This article seeks to explain the traditional celebration of Cold Food and some other springtime customs in the mid-Yangzi basin in central China. In these rituals the ancestors and their influence in the production of new rice were highlighted while, at the same time, social reproduction through women was temporarily suspended. Female generative energy was not allowed to compete with the creative force of the ancestors in the fields. Cold Food is seen as a trope on seasonal agricultural tasks. The myth of moral constancy, which accompanied the festival, was on another deeper level an iconic exploration of the preparation of the agricultural fields. Death was seen to propel life, ancestral energy being transferred to the living through rice.

The cult of Zhunti 准提/準提 (Sanskrit: Cundī) is a unique religious and cultural phenomenon in China. However, the scholarship devoted to its history has long been dominated by two problematic models—the model of ‘Sinification’, according to which the goddess Zhunti is a Chinese Buddhist deity borrowed from an Indian source, and the ‘evolution’ model that depicts the persistence of the Zhunti cult as a continuous and gradual process. I challenge these views and instead argue that, far from being a foreign transplant, Zhunti is a deity ‘made in China’ and there is no evidence of continuity in the development of the cult from the Liao to Ming–Qing times. To justify these assertions, I re-examine the development of the cult of Zhunti by exploring its vicissitudes throughout history and highlighting the ‘Chinese creations’ that were produced during the process of the making of the goddess Zhunti.

Muslims’ education in British India is treated in the literature as something encompassing resistance, reaction, and hence emancipation from putatively exploitative British policies. This article focuses on the patterns of Muslims’ emergent knowledge traditions in British India in response to the British government's involvement in the educational matters of the Indian subcontinent. Data findings reveal that Indian Muslims’ responses to the growing trend towards ‘modern’ education in the Indian subcontinent evolved gradually through discursive interactions leading to divergent reformist tendencies in favour of or against adopting Western education. The British government's decision to make ‘special’ arrangements for Muslims’ educational uplift had left legacies of mutual admiration, fear, and sometimes resentment between Muslims and the British government in the subcontinent. Amid ambivalent relations between the British and Muslims, it was not difficult to find apt illustrations of what Francis Robinson calls a ‘cheek by jowl’ relationship.

As a case study of the changing mentalities that emerged in colonial India, this article analyses a discussion that took place among several munshis (secretaries trained in Persian to run the affairs of princely states), and also provides a translation and edition of the text. The subject was a short polemical letter refuting the immortality of the soul, published around 1850 in the Simla Akhbār (Simla News). The main question entertained in this correspondence was not the merit of the sceptical argument, based in part on modern medical findings, but the potential public impact of dismissing a religious doctrine that sustains morality. Two of the participants in this conversation, Shivaprasad and Sital Singh, displayed the full range of changes that made the nineteenth century so extraordinary, and the way they responded illustrates some of the salient features and stages of this process, including the difficulty of foreseeing the elimination of much of the system for which munshis were trained.

I am grateful to the Society for letting me see the above paper before publication and giving me space for a few comments. Circumstances at the moment debar me from access to libraries; and, as it is also hard to answer briefly arguments depending on assumptions which appear to me unwarranted by the available evidence, this note may be found incomplete.

Iron ore is found chiefly in the north-west quarter of the Peninsula. The result of my inquiries gives the number of six foundries working at one time, during the fair season, throughout the province, and two or three more occasionally. The extent to which the metal is manufactured will be given in the body of this Report. I have visited only two foundries, those at Ranawao and Ranpoor in the Ranas and Jam's Talookas respectively; but I understand a description of one applies alike to all, their construction being rude and simple.

As the Swat valley, and neighbourhood, which constitute the principal portion of the old province of Udyāna, have hitherto been inaccessible for archæological research, the following rough notes (made during the little time at my disposal as Chief Political Officer with the Chitral Relief Force, and lately as Political Officer for Dir and Swat) may induce others better qualified to devote some attention to this interesting neighbourhood. They are principally connected with the travels of the Chinese pilgrim Huan Tsiang, as given in Beal's “Buddhist Records of the Western World.”

The Svayambhūpurāṇa [Paris, dev. 78] is probably a literary recast of the Svayambhūpurāṇa named by copyists Vṛhat˚ and Mahāsvayambhūpurāṇa, and existing in many copies in the Paris, Cambridge, and London (A. S.) Libraries, and also in India. The topics of this work are identical, but the language is, to some extent, different, and the treatment of the matter fairly independent. The same can be said, so far as I am acquainted with the facts, about the Madhyama recension of the S. P. [London A. S. Library and Cambridge]. The number of chapters differs in the S. P. [Paris, dev. 78], and other redactions (being respectively 12, 20, and 8); prose and verse of very varied rhythm occur intermingled throughout the book, whilst, on the contrary, the Vṛhat˚ and the Mahāsvayambhūpurāṇa are both, from beginning to end, written in classic çlokas. The Mahā˚, as noticed in Bendall's Buddhist MSS. Catalogue, is only a second recension of the Vṛhat˚: all the verses of the Mahā˚, together with the prologue itself, are faithfully reproduced in the Vṛhat˚ edition, the distinctive mark of the two redactions being the separation between the first and the second chapters.

The aim of the present paper is to give some idea of what is known of the ‘Vernacular Literature and Folklore of the Panjáb.’ It lays no claim to be the result of original research. It is, in fact, little more than an epitome of information collected from books, periodicals, and official records, or gathered from the lips of Indian friends. Moreover, the task of collecting information has been greatly simplified by the appearance, within the last year, of a remarkable work by a rising Indian civilian. I refer to the Report of the late census of the Panjáb, by Mr. Denzil Ibbetson. The Report is a monument of elaborate research, is written in a most attractive style, and has been justly described by high authority as a “mine of information,”— not only regarding census operations—but also concerning the history, races, languages, and literature of the Panjáb. For the first portion of this paper free use has been made of the contents of that valuable work. I shall conclude by a few observations on the effects of thirty-five years of British rule on the development of vernacular literature and the intellectual condition of the people.

The Kharoṣṭhī inscription here published (in private possession) has been referred to me by an interested friend for a reading. The Kharoṣṭhī script, and the North-West Prakrit language written in it still remain problematic, so that as usual the following translation is preliminary. The accompanying photographs (Plates II and III) will offer specialists in Kharoṣṭhī the necessary basis for study.

The inscription is on the halo of a standing Buddha (height 96.52 cm). Two photographs are given so that the letters behind the head can be seen.