Despite being recognized as a significant literary mode in understanding the advent of the modern self, biographies as a genre have received relatively little attention from South Asian historians. Likewise, histories of science and healing in British India have largely ignored the colonial trajectories of those sectarian, dissenting, supposedly pseudo-sciences and medical heterodoxies that have flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century. This article addresses these gaps in the historiography to identify biographies as a principal mode through which an incipient, ‘heterodox’ Western science like homoeopathy could consolidate and sustain itself in Bengal. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives render largely invisible, this article argues that biographies are more than a mere repository of individual lives, and in fact are a veritable site of power. In bringing histories of print and publishing, histories of medicine, and histories of life writing practices together, it pursues two broad themes: first, it analyses the sociocultural strategies and networks by which scientific doctrines and concepts are translated across cultural borders. It explores the relation between medical commerce, print capital, and therapeutic knowledge to illustrate that acculturation of medical science necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of class, kinship, and religion. Second, it simultaneously reflects upon the expanding genre of homoeopathic biographies published since the mid-nineteenth century: on their features, relevance, and functions, examining in particular the contemporary status of biography vis-à-vis ‘history’ in writing objective pasts.

This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.

The Bengali bhadralok have had an important impact on Indian nationalism in Bengal and in India more broadly. Their commitment to narratives of national progress has been noted. However, little attention has been given to how ‘earthly paradise’, ‘garden of delights’, and related ideas of refinement and nobility also informed their nationalism. This article excavates the idea of earthly paradise as it is portrayed in Satyajit Ray's 1958 Bengali film Jalsaghar, usually translated as The Music Room. Jalsaghar is typically taken to depict, broadly, the decadence and decline of aristocratic ‘feudal’ landowners (zamindars) who were granted their holdings and, often, noble rank, such as ‘Lord’ or ‘Raja’, during Mughal or British times, representing the languid past of the nobility, and the ascendance of a restless business-oriented class that represents an emerging present and possible future. The zamindars are shown as pursuing aesthetic and spiritual delight, ecstasy, and edification through soirées. These soirées are produced for those among the nobility who are sufficiently cultivated and cosmopolitan to appreciate the finer things in life, such as the classical music and dance showcased in this film. The businessmen, too, aspire to host such exceptional events, but are too crass to do so properly and, moreover, they are motivated by a desire to accrue prestige, thus using soirées as a means to an end, rather than to experience aesthetic and spiritual elevation as an end in itself. I argue that the film calls on the bhadralok to value aesthetic cultivation and to actively counter its evanescence. The film thus beckons and authorizes the bhadralok to sustain the value of the timeless past, including nobility and refinement. Yet the bhadralok are also expected to embody and expand a new, progressive, and utilitarian spirit that would modernize India. With the aristocrats gone, and the entrepreneurs eager to assume authority, the film charges the bhadralok to construct a nationalism in which the immortal, character-building values of classical art, for example, can yet be sutured to utilitarian progressivism. I argue that the film conveys this even though it does not explicitly portray or even mention the bhadralok, or feature uniquely Bengali music and art. Accordingly, this article does not focus on the actual aesthetic and political practices of bhadralok nationalism. The aim is to shed light on one genealogy through which the bhadralok sanctioned themselves as India's stewards along these lines.

The current paper is part of an interdisciplinary project focusing on the intellectual dimensions of the French colonial experience in colonial Viet Nam, particularly in relation to the archaeology of Southeast Asia. As such, the work presented here is intended as a follow-up to the recently published exploration of intellectual movements under colonialism in French-ruled Viet Nam produced by Susan Bayly. Its wider aim is to contextualise the work of the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient in order to better understand why its product, the cultural history of Viet Nam, is now so far out of step with the rest of mainland Southeast Asia that despite more than thirty years of post-colonial fieldwork by Vietnamese scholars, and more than fifteen years of collaboration with Western institutions, our understanding of Vietnamese protohistory has advanced little since, in a now famous review of the then current state of Vietnamese archaeology, Jeremy Davidson opined that ‘our knowledge of Champa remains so fragmentary, vague and inaccurate that the whole subject must be reworked’. The current work has many points of concordance with Bayly's interdisciplinary study. Here too it is argued that the distinctive understandings of race, culture and polity brought to the colony by French scientists, profoundly affected the thought and actions of Vietnamese as well as Europeans, and that the effects of their work were felt both within and beyond the French empire.

When 1 October 1965 dawned on Djakarta, the Sukarno régime appeared to have been bloodily consolidated. By evening its foundation had been undermined. The subsequent collapse took the lives of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the Communist Party, and ended hostilities against Malaysia. For the first time in many years it seemed that the prosperity of the people might be put before the ‘progressive’ posturing of politicians. The events of the day are therefore worth considering in some detail.

This paper examines the history of ‘Hindi’1 as a modern Indian language in Bihar between 1850 and 1900. It looks beyond the North-Western Provinces, hitherto the focus of most studies of Hindi, and issues that were important here but not in Bihar like, for example, the ‘Hindi’-Urdu conflict. Instead, it looks at how the ways in which the history of ‘Hindi’ unfolded in Bihar and was distinct from that in other parts of North India. It demonstrates how the regional languages of Bihar were more crucial to the development of ‘Hindi’ in this region than standardized ‘Hindi’, at least until the early twentieth century. A prime focus in this paper is Sir George Abraham Grierson who postulated the theory of an independent ‘Bihari’ language and collected materials to support it. These materials reflect the continuing popularity of Bihari cultural traditions throughout the nineteenth century despite the avowed support for a standardized ‘Hindi’ by the colonial government and the intelligentsia of Bihar. They add a dimension to the historical development of ‘Hindi’ that was distinctive to Bihar. Focussing on this, this paper stresses the part played in the history of ‘Hindi’ by an agent whose voice was marginalized and later ignored or suppressed in canonical accounts of its development as a modern Indian language.

Despite the extensive literature on global slavery and servitude, human bondage in Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been largely neglected. Here bondage did not discriminate between ethnic, racial or religious groups and fulfilled a wide range of social, economic, and political functions, reflecting both the region's geographical position at the edge of Central Asia and its political position—first as a dependency and then as a province of Qing China. This paper discusses the nature of the forms of bondage that emerged in this unique geopolitical setting and suggests that the emancipation of Xinjiang's ‘British’ slaves at the end of the nineteenth century and the gradual decline of bondage resulted from a convergence of local, regional, and global forces.

At the moment, India, with two Congress Parties, two Jana Sanghs, two Socialist Parties, two D.M.K.s, two Akali Dals and two Communist Parties (the third Communist Party—the C.P.M.L.—has been declared illegal after the present emergency), presents a picture with ‘splitism’ as the common denominator. The split in the Communist Party of India occurred at a time when the Communist movement all over the world was in disarray, showing polycentric trends on account of Sino-Soviet polemics. In addition to this, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 also put serious strain on the party unity. Therefore, most of the studies that were undertaken on the C.P.I, split ascribed it either to the Sino-Soviet schism or to the Sino-Indian border war, or to both. However, an analysis of the authoritative pronouncements of two factions and an examination of their political resolutions indicate sharp differences on such issues as the character of the Congress Party, the nature of its government and the progressive and reactionary contents of its economic, home and foreign policy. The rightsts in the C.P.I, considered the national bourgeoisie Congress Party and its government as a progressive force and consequently advocated a policy of ‘Unity’ with it, in its fight against the parties of the Right reaction, such as the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra and the two variants of the Socialist Party.

The creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the ‘experienced’ history of the region as distinct from the ‘imagined’ one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians—writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives—have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous—mostly Hindus but partly Muslim—elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs—particularly ‘pro-Pakistani’ dalits (lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated ‘pro-Indian’ maulvis—emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum—a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the ‘communal psyche’ of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces.

The Allied victory in 1945 ensured that a greater degree of freedom was guaranteed to individual Japanese by law. Since the end of the Occupation Japanese intellectuals, alert to any moves that they considered an infringement of the postwar constitution, have acted as watchdogs for the whole community. Ienaga Saburo, historian and political ideologist, is one such intellectual.

In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic.

Confrontation with the British during the years 1839 to 1842 jolted the Chinese into a more realistic perception of the wider world. Before the Opium War, the Chinese took little notice of the world beyond the traditional Chinese realm; during the course of the war China's inadequate knowledge of overseas countries proved to be a strategic disadvantage. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China's defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small but influential group of Chinese set out to expand China's knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China's survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Wei Yüan (1794–1857) and Hsü Chi-yü (1795–1873) and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective in the decade after the Treaty of Nanking.

This article focuses on performing artists at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1801–39), the last fully sovereign ruler of the Punjab and leader of what is termed the Sikh empire. After Ranjit's death, his successors ruled for a mere decade before British annexation in 1849. Ranjit Singh's kingdom has been studied for the extraordinary authority it exercised over warring Sikh factions and for the strong challenge it posed to political rivals like the British. Scholarly exploration of cultural efflorescence at the Lahore court has ignored the role of performing artistes, despite a preponderance of references to them in both Persian chronicles of the Lahore court and in European travelogues of the time. I demonstrate how Ranjit Singh was partial to musicians and dancers as a class, even marrying two Muslim courtesans in the face of stiff Sikh orthodoxy. A particular focus is on Ranjit's corps of ‘Amazons’—female dancers performing martial feats dressed as men—the cynosure of all eyes, especially male European, and their significance in representing the martial glory of the Sikh state. Finally, I evaluate the curious cultural misunderstandings that arose when English ‘dancing’ encountered Indian ‘nautching’, revealing how gender was the primary axis around which Indian and European male statesmen alike expressed their power. Ubiquitous in the daily routine of Ranjit and the lavish entertainments set up for visitors, musicians and female performers lay at the interstices of the Indo-European encounter, and Anglo-Sikh interactions in particular.

This article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

This essay is the sequal to ‘The Missionary Activity of the Japan Congregational Church in Korea’. In the first part, I showed that the Congregational Church's missionary activity which started in 1911 was actually supported by the Government-General of Korea, and also mentioned a number of conscientious Christians such as Uchimura Kanzō and Kashiwagi Gien who not only opposed the Church's missionary activity in Korea but even went so far as to criticize the Japanese imperialist rule of Korea itself.

In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address.

This paper represents an attempt to throw more light on the problems faced by developing countries in their efforts to industrialize, through an examination of the recent economic history of a particular case, the scientific instruments industry in India. Since many of these problems are connected with technological matters, particular attention is paid to the relations between ‘science’ and ‘production’, broadly defined, and to how these relations affect prospects for industrial development under present-day conditions. The paper's other focus is the role of'planning’ in the industry's development, and the gap between what the planners envisaged and what happened in actual practice.

Children from rural Odishan Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste communities have an historically marginalized relation to schools and a corresponding greater involvement with informal education regimes and participation in everyday economic and cultural routines. Although radical state restructuring in recent decades makes rural school buildings more visible, inside the classrooms, students were often present and teachers absent. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in Western Mayurbhanj, Odisha, I examine students’ engagement with school and argue that rural schools cannot be fully understood without examining the motivations of and interactions between three sets of stakeholders: state, local providers, and students. Further, the motivations, evaluations, and experiences of students deserve to be brought much more to the fore in light of their active roles in Mayurbhanj village schools and the significant effects of this involvement on both the nature of rural schools and the changes in rural blocks.