The Government of India Act of 1935 was a constitutional device meant to extend the Raj's political alliances in Indian society. The Congress Party, on the other hand, construed the Act as a new challenge to the demand for independence. The authorities discovered that the Congress ministers’ primary loyalties lay with the imperatives of the party and not with the constitutional arrangement. Concern on this account was heightened by the resurgence of ground-level Congress activism. The Congress strengthened and expanded its volunteer organization while it governed the provinces. If the formal party institutions were weakened by corruption and factionalism during the ministry period, its grass-roots cadres were revitalized and mobilized opinion against compromises with the Raj, strengthening the ministers’ hands in any major clashes with the authorities. The latter were disturbed by links between the Congress ministers and party activity hostile to the Raj, even though a certain convergence of Congress and British interests kept the experiment of provincial autonomy going. The official response to this situation consisted, at one level, of making expedient concessions.But the authorities explored an alternative possibility as well. The Muslim League, which emerged as a mass party after 1937, was not exactly an ally, but it offered the most powerful resistance to the possibility of total mobilization under the Congress.

Untouchable agricultural servants in the Indian countryside are among the lowliest people on earth. Such illiterate folk leave no written record to enable historians to comprehend their world from their own angle of vision. To write their history from below, historians have to search for contemporaneous observations which—even though made by an outsider—show some degree of empathy with their consciousness. The gifted novelist is able to enter recesses of the mind which elude the most acute scientific investigator. Among the several Bengali novels which have taken for their theme the wretched of the earth, perhaps the most empathetic is the Kahar Chronicle of Tarashankar Banerjee which thankfully avoids painting their life in unrelieved black. In Hansuli Banker Upakatha, the novelist, a small landlord in Birbhum district, descends to the bottom of rural society to give us—as far as possible for a gifted novelist of gentry origin—a view from within.

This paper briefly charts the progress and findings of European scholars approaching the issues of caste and sect in the Jain community over the last two centuries. Other authors have already discussed the European interest in Jain textual and philosophical issues, and while I touch on these briefly, my main concern is to outline Jain social organization, with particular reference to Swetambar communities in the north.

The main purpose of this brief article on the importance of the joint family in six villages in Anekal Taluk, Bangalore District, Karnataka State, is to recommend a simple statistical method of measuring the ‘incidence of jointness’ among the resident population; it also presents the results of my enquiry.

In July 1928, upon the termination of the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek presented a sacrificial message to the departed leader, Sun Yat-sen, whose body reposed in the Pi-yün Temple outside the city of Peking. Sun had committed his life, Chiang declared, to the attainment of eight tasks in the rebuilding of a new China: (1) the explication of the Kuomintang's principles and the expunging of ‘unorthodox views’, (2) the constructing of a unified party through the curbing of individual freedom and the acceptance of party discipline, (3) the transfer of the national capital to Nanking to symbolize a new beginning for the nation, (4) a purposeful change in the ‘heart’ of the citizenry, (5) the psychological, economic, political and social reconstruction of the nation, (6) the disbanding of troops, (7) the termination of civil strife and a total commitment to national defence, and (8) the speedy introduction of local autonomy. These personal commitments—and public admonitions, as they were also meant to be—covered a wide range of national concerns, dealing as they did with ideology and organization, power and legitimacy, political socialization and national integration. It is noteworthy, however, that Chiang at the moment of personal triumph turned his attention above all to the ideological function of the ruling élite in the transitional Chinese society.

Scant attention has been paid to the study of ownership of agricultural land in Peninsular Malaysia, and the dearth of research on this important topic is largely due to the lack of source materials and the difficulty of collecting such materials. A major source of information on land ownership is the land titles which are filed in the Registration of Titles Office (for lots of land exceeding 4 ha.) in the State capitals, and in the Land Office (for lots below 4 ha.) in the district capitals, and the potentiality of these records for geographic investigation has barely been tapped. The registration of land ownership in Peninsular Malaysia is based on the Torrens System which represents ‘a system of registration of transactions with interests in land whose declared object is, under Government authority, to establish and certify to the ownership of an absolute and indefeasible title to land and to simplify its transfer’. Under this system, land alienation involves cadastral surveys to delineate the boundaries of individual parcels of land, to each of which a non-recurring identification number is assigned. All details relating to the size, date of registration, land-use conditions, and transactions for each parcel of land are entered in the land registers.

This article examines the cosmopolitan world of the colonial zenana through the marriages of two mid-twentieth-century royal Indian women, Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra and Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur. In particular, it analyses the close connection between zenana women's education and emergent adolescent sexuality. These women ordinarily began their studies in mixed-gender classrooms with their brothers and male cousins as children. As they neared the age of menarche, girls were extracted from the formal schoolroom and undertook instruction in household management and childcare in preparation for their expected roles as wives and mothers. Despite being prematurely cut off from the childhood classroom, women's educational backgrounds (in both Western and Indic forms of knowledge) and future learning potential remained an important part of their postmarital identity. Young, anglicized Indian men increasingly desired wives who reflected the modernity that they hoped to represent as imperial subjects and were encouraged to adopt by British advisors and tutors. They required wives who would not wear pardah and thus reflect more Western ideals of companionate marriages of friendship, yet simultaneously live in gender-segregated palace quarters, uphold traditional kinship networks, perform religious duties, and engage in the maintenance of a large polygamous household. Definitions of sex, marriage, and domesticity were increasingly cross-cultural and pan-historical in nature, incorporating aspects both of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’, the Indic and the European, the regional and the transnational.

Caste in contemporary Indian society has often been seen as a remainder of waning tradition. Advent of egalitarian liberalism and/or capitalism is taken to be the force of change which is destroying or restricting the relevance of caste in contemporary society. Against such a view, this paper will argue that caste remains an important frame of reference for defining people's identity especially in rural society. In particular, I would like to discuss the role of people's agency in the reshaping of caste in contemporary rural Orissa. It is the aggregate efforts of different groups of people in local situations to constantly redefine the form and meaning of caste that maintains its relevance. I feel this aspect has been neglected in many previous theories, which have tended to consider caste concerns merely in terms of the presence or absence of ‘hierarchy’ or in terms of ‘substantialized’ group formations.

The idea of Asia as a unity has appealed both to Europeans interested in differentiating themselves from a threatening, if inferior, Asiatic ‘other’, and to Asians keen to mark their distance from an alien and alienating Europe and West. For both groups, Asia is a useful term of alterity, although the place of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reversed. Near the beginning of his lecture Sanjay Subrahmanyam remarks that, ‘in the play between the -emic and the -etic, the insider's and the outsider's perspective, a concept like “Asia” falls decidedly on the side of the -etic’. This point is reinforced by the fact that the European concept of Asia goes back to the Ancient Greeks (as Subrahmanyam notes), whereas the interest of Asian insiders in the concept of a homogeneous Asia is a modern phenomenon, a reaction against the assumption of superiority inherent in Western imperialism and neo-imperialism. In the case of both the European and the Asian conceptions, however, it is the viewpoint of the observer, rather than the empirical features of what is observed, that gives shape and meaning to the concept. I will use this short response to take a look at Asia from a third perspective, one that is neither fully ‘insider’ nor ‘outsider’ in character, namely that of the early modern Armenians, whose travels took them across the length and breadth of Asia, and Europe too.

This paper investigages the role of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O) in the maritime organization of the Asian specie network between 1850 and 1920. In this period the specie network comprised several strands and layers but this paper will concentrate on those involving the flow of gold from Australia to India.

In 1919, Afghanistan embarked on a series of reforms that led to the presence of Afghan students at various European universities, facilitating the circulation of peoples, ideas, and goods. Focusing on one of these cases, this article examines how an Afghan student engaged critically with ‘Western’ art and translated artistic ideas and technologies through the grid of Afghanistan's own history of the fine arts. Through an exploration of the work of Abdul Ghafur Brechna (1907–1974)—artist, music composer, poet, and writer—I argue that, despite his desire to train at German technical schools, Brechna translated, then connected, his Western training to restore Afghanistan's traditional visual and literary arts, making it problematic to define his oeuvre as purely ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’. The first aim is to situate Brechna within the intellectual milieu of Weimar Germany, placing emphasis on how he curated the course of his education to support his aims. By tracing out the evolution of his artistic knowledge to Afghanistan, the second part of this article connects his earlier training to the newly emerging scholars in Kabul who also grappled with national renewal and an ‘Aryan’ literary and cultural heritage. Lastly, I discuss his attempt to rewrite the history of the arts by closely analysing his visual and literary work, emphasizing in particular his attempt to reconnect to themes and genres that had previously been lost or neglected.

In the decade and a half following Korean liberation from Japan in 1945, a category of men prowled Seoul's back alleys and also its halls of power. These figures might be called street leaders, for they were directly linked on one hand to private agents of violence and on the other to the top state and political elites of the country. The most notorious individuals included Kim Tu-han, a gang leader who became an elected politician, and Yi Chŏng-jae, a ‘political gangster’ who helped party politicians with their dirty work. Street leaders like Kim and Yi were on the scene at key moments in the republic's early political development. An examination of the political careers of Kim and Yi reveals how important cooperation between such actors and elite politicians was to state-building, political mobilization, and design of electoral institutions—processes that created the contemporary South Korean polity. Both the alliances between politicians and street leaders as well as the destruction of those alliances left deep impressions on South Korean politics.

This article documents Adivasi resistance to the ‘loot’ of their land and resources since 1980, especially during the Kalinganagar movement in Odisha, roughly between 2004 and 2010, and the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, between 2016 and 2018. Using the lens of trauma and testimony, the article represents a combined effort by Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi activist, journalist, and writer who has borne witness to events during these years; Felix Padel, an anthropologist; and Vinita Damodaran, a historian. The land grabs are mainly oriented towards mining and metals production, justified in terms of ‘development’, which leaves many dead and destroys landscapes that Adivasis have cared about for countless generations.

In the history of links between people from the Pearl River Delta with the countries of South-East Asia and the Pacific, the role played by Hong Kong cannot be ignored. It is the purpose here to examine the role and contribution of Hong Kong to these Pearl River Delta links over the period 1842 to 1942. Such an examination, it is hoped, will also allow the impact of Pearl River Delta links on Hong Kong to be investigated. Much of the material presented by this paper is not new, rather the aim is to view Hong Kong from the perspective of the Pearl River Delta qiaoxiang. A perspective, it is suggested, that will enable aspects of Hong Kong's history and its contribution to the history of the Pearl River Delta counties and their overseas links to be seen in a new way.

In the latter half of the twentieth century thousands of Khmer people were displaced from their homes along the freshwater rivers of Vietnam's Mekong delta. Their pattern of settlement along freshwater tidal rivers was an ecological adaptation unique in the Khmer-speaking world, of which only vestiges remain. Drawing upon oral histories and ethnographic observations of O Mon, a district in the central Mekong delta, this paper reconstructs a picture of the traditional river-based livelihoods, social structure and religious life of Khmers in this region in the 1940s. It describes how these Khmers were driven from their villages early in the First Indochina War. Experiencing ongoing dislocations in subsequent periods of war and peace, most have been prevented from returning to their former homes or reclaiming their land. Relying on testimony by elderly Khmers, who witnessed the disintegration of their riverside communities, the account challenges existing depictions of the ecology and history of the Mekong delta, offering new insights into the complexity of the Indochina wars and the severity of their consequences.

Along with the establishment of the Department of Public Health in 1912, the implementation of public health policies became an integral part of city management in Republican Guangzhou. Yet the cholera outbreak of 1932 fully exposed the weaknesses of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the city. Due to the Guangzhou government's inaction, the Fangbian Hospital, a local charitable hall founded in response to the bubonic plague of the 1890s, involuntarily took over the major responsibility for providing medical services for cholera patients in the early stage of the epidemic. Only after the death of hundreds of patients and Guangzhou being described as a ‘world of horror’ in the local press did the government-run hospital start to take a more active role. Epidemics have always served as catalysts for change in public health perceptions and practices. This paper attempts to explain how the cholera epidemic of 1932 changed the role of public health in the urban administration of the city. Emphasis is placed on analysing how the people of Guangzhou began to fight for a supply of clean drinking water once they came to realize the link between water and the spread of the fatal cholera epidemic in 1932. Clean water, which used to be seen as a commodity enjoyed by the privileged few, was now increasingly regarded as a citizen's right.

This essay argues that too much of scholarship on state formation in late pre-colonial India has displayed an elitist bias and focused exclusively on the activities and concerns of upper-caste ruling groups alone. Building upon recent trends that have brought into view the roles of a greater diversity of groups, this article explores the agentive role of the crafts and artisan communities in the state formation of Jodhpur during the eighteenth century. This was a period when the Rathor rulers of Jodhpur were unable to rely on the external support of the Mughal Empire and felt compelled to forge alliances with new groups who, perhaps, were previously marginal to political processes in the region. This, of course, did not dissolve the difficult and often exploitative conditions under which artisans worked, and though their agency was more reactive than creative, it did serve to define and limit the levels of state appropriations in revenues and labour.

The Mantetsu Employees' Association, founded in 1926 by a group of elite university-educated employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company, was an organization of unprecedented scope and vision which provided for the development of a limited form of self-government by the Japanese in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone during Japan's occupation of northeast China. Its founding principles resembled the ideological tenets of the metropole's movement of Taishō Democracy which had since the post-Russo-Japanese War energized supporters of widened popular access to the job of national governance. This paper traces how the Mantetsu Employees' Association reflected the political zeitgeist of post World War I metropolitan society whilst simultaneously developing in response to heightened Chinese nationalism in the northeast throughout the 1920s. It shows how the Association encompassed a wide range of employee ambitions—from increased involvement in imperial decision-making to labour advocacy on behalf of the Company's lowest-ranking Japanese workers to a critique of colonial policy as dictated by Tokyo's political parties. The paper introduces key Association players and their ideas as a means of questioning the nature of democracy in an imperial setting.

With a focus by scholars on states and classes, the environment of India and its impact on agriculture has been neglected, except to provide a context—which was largely unchanging—in which states extracted and classes struggled. One example of environment as the backdrop is the distinction between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas in Tamilnad and South India more widely. This distinction is based on the availability of water and on the local categorization of agricultural activity (nanjai versus punjai). There are two problems with this approach, however. First, it is a narrow treatment of the environment as it neglects other features of the land such as forests, grasslands, scrublands, and other so-called wasteland. Second, it sees the environment as a fixed entity, but the landscape has changed dramatically in the past, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If changes in the environment are included in the mix, the development of agriculture in nineteenth-century Tamilnad may be seen in some new ways. Agricultural production existed in symbiosis with the complex and varied environment of the region. In the early nineteenth century Tamilnad contained extensive tracts of forests, widespread wastelands, and abundant surface water. This diverse environment made it possible to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity as it provided the resources to maintain the fertility of the soil and the supplies of water that were critical for agricultural enterprise, as well as the well-being of the rural population. The consequences of changing regimes of water is the focus of this article.

This paper is concerned with the operational activities of the public security organs of the People's Republic of China during the immediate post-1949 period of regime consolidation. The main part of the paper is a case-study of a 1950 pilot scheme to recruit agents in critical sectors of industry and trade in the city of Yingkou in Northeast China, a scheme in due course subsumed under a nationwide programme with a similar focus. In the years to follow, the operational recruitment of agents would become one of China's arguably most important operational responses to the twin Cold War threats of economic espionage and—above all—sabotage. This paper's findings suggest, with respect to operational activities, that in order to represent and explain more fully, in Leopold von Ranke's words, ‘how things really were’, social and political historians may well want to shift their focus away from successive highly public Maoist ‘mass movements’ and look instead to what transpired out of the public eye in the interregnum of ordinary times that such movements punctuated. If and when they do, they will discover significant yet hitherto largely unexplored similarities between the work of the early People's Republic of China public security organs and their counterparts in the Soviet Union and other (former) socialist states.