly important. Official anthropologists, mostly members of the Indian Civil Service, reified castes and religious communities as separate ‘things’ to be counted and classified. In the 1911 and later censuses, less attention was paid to caste, but three officials – E. A. Gait, E. A. H. Blunt and L. S. S. O'Malley – made significant progress in understanding the caste system by recognising and partly overcoming the problems of reification. In this period, however, there was less progress in understanding popular religion. The Morley-Minto reforms established separate Muslim electorates in 1909; communal representation was extended in 1921 by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and again by the 1935 Government of India Act, which also introduced reservations for the Untouchable Scheduled Castes. Gait and Blunt were involved in the Montagu-Chelmsford debates, and Blunt in those preceding the 1935 Act. In the twentieth century, the imperial government's most serious problems were the nationalist movement, mainly supported by the middle class, and religious communalism. But there were no ethnographic data on the middle class, while the data on popular religion showed that Hindus and Muslims generally did not belong to separate communities; anthropological enquiry also failed to identify the Untouchable castes satisfactorily. Thus, official anthropology became increasingly irrelevant to policy making and could no longer strengthen the colonial state.

The imperial bestowal, as a major way of distributing the Buddhist canon, profoundly affected the contours of Buddhism in late imperial China. But why did the inner court engage in the distribution? How did it choose the recipient from the outside world? How was it possible for an aspirant to the canon to win out among the competitors? These questions concern the dynamics and mechanism behind the diffusion of the canon. They also cast new light on the relationship between Buddhism and the state and local society by revealing how the two otherwise separated worlds interacted. This paper is intended to tackle these unexplored questions by examining the extensive bestowal of the Ming Beizang during the Wanli court (1573–1620). It first makes a survey, revealing how uneven the distribution was in terms of both time and region. It then explores the motives of the imperial members as patrons in the context of court politics. Its focus, however, is on the agents and elements working behind the selection of the beneficiaries, and how their interplays conditioned the influence of the canon in local societies. In the process, the roles of the emperor, court women, eunuchs, officials, monks, and local elites are all examined.