The British territories of greater Southeast Asia were administratively connected to London and Calcutta, and while local censuses show that these centres could exert some influence at the furthest peripheries of the Empire, a close analysis of the ways in which race and religion were approached in the classification of colonial subjects in Southeast Asia shows peculiarities specific to the region.

In this article I argue that the demographic and socio-political contexts of British Burma and Malaya (with references to Hong Kong) led to a framing of ‘race’ that challenged European ‘scientific’ definitions and embraced instead the interweaving of multiple aspects of an individual's identity, most prominently religion. This shift, potentially empowering as reflective of local understandings of belonging, and an improvement from the period's anthropometric framework, was to backfire, however. With the emergence of nationalism, majoritarian identities came to be homogenised in these ethno-religious intersectional communities, marginalising and excluding those who did not fit.

Between 1562 and 1579, the third Mughal emperor Akbar undertook 17 pilgrimages to the Sufi shrine of Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer in western India. This article analyses them as a form of peripatetic kingship. It studies specific actions of the emperor in and around Ajmer to show how they articulated a specific understanding of monarchy, one that derived legitimacy from the spiritual authority of Sufi masters and sacred sites. It then shows how the strategic location of the town of Ajmer allowed the young emperor to use it as a base for military expansion and political consolidation in western and central India. It also discusses how the journeys allowed Akbar to carry out vital facets of imperial governance, like exploring the realms, forging alliances with local chieftains, and creating public infrastructure. They also served as a public site for the performance of kingship and sovereignty. The final portion of the article explains how a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualisation and performance of Mughal kingship—whereby the ideal of monarchy as a product of Sufi charisma and Islamic piety made way for more universalist and millenarian ideals—brought a sudden end to the pilgrimages after 1579.

The collection of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, preserves a manuscript titled Risala-i-Padakah which was formerly in the library of the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan (d. 1799). This manuscript has descriptions of medals with drawings illustrating their forms. We investigate the design of these medals and assert that Tipu Sultan understood the importance of rewarding his loyal subordinates with medals, thus transferring his authority down to them. The ‘People's Medals’ given to non-combatants, a novel award for those times, are also covered here in detail. We show that some of these medals, reflecting Deccan jewellery traditions, were actually awarded by Tipu Sultan himself to his men, who wore them; and we draw attention to the plunder of these medals, along with other treasures, during the sack of Seringapatam. The authors also view this as a demonstration of Tipu Sultan's regard for loyalty, rank, as well as good governance in opposition to estimates of him by contemporary British biographers. This article is the first documentation of these medals, which were the earliest to be awarded by any state in pre-modern India.

Nineteenth-century comparative sciences profoundly informed Sinology, but this field remains largely unexplored. Despite recent attention to the comparative study of Chinese religion, researchers have overlooked the comparative spirit underpinning British understanding of Chinese law. This article addresses this oversight by focusing on George Jamieson's (1843–1920) translation and interpretation of Chinese inheritance law in the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912). Drawing on Henry Maine's (1822–1888) comparative jurisprudence, Jamieson reflected upon China's lack of the legal concept of wills, which was a starting point for him to decipher the different developmental routes of Roman and Chinese law. As a parallel to Maine's comparison of Hindu and Roman law, Jamieson compared Chinese with Roman law, revealing that sacrificial duties to ancestors and underdevelopment of the legal profession were key factors contributing to China's legal particularities.

Muḥammad ibn Maslama was a prominent companion of the Prophet Muḥammad who belonged to the Ḥāritha clan of the Medinan tribe of Aws. He played a key role in the events leading to the defeat of the three Jewish tribes of Medina and participated in the assassination of the Jewish leader Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf. Muḥammad ibn Maslama was connected to the Jews in various ways, as is evident, for example, from accounts claiming that he was Kaʿb's maternal nephew, and that his clan, the Banū Ḥāritha, lived in the predominantly Jewish oasis of Khaybar for nearly a year in the pre-Islamic period. Muḥammad ibn Maslama's role in Kaʿb's assassination has recently been argued to be of dubious historicity. This article offers a reassessment of this conclusion by placing the accounts of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's ties with the Jews, on the one hand, and those that depict him as their enemy, on the other, in the broader context of the change in the attitudes of some of the Anṣār towards the Jews during the Prophet's Medinan period. It argues that this change of attitudes is an attested historical pattern and, accordingly, that the fact of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's participation in the assassination of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf can be deemed reliable.

This article investigates the use and frequency of what I refer to as the K-suffixes -ō/-ū/-o in the Shirazi dialects, namely, Old and Modern Shirazi. It shows that the use of K-suffixes as definiteness markers is more highly developed in Modern Shirazi than in Old Shirazi. In Old Shirazi, the K-suffix, with its original evaluative meaning, demonstrated some degree of multi-functionality. This has mostly been lost in Modern Shirazi, and the suffix is now used to express definiteness. The high frequency of use of the K-suffix appears to be independent of genre, speaker, and speech setting. Data from a corpus of written texts in Old Shirazi, mainly comprised of poems, are quantitatively analysed, along with data from a corpus of spoken Shirazi narratives and data from a questionnaire answered by ten speakers. The results show that an evaluative suffix can develop into a definiteness marker by passing through a stage of combination with deictic markers, which paves the way for extending the use of the K-suffix to include non-deictic anaphoric tracking. This article concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definiteness marking, even if the endpoint may be similar. The detailed documentation of this process presented here is a further contribution to Iranian studies, and augments the small group of well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking cross-linguistically.

Unlike other commentaries on the Sāṅkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā (circa sixth to eighth centuries) problematised the Sāṅkhya tradition's equivocal attitudes toward the Veda. While submitting itself to the authority of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā's commentary on Sāṅkhyakārikā 2 illustrates how Sāṅkhya thinkers of the post-Gupta period safeguarded the identity of Brahmin renouncers. Aligning its doctrine with the Upaniṣad, the end of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā launched a Sāṅkhya navigation of the central concern of Indian intellectuals, Vedic hermeneutics, and attempted to secure Sāṅkhya's place within Vedic orthodoxy. This article discusses the Yuktidīpikā's strategy for surviving the peer pressure of Vedic ritualists, as represented by the Mīmāṃsakas, while maintaining Sāṅkhya superiority by exploiting the inner division within the Veda.

The present note offers a new, and hopefully more nuanced, reading for a cryptic marginal legend on an issue of the Umayyad-era rebel ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ashʿath (d. circa 85 ah/704 ce). Comparing this legend with several marginal legends of like character, and contextualising the formulae within contemporary religious idiom as expressed in late ancient Arabic-Islamic epigraphy, it is argued that all these legends contain proper nouns invariably belonging to the issuing authority, in conjunction with invocations addressed to God, in an attempt to establish a hierarchic relationship between the two. Drawing on literary sources, it is then demonstrated that the legend of the Ibn al-Ashʿath issue does indeed mention the name of an individual, the local governor, Kharasha ibn Masʿūd ibn Wathīma, a new name in the repertoire of governors known through Arab-Sasanian coinage. Based on these results, a case for further reliance on literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and other forms of evidence in the study of numismatics is made. A new chronology, based on numismatic evidence, for Ibn al-Ashʿath's rebellion is also proposed.

This article explores the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ which has survived as a single copy within a manuscript codex located at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Not only does the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ lift ‘the iron curtain’ from the little-known world of rituals and customs practised by women in early modern Central Asian societies, it also serves as an important source to balance the androcentric view of gendered history of the early modern Persianate world, while challenging the preconceived notions of women's agency and authority in pre-modern Muslim societies.

This article examines the linked sets of paintings commonly known as the “small Guler” Rāmāyaṇa by Paṇḍit Seu, the “Mankot” Rāmāyaṇa and the “Siege of Laṅkā” by Mānaku in the light of the text from the Vālmīki Rāmayaṇa on the versos of the paintings. This allows significant conclusions about the intentions behind their production and the original extent of each set.

Central to this article is an Arabic letter written on papyrus in an Egyptian prison in the late ninth or early tenth century ce. The author complains that he and his companions are being kept in terrible conditions and that they have received insufficient support from outside prison. Interestingly, he indicates that there is a strong inclination among the group to offer themselves as slaves in order to find relief from their crushing living conditions. By doing so, they would have transgressed Islamic law of that time, which forbade the enslavement of free inhabitants of the Realm of Islam. The letter is a unique source for the social history of slavery, especially self-enslavement, in Abbasid society. This article presents, translates, and annotates this letter and offers a detailed study of its contents.

According to recent research, after the Song dynasty, there was a transformation of the political culture in imperial China according to which Confucian elites and dynastic rulers ceased to construct political legitimacy by interpreting prophecies. By examining the process of how Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, utilized a popular prophecy and how he concealed his utilization of this prophecy after enthronement, this article offers a more nuanced narrative of the transformation. It shows that during the Yuan-Ming transition, rulers sought to employ prophecies to construct their image as sovereigns favoured by Heaven, but, ironically, in official writings rulers tended to hide their utilization of prophecies so as to highlight their virtues which deserved the Mandate of Heaven. This article argues that after the Song, the role of prophecies changed in the political arena—not from important to unimportant, but from officially recognized to officially concealed.

Francis Robinson's academic romance with the subcontinent began when he was doing research for his doctoral thesis at Trinity College Cambridge. He has often reminded me that we were contemporaries—or near contemporaries—at Cambridge, but I do not remember having met him then. I do recall that his supervisor was my friend, the historian Anil Seal, who was a fellow of Trinity College.

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

Mughal chronicles frequently refer to royal Mughal infants being entrusted to wet nurses for breastfeeding and nurturing. The women chosen for this purpose were invariably the wives of important Mughal officials. It was believed that the quality of milk the baby received determined its future disposition. Therefore, these nurses needed to possess desirable psychological qualities and moral temperaments. They were accorded a high status and usually established a lasting relationship with their charges. As a result, the children of the emperor developed a close association with their wet nurses and their families who, in turn, became the staunchest supporters of their wards. The success, influence, and prestige of these families depended on the political fortune of the royal child they had cared for. If the prince became an emperor, they gained immense power and prestige both in life and death. They were honoured with elaborate funerals and buried in imperial tombs. This article argues that the rationale behind the use of wet nurses by Mughal royalty during Emperor Akbar's reign was not simply a medical or physiological one, it was equally a political instrument for forging ties between prominent families and royalty.

The three years that I spent at Royal Holloway, University of London between 1975 and 1978, as professor and head of the History Department, were among the happiest and most purposive of my entire academic life. This was due, in no small part, to my instant friendship with Francis Robinson. We soon realised that our interests converged to a remarkable degree, despite the gulf of almost two millennia between my own concern for the world of Late Antiquity and his with religion and politics in contemporary India and Pakistan.

‘The dialogue between a cat and a mouse’ (Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda) is an animal fable used in the Mahābhārata to provide instruction in statecraft (nīti). This article argues that the Mahābhārata version of this tale must be based on an earlier soteriological allegory about a brahmin who provides spiritual liberation to a king in exchange for protection. The Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda abounds in terms and phrases that, in addition to their everyday meanings, have a technical or typical usage in the ascetic traditions of Ancient India. Moreover, the conversation between the cat and the mouse resembles that between a teacher and a disciple, rather than a discussion of a possible alliance between two kings. The hunter of the Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda can be identified with the Buddhist Māra. To support the plausibility of this soteriological reading, the article includes a discussion of Buddhist jātakas with a similar plot.