The first five papers in this issue of Modern Asian Studies were originally written for a panel that came together at the 40th meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco, in March of 1988, to discuss ‘Civil Ritual in India: British and Indian Modes of Symbolic Representation.’

Sociologists of western religion have devoted much time and effort to delineating the principal characteristics of the denomination. The discussion has emerged very largely from the distinction drawn in 1912 by Troeltsch between church and sect. The latter is represented as radical and egalitarian, at odds with the society of which it is a part, and demanding total commitment from its followers. By comparison, the former is hierarchic and conservative, at one with its social surroundings, and generally less concerned about the varying extent of members' adherence to the corporate body. There has ensued considerable discussion regarding the adequacy of this dichtomy, and a number of refinements and alternative schema have been proposed.

Having followed Modern Asian Studies for some time now as being among the major journals to have sustained a high degree of sophistication on debates relating to the historical and cultural developments of modern South Asia, one was greatly distressed to read Akbar S. Ahmed's article ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics’. Practices of representation always implicate positions of enunciation. In what follows, I wish to re-read Ahmed's article to show that his representations of Indian society derive their legitimacy not from their engagement with the many-layered sociocultural formation of the present-day Indian nation, but from a perspective which reinforces the continuing relations of dominance between metropolis and former colony. As an academician of and for present-day India, to challenge such a perspective is not merely an attempt to radicalize academic frameworks but, as I wish to show, expressive of a larger social need to create spaces where one is able to transform present reality. It is to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation. It is to identify marginality as a space of resistance, as a site of radical possibility.

Four years after the publication of Wei Yuan's Hai-kuo t'u-chih, Hsu Chi-yü (1795–1873), while governor of Fukien, composed the preface to his ten-chüan history-geography of the non-Chinese world. A product of the immediate post-Opium War period, Hsu's Ying-huan chih-lueh (A short account of the maritime circuit, 1848) is another example of Chinese intellectual response to Western intrusion and the challenges of a new era. Indeed, while Hsu and Wei agreed on the fundamental necessity to learn more about the outside world in order to protect China, the tone of their books, the Ying-huan chih-lueh and the Hai-kuo t'u-chih, differed to such an extent that the former came to represent the views of Chinese ‘moderates’, while the latter did likewise for the ‘conservatives’.

This article examines the historical role and legacy of the foreign establishment in China's temporary capital Chongqing during the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan and the Second World War. This extraordinary episode, lasting from 1938 to 1946, ushered in a new era for China's foreign diplomacy and laid the foundation for its rise to world-power status. Placing Chongqing at the very heart of this epochal chapter in modern Chinese history, this article describes the major events, trends, and actors that directly or indirectly were instrumental to China's wartime transformation from a partitioned, de facto colony to a first-rate global power with a permanent seat among the ‘Big Five’. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, this article presents fresh perspectives on a near-forgotten episode of China's war experience. Moving beyond the traditional typecasting of ‘Chungking’ as a primitive backwater in China's remote hinterland, this article reappraises wartime Chongqing as a major international centre at the spearhead of global change and as an important cradle of the modern power that China is today.

In the opening chapter of his study of Agricultural Trends in India, 1891–1947, George Blyn explains the double significance of determining crop production trends in a society where agriculture is the largest single sector of the economy. Firstly, crop trends reveal the nature of changes in production and provide the basis for estimating changes in consumption. Secondly, since availability of crops for consumption depends not only on output but also on foreign trade, changes in cropping patterns provide a basis for estimating the pace and direction of commercialization of the economy. Blyn's study covers the fifty-six years before Indian independence and provides detailed analysis of such topics as aggregate crop trends for the eighteen crops that constituted most of India's agriculture. More recently, there have been a number of studies concerned with the agricultural history of nineteenth-century India. My own work is concerned with the social and economic history of the Central Provinces for the period 1861–1921. Within this broad subject an important specific topic is that of cropping patterns. This paper provides data on crop trends in this part of India for a period of fifty-four years from 1867 to 1921 and evaluates and analyzes this data. Its object is to establish the broad trends in cropping patterns and to shed some light on methods of agriculture in the Central Provinces in the later nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. (Provincial data are given in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 at the end of the paper.)

Individuals and societies are as much influenced and motivated by perceptions of reality as by reality itself, indeed possibly more so. It is in that sense that the images which one society holds in relation to another are highly significant in terms of an understanding of the relationship between the two. Japanese officials tend to stress that problems which exist between Japan and Europe are due to ‘misunderstandings’—and indeed the fact that Endymion Wilkinson's book on Europe and Japan (‘Misunderstanding’) has proved such a best-seller in its Japanese version, GOKAI, indicates that it struck a sensitive chord among the Japanese public. In other words, the image, it is alleged, is out of focus with reality. Presumably an aspiration, and an entirely legitimate one, in the mounting of the Great Japan exhibition was to redress and improve Japan's image in the West, namely by stressing the cultural legacy with the intention of diverting attention from the more powerful industrial dimension.

Some time ago the Commonwealth and Overseas History Society of Cambridge University asked me to provide an overview of recent scholarship on modern Chinese history. What follows is a written version of this ‘public service’ lecture aimed at non-specialist historians. It discusses Western scholarship on China from the eighteenth until the twentieth century.

Many years ago, the eminent historian Gordon A. Craig wrote: ‘One of the recurring themes in those books on the diplomatic pre-history of the Second World War which have come to us from the former enemy countries is the plight of the professional diplomat, whose training and knowledge convinced him that the policy of his government was leading straight to disaster but whose advice was seldom solicited and never followed.’ Craig went on to show that this pattern of ‘the neglect and abuse of the resources of expert diplomacy’ occurred in the democratic countries of the time. Professional Chinese diplomats (and intellectuals) fared little better than their counterparts, democratic or totalitarian, in the 1930s when their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, pursued a policy of appeasement toward Japan. Chiang's appeasement policy, or what some have referred to as a policy of accommodation or gradualism, has received much treatment from historians.

The voluminous Blechynden diaries, in the British Library, offer incomparable opportunities for studying (among other things) domestic life among middle-level British residents of Calcutta around the start of the nineteenth century. This paper is concerned with a small part of the history of the Blechynden household, focusing on Arthur Blechynden, son of Richard and his successor as superintendent of roads. Richard's diary runs to more than 70 volumes and Arthur's to seven. These sources permit none of the structural analysis that was made the basis of family history by Peter Laslett and others; but they touch several points of the richer canvas painted by Laurence Stone, and those genres that are concerned with individual lives, with emotion, with relationships, and with identity, the kinds of subject approached by the contributors to Roy Porter's collection Rewriting the Self. In this paper some of these issues will be taken up, with particular reference to ideas of individuality and of race. That discussion will then lead on to another, on the construction of British imperial identity outside Britain and in the context of the formation of empire, an aspect that seems worthy of more attention than it has received.

This paper supplies the historical context to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's (1861–1941) first visit to the city of Chicago in January 1913 when he spoke at the University of Chicago and established life-long friendships with some of the literary personalities of the city. By focusing on how Tagore came to be received by the University authorities and on his friendship with Harriet Vaughan Moody (1857–1932), the widow of the American writer William Vaughn Moody, it also seeks to trace the role that the themes of ‘empire’ and ‘civilization’ played in determining how the poet was received, understood, and admired by his foreign friends.

This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary—the India-Bangladesh border—I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban or border scholars. I argue that reciprocal webs of exchange brought Garo matrilineal kinship and Christian religiosity into relations with seemingly impersonal worlds of state control and border rule. The exchange of valued domestic objects, and the broader set of political and gendered affinities that surrounded these, are evidence of the border's changing role and temporality in mitigating difference and danger. Although these relations are embedded in the history of border-making in the Garo Hills, recent national security measures and border infrastructures have disrupted prior exchanges. These have disembedded the troops from their immediate rural environment in attempts to contain trans-border relationships.

In a letter to Sir Samuel Hoare in September 1932, on the eve of his ‘fast unto the death’ against the principle of separate electorates for untouchables, Gandhi wrote:For me religion is one in essence, but it has many branches and if I, the Hindu branch, fail in my duty to the parent trunk, I am an unworthy follower of that one indivisible, visible religion…. My nationalism and my religion are not exclusive, but inclusive and they must be so consistently with the welfare of all life.

This article examines the literary strategies employed by a devotional poet who wrote about recent events in the eighteenth century, in order to shed light on contemporary notions of social responsibility. Taking the poetic treatment of Ahmad Shah Abdali's invasion of North India and the sacking of Vrindavan in 1757 as its primary focus, the article will discuss how political and theological understandings of lordship converged at a popular level, such that a deity could be called to account as a neglectful landlord as well as venerated in a bhakti context. It examines the redaction of tropes inherited from both vaisnava literature and late Mughal ethical thought, and considers the parallels between the Harikala Beli, a Braj Bhasha poem, and immediately contemporary developments in Urdu literature, particularly the shahr ashob genre. As such, it uses poetic responses to traumatic events as a guide to the interaction between multiple intellectual systems concerned with human and divine expectations and obligations.

This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.

After their government's 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japanese internationalists searched for new ways to engage with the world or struggled to accommodate their advocacy of international cooperation to the realities of the wartime empire. The idea of international morality was central to this effort. Ethics textbooks, which presented ideals of international behaviour, provide a particular view of this intellectual and policy endeavour of the 1930s and early 1940s, showing how the concept of morality became a means to reconcile internationalism with imperialism and war. Echoing many of the ideas current in both public discussion and behind-closed-doors decision-making on foreign policy at the time, textbook authors and other educators contributed to a broader redefinition of internationalism that enabled it to persist through a period of imperialism and war.

Henry Derozio, India's first modern poet, used the pseudonym ‘An East Indian’ for several poems he published in his lifetime, and he may have used it again in a heated controversy that played itself out in the correspondence columns of the India Gazette, Calcutta's leading newspaper, from May 26 to June 5, 1825. The occasion was an editorial comment upon a community of office-goers in the city—called, at the time, ‘sircars’—who had set up a literary association. This editorial was widely perceived to be reactionary, and civil society responded vigorously in protest at the injustice. The sequence of editorials and letters published on this issue, which seem to have been written by Englishmen, East Indians and Indians alike, demonstrate a remarkable liberalism of spirit and a free-thinking attitude to ethnicity that was soon to disappear in the stiffening boundaries of a racially divided society. 1825 was also the year that Derozio began to publish prolifically in the poetry columns of newspapers and periodicals in the city; by the time he died, in 1831, he had published two books of poems in 1827 and 1828 and had created a revolution of sorts among the radicalised youth of the Hindu College, from which he had been dismissed for his role in their alienation from tradition. In 1831, a few months before his death, Derozio addressed a mammoth meeting called to commemorate the return of John Ricketts, the East Indian representative, from his mission to the English houses of Parliament for a redressal of the community's grievances. Using these two lost occasions—the public correspondence and the meeting—both concerned with the politics of naming, this paper will attempt to present the early radical interventions of the mixed-race community in initiating a discourse of civic rights and human dignity which led, ultimately, to organised attempts at constitutional change and political reform in India, whose estimation is underrated in present-day contexts.

Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian Studies, despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Burma is often studied either in isolation or alongside Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, despite its equally important historical and cultural connections to communities, states, and networks across what is now India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal. In this Roundtable, four scholars of South Asia discuss Burma's erasure within the discipline, the origins and limitations of traditional area studies frameworks, and the possibilities afforded by Burma's inclusion within a more expansive conception of South Asia.

Ongoing volatile political activism in the Indian Punjab, embodying an armed guerrilla warfare, inter-religious dissensions and severe official retaliatory policies, is a microcosm of a pervasive governability crisis in entire South Asia. The dilemma, with all its intensity, is the culmination of various parallel political processes in currency for almost one century. While the state, both colonial and post-colonial, may conveniently and simplistically perceive it as a mere administrative prblem or, at the most, an enduring communal disharmony fostered by hazy ideas,1 its very endurance warrants a serious review of numerous crucial denominators. Politicized ethnicity, largely banking on religious and similar other primordial factors, has received added momentum from interaction with a sterilized and elitist state structure in the wake of vital demographic changes and diasporic quest for identity. Neighbouring Pakistani Punjab exhibited a profile in political defiance for the entire period of Benazir Bhutto's premiership when her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) confronted a formidable opposition from the provincial government of the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA/IJI). It eventually catapulted Mian Nawaz Sharif into premiership.2 Such an increased political activism in the grain basket of the sub-continent may pose a perplexing issue for those to whom the province since early times has been a conformist, centrist and pro-establishment area when it came to its relationship with Indiawide movements all the way from the stormy events of 1857 to the 1980s Quest

Brahmin identity and community—these are the essentials. Melody cannot be understood except by the notes and spaces that constitute it. So too with the group. To know it, we must understand individuals and their interactions. Failure to do this sacrifices accuracy for simplicity; realities get replaced with poor simulacra of themselves. Consider caste names; are they contested? A common assumption is that they are not.