The purpose of this short discussion paper is to raise some general questions concerning the current state of the historiography on the industrialization of pre-Independent India. Although triggered off by a close reading of Professor Morris's contribution to the recent Cambridge Economic History of India, volume 2, it is not my intention to review the essay in a detailed and systematic manner; rather I seek to place it in the wider context of what is, in my view, the unsatisfactory state of our accumulated knowledge. The paper is organized in the following way. Section II contends that all too little is known about a seemingly crucial sector—a vacuity that is not confined to India alone among the Third World economies—and that this tends to distort accounts of the general functioning of the international economy. In Section III I try to pinpoint the major areas of weakness, and then go on to suggest the main reasons for this somewhat surprising situation. Finally, in Section IV, I argue that Morris's study reflects the problems I identify but does not take us further down the road towards their resolution.

This paper is concerned with cronyism and corruption in the Indonesian corporate economy. It employs detailed corporate evidence, verifying the inter-penetration of diverse political, bureaucratic and economic institutions. Although the emphasis is on the 1990s, the historical developments since 1950 within the institutions of the presidency, the military, private Chinese and pribumi corporations, as well as state-owned enterprises, are analysed in detail to identify the sources of this corruption. Equally important are the failures of the bureaucracy, the legal infrastructure, in curtailing corruption and introducing effective corporate governance. The relationship of this spiralling corruption to the 1997 financial crisis is clear. The final section is concerned with the reforms introduced after the crisis. This section also appraises the differences in corporate structures and networks between Western companies and the Indonesian conglomerates, identifying the need for institutional change.

This essay explores the division between ‘things Japanese’ and ‘things foreign’ in contemporary Japanese life through an analysis of modern retailing. Japanese department stores domesticate ‘foreign things’, including customs, holidays, goods, and people, by creating for these meaning consistent with the existing fabric of Japanese culture. Their role in gift-exchanges, in the adoption of foreign holidays and in establishing special advocacy centers for foreigners reinforces the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘other’ that shapes and affirms Japanese identity (economy, national identity, symbolism, popular culture, gift-exchange, Japan).

In the nineteenth century the towns and cities of the North-Western Provinces witnessed a huge expansion in public expressions of Hindu identity: temples mushroomed, new processions graced the streets and the cow attained new prominence as a symbol of Hindu piety. Rarely, if ever, were such activities motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, but they could provoke ill-will between Hindus and Muslims, especially in the towns where Islamic government, buildings and festivals had previously set the tone for the public life of their inhabitants. The colonial administration was a powerful but ill- informed force, able either to suppress or to protect the new display, and its responses were crucial in determining people's understanding of their rights to public religious expression.For the first half of the nineteenth century the British tried to preserve the balance of religious display in each town and city as they had found it, but this goal required that individual officers piece together a local history from imperfect sources and then invest it with the authority of the new state. It is easy enough to delineate the simplistic and sometimes crass categorizations that the agents of colonialism employed to explain Indians' religious sensibilities. What I want to do here, however, is show how their fundamentally novel reconstructions of a town's history of public religious display could feed back into Indians' own reading of their past and hence their future, even long after the British had abandoned their pursuit of a locality's ‘established usage’.

The emergence of criminal secret societies in post-Mao China has closely correlated with the criminal subcultures, massive unemployment, impoverishment, economic inequality, relative deprivation, and political corruption that have arisen from the reform process. Although perceived as the roots of organized crime worldwide, these variables have generated crime incentives—mainly among disadvantaged and marginalized social groups—far stronger in China than in most of Western societies. The factors underlying organized crime in China are not simply the by-products of economic liberalization, but rather related to the structural problems caused by flawed reform policies and China's particular political context. These problems account to a large extent for the double nature of many criminal organizations as both anti-social and anti-state forces. The regime's crackdown on organized crime may hamper efforts for greater socio-political pluralism. But in the long run, it may strengthen the rule of law and lead to the improvement of relevant reform policies.

The copious literature on love in early India has most recently been interpreted as a variant of the universal experience of human sexuality. Studies have rooted the uniqueness of Indian ideas either in theological conceptions of the immanent and transcendent, or in the particularity of the parent-child relation in India. Whatever the insights of such scholarship, two major problems relevant to this essay are its positioning of a ‘civilizational’ backdrop as its subject of analysis—either ‘India’ or ‘Hinduism’—and, particularly with the former approach, the subsequent application of what has been called the ‘repressive hypothesis’ to the Indian material, which poses the ‘transcendent’ principles of Indian civilization in a restraining role over those deemed life-affirming or immanent. This essay will offer an alternative to these interpretations by placing conceptions of romantic love in medieval India within their social and discursive contexts, and connect up the discourses on self-discipline in medieval India with those of love in a more historically specific and illuminating way.

The economy which evolved during the last phase of Sri Lanka's colonial rule under the British (1796–1948) has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in the recent years. Much of the writing which has emerged is descriptive by nature; the concern has been to lay bare the manner in which the economy took its shape and not to provide an analytical framework to explain the developments of the colonial era. This is not to say that conceptualizing has been wholly absent. Indeed, one particular conceptual treatment of the economy of British Sri Lanka has produced an interpretation which has gained wide currency and it has now acquired considerable influence over the economic literature concerned with the country.

This paper argues that our understanding of the transition to colonialism in South Asia can be enriched by examining the formation of revenue collection systems in north India between 1750 and 1850. It examines agrarian revenue systems not through the prism of legalism or landholding patterns, but by looking at the paper and record-based mechanisms by which wealth was actually extracted from India's hinterlands. It also examines the Kayastha pensmen who became an exponentially significant component of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration. They assisted the extension of Mughal revenue collection capabilities as qanungos (registrars) and patwaris (accountants). The intensity of revenue assessment, extraction and collection had increased by the mid 1700s, through the extension of cultivation and assessment by regional Indian kingdoms. The East India Company, in its agrarian revenue settlements in north India, utilized this extant revenue culture to push through savage revenue demands. These Kayastha pensmen thus furnished the ‘young’ Company with the crucial skills, physical records, and legitimacy to garner the agrarian wealth which would fund Britain's Indian empire. These more regular patterns of paper-oriented administration engendered a process of ‘bureaucratization’ and the emergence of the modern colonial state.

This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

Soviet writers have often claimed that there was no Russian threat to India. They have pointed, correctly, to the circumstance that no invasion attempt was ever launched and have stated that those projects which were canvassed were no more than the ideas of hotheaded generals and the like, were never adopted by the Russian Government and cannot be taken seriously. Further, they have pointed to the rejection of approaches made to Russian authorities by discontented Indians who sought Russian assistance in overthrowing British rule in India. Talk of the defence of British India, with its implication that there was a genuine Russian threat to be warded off, they argue, is more than misleading; it was a deception practised by nineteenth-century British rulers of India to disguise expansionist British aims in India and, beyond the Indian frontier, in the Persian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkestan, and it is now a device employed by modern British historians to conceal the true nature of British imperialism in India and to blacken the reputation of Russia. They do not accept that British statesmen and military officers could genuinely have believed in the possibility of a Russian invasion of India; and they suppose that British historians are not so incompetent as to think that nineteenth-century Britons did believe that the threat was real.

When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Through a focus on a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia in the Indian city of Bombay/Mumbai, this article expands our understanding of labour experiences of the city through the twentieth century and into the present. It moves between historical archives, oral history, and lived experience to illuminate how the labour of transport workers structures circulations, collective identities, and urban space. It explores several dimensions of the history and present of transport labour in India. First, it is concerned with the connection between the work of hereditary motoring and the reconfiguration and constitution of communal identities in contexts of urban labour migration. Second, it is interested how labour practices become embedded in broader social and cultural space. Third, given that chillia have continued in the trade for over 100 years, the article explores the circuits of work and labour surrounding their trade to illuminate intersections between political and cultural shifts in Mumbai, changing conditions of work in contemporary contexts of globalizing capital, and the forms of ‘non-consent’ that emerge out of these networks.

The legendary Gurkhas have inspired a considerable literature about their character, quality and exploits under British command. Some years ago, after I returned from fieldwork in an area of east Nepal inhabited by the Limbu people, many of whom had served in Gurkha regiments, I began to read some of this literature for background purposes. It struck me then, although not nearly so forcibly as it did later when I had read Edward Said (1978), and returned to the Gurkha material after a long absence, that these writings have a very distinctive character, constituting a particular mode of ‘orientalist’ discourse.

Within the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy, and nostalgia. The refugees or, more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This paper explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, which was designed to integrate refugees into the socio-economic fabric of India, or eulogizes them as heroic protagonists who successfully battled overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee as both victim and victor obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this paper will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This paper interrogates refugee reminiscences to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to both popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees.

This is a narrative of events and panics in India in 1907: the fiftieth anniversary of 1857. After the East India Company's political ascendancy in 1757, the uprisings and insurrections of 1857 shook the very foundations of British rule in India. In the summer of 1907, several different strands of protest came together: the nearly all-India telegraph strike was barely over when a revolutionary terrorist network was unearthed, bringing the simmering political cauldron to the boil. The burgeoning swadeshi and boycott movement splintered, partly through the experience of Government repression, into political extremism within the Indian National Congress and revolutionary terrorism via secret societies. The growing radicalism within nationalist politics culminated in the split of the Congress at the meeting at Surat in 1907. Through this process the Indian National Congress changed from its constitutional and elite politics of reform into a more popular and mass-oriented organization. Though much has been written about this period of Indian politics, this paper delineates the larger international technological and informational entanglement through a case study of India, and in particular, Bengal.

It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

Guru cults are an increasingly prominent feature of Indian religious life today, especially in the towns and cities, and among the urban middle classes. Many of these gurus are actually worshipped by their followers, who believe that they have magical powers; and in most cults the devotional element is strong. Since independence there seem to be more gurus in India; more of them have a more than local following; their followings are growing rapidly, and the cults are receiving more publicity, which reflects their discernible impact on the Indian scene. The godmen, as they are called, are often somewhat ostentatious; their travels, by air, road or rail, are widely reported in the press, and their followings are known to include numerous high ranking and well known figures in the worlds of politics, business, the professions and academia. Courted and feted, they preside over anniversary functions, commemorations, and installations, and their pictures and books are to be found on bookstalls throughout the subcontinent. In part, the publicity given to the gurus and godmen of India reflects the growing popular interest in them among western followers: the antics of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, in Oxford Street or in Berkeley, California; the Transcendental Meditation Movement of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with a following of as many as four hundred thousand in the west; the powerful vogue in America for the boy Guru Maharaj; and the ecstatic cult of Bhagwan Rajneesh, which attracts hundreds to Poona, are just a few of the more notorious examples.

Buried in an obscure journal published in Burma is a letter addressed to its readers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication. The editor had asked one of the publication's founders, a well-known former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer turned progres-sive reformer, to pen a few lines. Years later, the writer achieved acclaim as an ardent supporter of Burmese nationalism and independence and one of the founding scholars of Burma and Southeast Asia studies. These were his words of inspiration to an audience that comprised mostly educated Burmese:

Burma did not lose its independence because the rulers of Burma came into conflict with the British Empire, but because they had not sufficient wisdom to preserve their country; they did not know enough of Burma or of the outside world. And it will not again be capable of independence until Burmans know enough of Burma and of the outside world to guide its destinies.

In essence, the Burmese were responsible for their own colonisation because they lacked ‘wisdom’ and only through gaining this elusive knowledge could they be free. This opinion was based on nearly three decades worth of first-hand observation of Burmese society. The author was J. S. Furnivall.

Westernization is a pervasive modern phenomenon. Its impact is more pervasive and pernicious than many people are aware and/or willing to admit. The spread of the dominant Western culture has caused a gradual demise of many peripheral cultures. The incursion of Western agents into Naga soil, beginning with British military conquest and American missionary intrusion, has resulted in a significant influence and westernization of Nagas and their culture and worldview. Consequently, it is almost a cliché to assert that since colonial contact the long-evolved Naga traditional values are being replaced by Western values. Today, the literal colonization of Nagas by the imperial West has ended, but the process of westernization is continuing, thanks to the ongoing influence being exerted by modern media, technology and other trends of globalization. My objective in this paper is not to highlight the ‘form’ or ‘material’ aspect of the culture, such as clothing (although mimicry in this area is almost faultless among a large section of Nagas), rather, my goal is to discuss the current state of mindset and fundamental cultural structures of the Nagas that have resulted from the adjustments in the lives and minds of the people because of the imposition of westernization. In fact, it is more than merely a process of adjustment consequent upon conquest, it is an extensive overhauling of cultural institutions, values and practices. I will underscore the westernization of some basic social structures and the mindset of the people.

Event

During the spring, summer and autumn of 1947 India's richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe. The trigger for the catastrophe was Britain's parting gift to its Indian subjects of partition. Confronted by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland—Pakistan—a campaign which since 1946 had turned increasingly violent, the British government early in 1947 accepted viceroy Lord Mountbatten's advice that partition was necessary to arrest the country's descent into civil war. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi notably excepted, the leadership of the Congress party came gradually and reluctantly to the same conclusion. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru's deputy, likened it to the cutting off of a diseased limb. But in accepting the ‘logic’ of the League's ‘two-nation’ theory, the British applied it remorselessly. They insisted that partition would have to follow the lines of religious affiliation, not the boundaries of provinces. In 1947 League president Muhammad Ali Jinnah was forced to accept what he had contemptuously dismissed in 1944 as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, a Pakistan bereft of something like half of Bengal and the Punjab and most of Assam.

This paper explores the institution of caste and its operation in a micro-level village setting of West Bengal, an Indian state, where state politics at grass roots level is vibrant with functioning local self-government and entrenched political parties. This ethnographic study reveals that caste relations and caste identities have overarching dimensions in the day-to-day politics of the study villages. Though caste almost ceases to operate in relation to strict religious strictures, under economic compulsion the division of labour largely coincides with caste division. In the cultural–ideological field, the concept of caste-hierarchy seems to continue as an influencing factor, even in the operation of leftist politics.