. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.

Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57

This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the words ‘curious’ and ‘puzzling’ deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

Current scholarship is replete with the praises of princely Baroda, the ‘ideal and progressive’ state which emerged and prospered under the enlightened rule of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III in the early twentieth century. For example, V. B. Kulkarni notes in his Princely India and Lapse of British Paramountcy that ‘It is . . . enough to end this heart-warming story of wise princely governments by recalling the achievements of Sayajirao of Baroda . . . [in part] because he gave an enlightened government to a chronically-misgoverned state . . .’.

The anthropology of caste was a pivotal part of colonial knowledge in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denzil Ibbetson and Herbert Risley, then the two leading official anthropologists, both made major contributions to the study of caste, which this article discusses. Ibbetson and Risley assumed high office in the imperial government in 1902 and played important roles in policy making during the partition of Bengal (1903–5) and the Morley-Minto legislative councils reforms (1906–9); Ibbetson was also influential in deciding Punjab land policy in the 1890s. Contemporary policy documents, which this article examines, show that the two men's anthropological knowledge had limited influence on their deliberations. Moreover, caste was irrelevant to their thinking about agrarian policy, the promotion of Muslim interests, and the urban, educated middle class, whose growing nationalism was challenging British rule. No ethnographic information was collected about this class, because the scope of anthropology was restricted to ‘traditional’ rural society. At the turn of the twentieth century, colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, had little value for the imperial government confronting Indian nationalism, and was less critical in constituting the Indian colonial state than it previously had been.

‘The influence of William Morris, even here.’

Stephen Potter, One-Upmanship

Introduction

In 1978 the village of Kukulewa, in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), was selected for development under the Gam Udava (Village Awakening) program launched by the recently elected UNP (United National Party) government. Five years later, in 1983, I spent nine months in Kukulewa, studying the changes that had taken place since I had first done ethnographic research there from 1968 to 1970. As I examined the local impact of the Village Awakening project, in the broader context of escalating ethnic violence, I was repeatedly struck by the official priority given to the task of revitalizing the village community, not just in programs of rural development, but in the discourse of Sinhala nationalism more generally (Brow 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 1996; cf. Moore 1989, 1992; Woost 1993, 1994).

‘. . . [T]he awakened untouchable today is repeatedly asking them [the Congress] if they could not remove the ‘social evil’ of their own creation without political power, how do they expect us [the untouchables] to liberate ourselves without political power’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p. 24)

‘This is 1946, not 1932’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p.76)

Shankaranand Shastri's statements help us locate two related propositions that came to constitute Dalit politics in Uttar Pradesh in the 1940s. The first proposition deals with claims made by Dalits to acquire political power—specifically in the form of adequate representation in the provincial legislative assemblies and in the Constituent Assembly. They demanded positive discrimination in the form of reservations within legislative and executive institutions. Safeguards for Dalits, it was argued, should be incorporated into the proposed constitution for Indian citizens. The second proposition concerns achhut identity, through which Dalits hoped to reconstitute their polity in UP. The Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) and even a section of Congress Harijans staked a claim for achhut identity to distinguish their difference from ‘other communities.’ Dalit writings increasingly depicted the Poona Pact as a great betrayal by the Congress and the British. From their experience of the two general elections of 1937 and 1946, they argued that the electoral mechanism worked out under the aegis of the Poona Pact was structured against the Dalits.

Drawing upon interviews with individuals in Pakistan who cannot be identified as heterosexual or be contained by the gender binary, I argue that in recent years post-colonial legacies of colonial laws have been challenged in Pakistan in ways that suggest a complicated relationship among sexuality, gender, and modernity. I draw upon Partha Chatterjee's notion of political society to situate this relationship. As such, I seek to strengthen prior discussions located in India and Pakistan. Further, this article challenges the problematic assumptions in mainstream queer politics that Muslim societies are static and ahistorical assumptions that appear to assume progress and struggle for sexual rights to be a Western attribute. In so doing, I extend earlier critiques arguing for a more complex understanding of the rule of non-normative sexualities in Muslim societies and suggest that colonial policies that regulated and criminalized the more fluid forms of sexuality in Muslim societies were incorporated in the imperial project of civilizing non-European cultures. The stability of colonial policies regarding sexuality was challenged in 2009 when the Pakistani state gave political recognition to trans* communities, identifying them as citizens of a modern state. These changes, I argue, pave the way for a potential shift from the fluid sexuality and irreverence that khwaja sara are usually associated with middle-class norms of respectability and encouragement towards assimilation into the social order.

This paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.

I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violence vis-à-vis the emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.

On 12 November 1970, the Bhola Cyclone swept across the southern districts of East Pakistan, killing over 300,000 people. Small islands were swept away and dead bodies of humans and cattle lay strewn across the devastated landscape. Following the news of the destruction, journalists, students, artists, and political workers rushed to the affected area with basic relief supplies, without waiting for the Military Law Administration (MLA) to intervene. The cyclone's occurrence just three weeks prior to the first general elections in Pakistan added a new dimension to the already simmering political crisis. The extensive media coverage of the disaster brought the pitiful state of infrastructural development and lack of governance in East Pakistan under local and global scrutiny. The cyclone and the corresponding issues soon became embroiled within the larger political demand for regional autonomy. The MLA came under attack from sections of East Pakistan's politicians, press, and public, as well as international political actors, for its poor disaster governance. This article uses the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 as the lens to explore the complex interconnections between environmental disasters and a key issue of governance. While the Bhola Cyclone has been a subject of recent discussions, this article uses a disaster-politics analytical framework to understand the disaster's role in the subsequent political turbulence and the emergence of Bangladesh.

After half a century of intense debate, landlordism in traditional China continues to be one of the most controversial subjects in Asian Studies circles. The earlier literature on this topic tends to be contradictory and, at times, highly polemical. Two loosely defined schools of thought have emerged since the 1930s: (A) those scholars who argue that landlord-tenant relations were primarily exploitative with the balance of power passing increasingly to urban-based absentee landlords, and (B) those who maintain that a high rate of tenancy is not particularly unique to the twentieth century and that the relationship between landlord and tenant was not uniformly exploitative. The present paper does not fit neatly into either school, although specific elements of the following argument can be isolated to support opposing sides of the debate. I intend to explore one form of traditional Chinese tenancy, known in the literature as ‘hereditary’ or ‘permanent’ tenancy, which was common throughout many parts of Southeastern China until the Communist land reform campaigns of the early 1950s. The tenants were hereditary in the sense that the usufruct passed patrilineally from father to son while the actual title to the land remained in the hands of powerful lineage corporations. The tenants lived in satellite villages near the landlords' communities and were overshadowed in every way by their dominant neighbors.

This paper examines two linked cases of abortive Imperial expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian winter expedition to Khiva both took place in 1839, and both ended in disaster. These events were linked, not merely by coincidence, but by mutual reactions to intelligence received in Orenburg, St Petersburg, Calcutta, London, and Tehran. British and Russian officials shared similar fears about each other's ambitions in Central Asia, similar patterns of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, and a similar sense of entitlement as the self-conscious agents of two ‘Great Powers’. By examining the decision-making process which preceded these twin cases of expansion, and the British and Russian attitudes to Central Asian rulers and informants, the paper provides not only a deeper understanding of what provoked these particular disasters, but also of the wider process of European imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

This article is concerned with the role of kinship and kin morality in contexts of work in South Asia. It focuses on the highly ambivalent nature of kin morality when mobilised outside the household and the family. Ethnographic evidence from a small-scale industry in Tamilnadu, South India, shows how employers frequently invoke the morality of kinship and caste in an attempt to secure a reliable and compliant labour force and to avoid overt class confrontation. However, employers’ efforts to promote kinship—real or fictive—and its morality in the workplace appear inadequate in the face of high labour turnover and frequently collapsing employer-worker relationships in small-scale industries. While employers’ repeated use of kin ideology succeeds in silencing the workers on the shop floor, it is much less effective in securing a stable labour force in the long run. The argument put forward here points to the limits of kin morality and questions its effectiveness in informal contexts of labour employment. The discussion sheds new light on the role of caste and kinship in recruiting, retaining and disciplining labour in India's informal economy.

This essay raises a single question for which it ventures two kinds of answers, one historical and the other historiographical. On the one hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to express an interest in finding out about transformations over time in the activities, experiences, and social placement of pandits—for present purposes in the context of colonial Bengal. Taken in this sense, the question reflects a desire to examine the diverse experiences of Sanskrit pandits, perhaps to inquire about the degree to which they either may or may not be illustrative of other sorts of changes taking place in colonial Indian society. On the other hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to suggest that it may be worth investigating what we mean by the word ‘pandit’ and how we have come to view pandits as we do. What we're asking thus is really, ‘What's become of the pandit in modern scholarly discourse?’ In this sense, the question is a historiographical or methodological one. It suggests there may be important reasons why scholars tend to conceptualize the life and work of pandits as they do, and reminds us that becoming aware of these reasons might allow us to gain a better perspective on our own field of study.

There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that have been asked, and also to identify some of the shortfalls in the existing literature and propose some lines of research to be pursued by future scholars.

Despite theoretical justifications and empirical evidence that state-owned enterprises have played an important role in late development, as well as over three decades of evidence that privatization programmes since the 1980s have had mixed results at best, international financial institutions continue prescribing privatization as a panacea for developing countries. Pakistan is an interesting case to understand why privatization is still considered desirable, because it is one of a set of developing countries that have whole-heartedly implemented Washington Consensus policies. In this context, we analyse privatization in two key economic sectors in Pakistan: energy and banking. Using qualitative and quantitative data, we describe the motivations behind these privatizations, the process by which they were carried out, and analyse the post-privatization performance of these organizations and sectors. We find that in both cases (a) the privatizations failed not only with respect to their stated aims, leading to a decline in national productive capabilities, but also had adverse distributional consequences, shifting the rewards to the buyers while the risks and costs remained with the public sector, and (b) the suboptimal outcomes of the privatizations went largely unchallenged aided by a prevalent neoliberal view amongst the country's economic policy makers and intelligentsia. Our analysis sheds new light on the process by which privatization in the absence of a state with the capacity to discipline business interests has enabled these interests to obtain state-sponsored rents without bringing any of the associated benefits for economic development.

The movement to abolish the unequal treaties was the cause célèbre of Chinese nationalism after the First World War. It was an extension of the late Qing movement to retrieve the rights and interests (shouhui liquan yundong) that had been lost to the powers over the decades. Whereas the quintessence of the late Qing campaign was economic nationalism and the means it employed peaceful, the post-war drive was highly political and at times accompanied by a degree of violence. The Chinese determination, strengthened by Germany's and Austria's relinquishment of their treaty status, was a bond that united the whole nation from Beijing to Guangzhou (Canton) despite their domestic political differences.

This article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the tarmac road network in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China has been greatly expanded. The total length of roads increased from about 30,000 kilometres in 1999 to more than 146,000 kilometres in 2008. Though roads are considered by the state to be instruments of economic development, in multi-ethnic border regions like Xinjiang, the role of an efficient road network in the construction of the Chinese state's imaginary ‘bounded space’ is arguably just as crucial. With the help of Lefebvre's (1991) and Soja's (1999) conceptualization of space, this article explores the multiple spatial figurations of which roads are a part in Xinjiang. The article starts from ‘the mappable’ dimension of the expanding road network, and moves on to discuss perceptions and representations related to this expansion, before finally discussing how individuals creatively explore its fissures and hidden pockets.

Nationalism postulates the existence of a people and declares its right to take over an old state organization or establish a new one. A nationalist movement attempts to do this in the name of the people so postulated. Usually, the leaders of such movements come from the centre, or more precisely, the large urban areas of the envisaged state.

In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. This was the most dramatic Malaysian acquisition of a foreign company during the restructuring of the country's post-colonial economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Guthrie Dawn Raid remains a celebrated but, at the same time, contested juncture in contemporary Malaysian memory. Drawing upon a variety of sources—including original interviews and correspondence with key participants in, and observers of, the Guthrie Dawn Raid, as well as newly released British documents related to the Anglo-Malaysian events of September 1981—this article presents a new interpretation of the origins of this most iconic of Malaysian corporate takeovers. In particular, it stresses the long-term aspirations of a key (but often overlooked) figure within the late and post-colonial Malay bureaucratic and economic elite, Ismail Mohamed Ali. At the same time, the article emphasizes the specific requirements of Malaysia's New Economic Policy against the backdrop of burgeoning intra-Malaysian ethnic business competition.

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality.