Islam's devotional and mystical tradition, Sufism (tasawwuf), is commonly cast as antithetical to Salafi Islam. Self-identified ‘Salafis’, with their ideological roots in anti-liberal strands of twentieth-century modernist Islam, do commonly view Sufis as heretics propagating practices wrongly introduced into Islam centuries after the time of the pious ancestors (the Salaf). Yet reformist zeal that fixes on the singular importance of the Salaf (particularly the Prophet Muhammad and his principal companions) as models for correct piety can also be found amongst Sufis. This paper calls attention to the Salafist colouration of Sufism in two areas of popular culture: television preaching and the popular religious ‘how-to’ books and DVDs that make the preachers’ messages available for purchase. It reprises the teachings of two of the best known Indonesian Muslim televangelists, ‘Hamka’ (b. 1908, d. 1981) and M. Arifin Ilham (b. 1969), both of whom also happen to be champions of Sufism, and analyses the different rhetorical uses each has made of references to the ‘Salaf’ and the notion of ‘Salafist’ Islam.

Keramat is the Malay word for the graves of notable figures which are popular sites of prayer and dot the social and physical landscapes of much of Muslim Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region as a whole. The term refers to both people as well as their burial sites. Historically, keramat drew people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. While the venerated dead also came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, histories, and faiths, they were usually Muslim and frequently Hadrami (from the Hadramaut region in Yemen). In this paper, I view keramat as a significant site of social and cultural diversity. The study of keramat, and the transoceanic movement of the people and faith to which it is linked, may shed further light on the cultural interaction that has historically characterized the region. At the same time, the permissibility of the veneration of graves constitutes a terrain that has long been contested by Muslim scholars. As a result, the fate of this popular practice may offer insights into the complex process of Islamization in the region which began around 700 years ago. I explore two questions in particular. First, in what ways do keramat embody cultural diversity? Secondly, where do keramat stand in relation to state- and organization-driven Islam?

The historian Geraldine Forbes, writing on the origins of the woman suffrage movement in India, stated: ‘the firm insistence of organized women—that they be treated as equals of men on the franchise issue—emerged not from the perceptions of the needs of the women in India, but as the result of the influence of certain British women, in the case of the first demand for the franchise, 1917, and as a response to the nationalist movement, in the case of the second demand for franchise, 1927–33.’

Overseas Chinese political links with China have been a subject of interest for many years. Travellers, journalists, officials and scholars have constantly made speculation, assessments and predictions about the political loyalties of overseas Chinese, and their future in their host countries. Although the overseas Chinese share a common historical and cultural background, they live in different economic environments and political climates, and in different stages of transition. Their political loyalty is especially difficult to assess. It is not just moulded by cultural, economic and political environments; it is also affected by other, less predictable factors. The rise of nationalism in the overseas Chinese communities at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was a major factor in shaping the political life of the overseas Chinese. Using Singapore and Malaya as case studies, this paper seeks to explain how and why overseas Chinese nationalism arose during this period.

The years 1916–17 were something of a turning-point in the development of Vietnamese nationalism. In Cochinchina an abortive attack on Saigon central prison in February 1916 was followed by a great many arrests and the virtual destruction, for the time being, of the network of secret societies which had grown up in many of the colony's provinces during the previous decade. Many members of such societies were brought before special military tribunals (justified by the fact that France was at war in Europe) and sentenced to death, exile, or long terms of imprisonment. In Annam another abortive plot, probably quite separate, was hatched at Huê in May 1916, involving the kidnapping of the boy-emperor Duy-Tân; but he was found by the French two years later, before a projected rising in the provinces of Quang-Nam and Quang-Ngai could get under way. The leader of the plot, Trân Cao Vân, was executed along with three others, and the deposed emperor was exiled to the island of Réunion.2 These events in Cochinchina and Annam brought to a halt, for a time at least, the activities of secret nationalist groups which, drawing their initial inspiration from Japan, had been increasing in strength since about 1905. In Tongking there were also secret associations, mostly acknowledging the leadership of Phan Bôi Châu who was then in exile at Canton, and strongly influenced by the revolutionary methods of Sun Yat-sen. But there also, their last important operation for several years occurred in September 1917, when Luong Ngoc Quyên escaped from prison at Thai-Nguyen and was able to control the town for a week, before being driven out and committing suicide.3 Phan Bôi Châu himself was arrested by the Chinese the following year.

The formation of the Dalit Panthers and the flourishing of Dalit literature in the 1970s saw the advent of a new connotation for the Marathi word ‘Dalit’. Chosen by the Mahar community leaders themselves, the title ‘Dalit’ was used by them to replace the titles of untouchable, Backward or Depressed Classes and Harijans, which had been coined by those outside the Dalit communities to describe the Mahar and Chambhar jatis. ‘Dalit’ identified those whose culture had been deliberately ‘broken’, ‘crushed to pieces’ or ‘ground down’ by the varna Hindu culture above them. As such, it contained an explicit repudiation of all the Hindu cultural norms of untouchability, varna structure and karma doctrine which varna Hindu society had imposed. The adoption of this new title was an affirmation of the Dalit community's struggle for cultural independence and separate identity. Yet this struggle for an independent cultural identity was not merely a cultural struggle of the 1970s, but one which stretched back almost a century to what, retrospectively, must be seen as the inception of Dalit literature and culture in the activities of the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal and the first Dalit writings of Gopal Baba Valangkar in 1888. This article aims to recover this much-neglected early history of the Dalit communities of western India at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, it examines how these early Dalit communities came to articulate an emergent Dalit cultural identity through the construction of a syncretic form of bhakti Hindu culture.

After revisiting Sind in 1876, Sir Richard Burton wrote, ‘The Hindu's reed-pen is a rod of iron and abjectly the unhappy Sindi trembles before it.’ By ‘Hindu,’ Burton meant the Hindu bania, the trader and moneylender, and by ‘Sindi’ he meant the Sindhi Muslim zamindar (landholder), the perennial debtor. The creditor tyrannized over the debtor, imposing ever harsher and more inequitable terms on him. What is interesting is that Burton scarcely appeared to recognize the Hindu banias as Sindhis at all; he wrote as if they were interlopers on the Sindhi scene. It was a colourful summary of the average British official's attitude towards debt. Twenty years later, Evan James, the Commissioner in Sind, quoted Burton's remark to lend support to his own argument that debt was an intolerable burden on Sindhi Muslims in general and the great zamindars in particular.

India has the largest informal, unregistered economy in the world, infrastructurally backward, yet vital for both growth and livelihoods. In the first section of this article, five economic institutions that shape this economy are introduced: small firms, informality, non-metropolitan towns, innovation and innovation systems, and the state's regulative impact on the economy it does not directly regulate. In the second section, we trace the development of the commodity economy of a South Indian town taken for case study over 40 years, before exploring three kinds of innovation in the third section: invention, adaptive, and adoptive innovation. In the fourth section, the formal and informal institutions that nurture informal innovation are analysed: family business, business associations, banks and finance, informal insurance and gold, hybrid state–private institutions, and informal innovation inside the state. The conclusion confirms the innovative dynamism of the informal economy and the complex pathways of institutional change that both shape, and are shaped by, innovation.

The paper first provides a broad overview of the structure of textile manufacturing and procurement in India in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. It then takes up for a detailed analysis the changes in this structure in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the assumption of political authority by the English East India Company in the subcontinent with special reference to the case of Bengal where such authority was exercised most intensively. A market-based system was replaced by one embedded in coercion of the intermediary merchants and the manufacturing artisans. In the concluding section, the paper makes a plea for a distinction being made between the distributive justice dimension and the implications for output dimension of the changed scenario and argues that the picture of a ruined textile industry in Bengal might be in need of substantive revision.

Rising Uyghur ethnic consciousness in the post-1978 era is believed to cause tense Uyghur-Han relations and conflicts in Xinjiang. There are different accounts linking rising Uyghur consciousness with variables such as Han migration into Xinjiang, ethnic inequalities, Uyghur language, and Islamic religiosity. Yet there is no concrete effort to summarize, elaborate, and verify these accounts. Nor is there a quantitative study of the levels of Uyghur ethnic consciousness in Xinjiang. Using data from a survey (N = 799) conducted in Ürümchi in 2007, this paper shows a high level of ethnic consciousness among Uyghurs. It also shows that Uyghur consciousness is based more on cultural and psychological properties than on instrumental sentiments.

The historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of supplication designed to affirm and reproduce established power relations. This article restores to the analysis of the petition its status as a potential ‘event’ that could exceed its documentary confines and generate new communities of action. Focusing specifically on colonial Bombay, circa 1889–1914, it highlights three ways in which petitioning marked a rupture in the relations between rulers and ruled, and heralded significant shifts in the local constructions of state and society. First, the article shows how Bombay's Indian residents deployed the petitioning process to contest the unprecedented degree of state intervention in their quotidian lives following an extraordinary civic crisis that engulfed the city in the last decade of the Victorian era. Secondly, the article contends that the petitions that ordinary Indians in Bombay submitted to the different agencies of urban government point to a more complex set of orientations to the colonial state than has been acknowledged by scholars. Thirdly, the article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, collective petitioning in colonial Bombay had become embedded in forms of political action with which it is conventionally regarded as being incompatible.

An extensive body of literature has grown up in recent years devoted to the analysis of the causes of what is certainly the most pressing economic issue of our time: the unequal distribution of the world's wealth and income, and in particular what in shorthand may be called ‘the underdevelopment of the Third World’. Tremendous progress has been made by radical as well as more conventional social scientists, and our understanding of the processes of interaction, economic as well as otherwise, between the metropolitan core of western colonial powers and indigenous societies in the periphery has benefited commensurately. Naturally, the debate has tended to focus on the major sectorsinvolved in the processes of economic growth and modernization, agriculture and industry, with infrastructure a poor third. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to observe that what to many students ofEuropean expansion has appeared to constitute the essential element intheir ability to explore, gain access to, and exploit the periphery, hasbeen completely neglected: ocean transport, or to put it differently, themain body of the infrastructure of the world economy. In some ways, no dependence is felt to be so absolute as that of the country that sees itscoastal traffic dominated and its exports carried by foreign-owned ships.

This account of the Burmese Rebellion of 1930–1931, and the role of its leader, Saya San, emphasizes the importance of traditional elements in what is commonly regarded as a nationalist uprising. The apparently nationalistic symbols of the Rebellion had magical and protective functions that were not appreciated by the British at the time of the Rebellion. The importance of nationalism in Burma in the 1930s has been overestimated, while the strength and continuity of traditional appeals has been incompletely understood. A comparison of the tactics of U Ottama, a cosmopolitan revolutionary, with the less modern but more successful efforts of Saya San, suggests that the rural Burmese of 1930 were more responsive to symbolic appeals than to programmatic designs for reform. The Western-educated elite of Burma were at first surprised and perhaps embarrassed by the primitive uprising in the countryside, but they eventually embraced the Rebellion and its symbols. Thus the Saya San Rebellion was a key stage in the transition of Burmese nationalism; to the urban elite, it vividly demonstrated the survival of traditional values in the countryside, while proving that a peasant uprising could achieve only temporary success without specific and negotiable aims, which required modern political skills.

In 1874 Itagaki Taisuke and other critics of the newly established Meiji government submitted a petition demanding a popularly elected national assembly. This is said to be the origin of the Liberty and People's Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō). Around the same time a number of local political leaders intensified their campaign for the creation of village assemblies. Although the demand for local autonomy in the early Meiji period was both deep-felt and widespread, only a few scholars, notably Neil Waters, have diverted their attention from Itagaki and other political activists and thinkers at the center. An examination of Meiji local politics is nonetheless essential to understand Japan's modern political development.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing knowledge of British and Asian ‘country’ trade to selected parts of Southeast Asia by drawing upon British private papers and the records of Fort St George, Madras. The 1680s marked the peak of international trade in Siamunder king Narai before the wars and revolution there of 1687–88. The decade also saw the elimination of the last great independent entrepot, Banten, on the Java Sea in 1682, as well as the final, ultimately-futile, Dutch efforts to control the Malayan tin-trade north of Perak. The Dutch also began in 1685 and 1689 their intermittent attempts to monopolize key commodities in the Johor–Riau–Lingga sultánate at the southern end of Malacca Strait. In one sense, given Dutch success or at least pretensions, the region from Pegu and Tenasserim–Mergui through certain Malay ports and Aceh to Ayudhya and Tongking constituted what might loosely be called the free-trade zone of maritime Southeast Asia. It was also one in which, with the exception of Perak after 1745, the indigenous monarchies retained complete or extensive independence from European supervision. Into this zone, with occasional ventures to the smaller Indonesian ports, British country traders sailed for over a century, from Bowrey and Dampier in the 1680s to Light and Scott in the 1770s. What were the principal features of the markets they frequented?

Between 1943 and 1945, 1,500 Indian women in Burma, Malaya and Singapore exchanged their colorful saris for the khakis, breeches, half caps and boots of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the all-female brigade of the Indian National Army (INA). Under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, members of the moneyed elite and the daughters of rubber plantation laborers shared the same food and fate to fight a jungle war for India's freedom.

A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women has greatly improved, which is regarded by Tamil Brahmans themselves as a sign of their modern, educated, professional, middle-class status, whereas extreme gender inequality formerly indicated their traditional, high-caste status. This paper examines how female marriage, education, and employment are interrelated and how they have changed among Tamil Brahmans, particularly in the Eighteen-Village Vattima subcaste, which continued child marriage until the 1970s. Among Tamil Brahmans, as both women and men recognize, a real reduction in gender inequality has occurred. Moreover, Brahman men have more readily ceded status to Brahman women than Brahmans together have to non-Brahmans, so that there is a striking contrast today between persisting ideas of caste superiority and diminishing gender inequality.

Following the police raid on the ‘Muthanga’ land occupation by Adivasi (‘indigenous’) activists in Kerala, India, in February 2003, intense public debate erupted about the fate of Adivasis in this ‘model’ development state. Most commentators saw the land occupation either as the fight-back of Adivasis against their age-old colonization or the work of ‘external’ agitators. Capitalist restructuring and ‘globalization’ was generally seen as simply the latest chapter in the suffering of these Adivasis. Little focused attention was paid to the recent class trajectory of their lives under changing capitalist relations, the exact social processes under which they were having to make a living, and what had only recently—and still largely ambiguously—made them ready to identify themselves politically as ‘Adivasi’. Demonstrating the usefulness of ethnographic curiosity driven by an ‘expanded’ class analysis, as elaborated in Marxian anthropology, this article provides an alternative to the liberal-culturalist explanation of indigenism in Kerala. It argues instead that contemporary class processes—as experienced close to the skin by the people who decided to participate in the Muthanga struggle—were what shaped their decision to embrace indigenism.

Thestudy of Indonesian history is still very much in its infancy. There is as yet nothing like the breadth or depth of historical writing on Indonesia that there is on China or India, let alone on Europe or the United States. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dearth of urban history. Certainly, Indonesia was, and is, predominantly an agricultural society, but since the 1870s an increasing number of Indonesians have lived in towns and cities, earning their living from the urban economy. In the colonial period many worked in the Indies bureaucracy, while others formed a small but growing professional class of doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers. From this group came most of the intellectual and organizational leadership of the nationalist movement. Through their writings and speeches we have a reasonably clear picture of their changing perceptions of the world and their struggle to work out what it meant to be an Indonesian in the last three decades of colonial rule.

This paper explores the unusually weak voice of Chinese war veterans in post-1949 politics society and culture. Although Chinese movies and television often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and politicized depictions of China's military conflicts. In this respect, China departs sharply from the former Soviet Union—China's Leninist model for most of its formative years—as well as Vietnam, European inter-war fascist regimes and democracies. This paper argues that the relative weakness of authentic military voices in China can be traced to several peculiar features of modern Chinese history. The nature of warfare in China, as well as the absence of a national army, veteran organizations and a consensus over the legitimacy about China's wars, has led many to question the validity of veterans’ claims for a higher political and cultural status. Rather than allow veterans the space to portray war as they experienced it, intellectual elites in various cultural and propaganda offices dominate national war memory, presenting a simplistic and artificial rendering of China's wars.