This paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.

In India, investigations into patterns of industrialisation and the formation of industrial labour began during the colonial period, soon after the inception of modern industry in the mid-nineteenth century. After Independence in 1947, the development of a ‘working class’ became the primary focus of enquiry into conditions of industrial labour.

The primary aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the massive report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895. This document is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire. In it we see displayed the cultural tensions and conflicts negotiated between British colonizers and Indian colonized subjects.The author is indebted to Richard Newman for suggesting that the Royal Commission on Opium deserves reappraisal.

Opium, like colonialism, is a sensitive and charged issue. The question of mood-altering drugs—opium, alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, among others—is always fraught. Each society and culture is convinced that its own drugs of choice are normal and natural; and that those of other societies are depraved and unnatural. Generally each society and culture has drugs of choice that have been assimilated to its cultural practices. The pleasures of these familiar drugs are known; their dangers minimized by taboos and social rituals of consumption, and their damage contained and ignored. Similar adaptations in other cultures are invisible or, if seen, grotesque.

The substantive aim of this essay is to document popular attitudes towards the forest and its biotic resources through time as I have encountered these in the northernmost areas of the modern Indian state of Kerala. The interviews and folk-lore I have drawn upon in the present, however, are very much a legacy of Kerala's past. And since, sadly, most of the forests themselves have become a rapidly fading memory, my approach must be not only anthropological, but also folkloric and ethnohistorical.

After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the ‘statistical’ tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour.

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.

This paper explores the regulation of prostitution in colonial India between the abolition of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888 and the passing of the first Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1923. It challenges the commonly held assumption that prostitutes naturally segregated themselves in Indian cities, and shows that this was a policy advocated by the Government of India. The object was to prevent the military visiting these segregated areas, in the absence of effective Cantonment Regulations for registering, inspecting, and treating prostitutes. The central government stimulated provincial segregation through expressing its desires via demi-official memoranda and confidential correspondence, to which Rangoon and Bombay responded most willingly. The second half of the paper explores the conditions, in both India and Ceylon, that made these segregated areas into scandalous sites in the early twentieth century. It situates the brothel amongst changing beliefs that they: increased rather than decreased incidents of homosexuality; stimulated trafficking in women and children; and encouraged the spread of scandalous white prostitutes ‘up-country’, beyond their tolerated location in coastal cosmopolitan ports. Taken alongside demands that the state support social reform in the early twentieth century, segregation provided the tipping point for the shift towards suppression from 1917 onwards. It also illustrates the scalar shifts in which central-local relations, and relations between provinces, in government were being negotiated in advance of the dyarchy system formalized in 1919.

This article examines issues pertaining to the growth of ‘informal’ economic exchanges and relationships of patronage in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala (H-P), India. I firstly review the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by investigations of Tibetan refugee modernity, then focus on one particular form of exchange in the informal economy of exiles: rogs ram, or the sponsorship of Tibetans by foreigners. The article argues that symbolic capital comes to play a particularly important role in communities where economic capital is scarce, acting in fact as a proviso to economic capital. The highly unstable character of symbolic capital means that, for Tibetan refugees as for other communities, its conversion into economic capital is arduous and engenders a tense field of negotiations between sponsors and beneficiaries.

In late nineteenth century Malayalee society, the project of social reforming was caught up in the concern to evolve an alternative to established Jati-based mode of ordering human beings. The criticism by the missionaries of the CMS, LMS and the Basel Mission of the established order in Malayalee society as entirely unnatural and inimical to (universal) human values was heard right through the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, the nascent modern educated of Tiruvitamkoor, Kochi and Malabar were beginning to echo such viewpoints actively. The terms on which these groups perceived their identities and assessed local society were more or less set by colonial sociology and the codification efforts by both imperial and local powers. Interpreting locally existing jati in terms of the construction of ‘caste’ (i.e., ‘Nair’, ‘Ezhava’, ‘Araya’ etc.) these groups sought to form organisations for the reform of caste, to transform these into full-fledged modern communities.

Undivided colonial India experienced an accelerated rate of economic change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Official policies and funds combined with private entrepreneurial energies and investment to intensify India's linkages with the world market in trade, industry, agriculture, and natural resource extraction. Slow, but in the long term steady, population expansion accompanied this trend. After 1947, economic development accelerated under five-year plans in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and transformed the earlier colonial economy. Population figures have similarly shot up since partition and independence. These two linked trends have accompanied steadily intensifying human intervention in the natural environment of the subcontinent over the same time. One effect, among others, has been dramatic alteration in land use and vegetation cover. Comparing Francis Buchanan's early nineteenth-century descriptions of the countryside in both north and south India with the appearance of these areas today suggests just how sweeping these changes have been. The landscape of today in virtually every Indian district is very different from that seen two hundred or even hundred years ago.

In tracing the history of the concept of race, this article revises the conventional view that race acquired significance only after the mid-nineteenth century in colonial India. Instead, it situates the history of race in the connected realms of enlightenment science in both the metropolitan and colonial worlds and in the public sphere of Indian print culture. From the 1770s onwards the emerging ‘science’ of race was intimately related to orientalism and was salient for civilisational concepts, above all, religion. Precisely because it was a capacious concept that encompassed both cultural and biological ideas, race became an inescapable category for world-comparative distinctions between human types and religions, but it also held implications for the role of empire. Phrenology was a popular dimension of this set of ideas and found votaries among both imperial and also Indian literati of radical, conservative and liberal political opinions. The Calcutta Phrenological Society became an active site of debate on these issues. Yet in the popular realm of vernacular print culture analogous notions of physical typology and distinction (particularly samudrikvidya) remained distant from such concerns. As a form of ‘insurgent knowledge’ samudrikvidya was part of the techniques for the reconstitution of an Indian selfhood. Race then was not only a powerful concept, but also one that was remarkably mutable in its meanings and uses from the eighteenth century onwards.

When Marx in 1853 denounced the exploitation of India under British rule and wrote of ‘The British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom’ he laid the foundation for an economic critique which has endured to the present day. In the twentieth century, the fate of the Indian handloom weaver has been at the center of the controversy over the concept of the ‘deindustrialization’ of India on which there is now a substantial body of literature. Did the handloom industry collapse in face of competition from manufactured British imports as proponents of this thesis contend? Or were the handloom weavers able to survive the competition and at least retain (and, as has recently been argued, perhaps even improve) their position, as demand for cloth rose with rising per capita income, the fall in cloth prices was offset by the cheaper price of machine-spun yarn, and the handloom weavers diversified into higher-valued products and adopted new technologies? This paper is intended as a further contribution to this debate. It examines what happened to the handloom industry in one part of India (the region that from 1861 was called the Central Provinces) over a period of roughly one hundred and fifty years. It is in four parts. The first part studies the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century as British power spread throughout the subcontinent. This is the period when deindustrialization is said to have occurred to a significant extent.

While much has been written about resurgent Islamic movements in recent decades, the proliferation of religious reading circles has received little attention. Few studies delineate the specifics of audience engagement with authoritative Islamic texts on the ground. This paper is a small attempt at such an inquiry in the context of Bangladesh. It investigates a particular Islamist Qur'anic study session conducted in Dhaka in 2003. Such reading sessions are routinely conducted within Bangladesh Islamic Chatri Sangstha (BICSa), the leading Islamic organization of women students in Bangladesh. I suggest that BICSa reading sessions embody spaces of both deliberation and discipline. In analysing a group discussion of a set of Qur'anic verses widely assigned for study within BICSa, particularly in relation to the central Islamist notion of ‘belief’, this paper argues that reading circles play a primary role in the production of a uniquely disciplined and devout, yet modern Islamist subjectivity in Bangladesh. A study circle familiarizes a lay Bangladeshi with specific kinds of religious literature and teaches them to understand and shape contemporary realities via scriptural injunctions. However, this inculcation process is not linear: The mastery of the Qur'anic literature enables both devotion to and contestation of BICSa precepts.

This paper examines changes between 1992 and 2010 in Japanese junior high school history textbooks’ representations of imperial Japan's colonialism and aggression in Asia, using documentary study and interviews with actors in the textbook production process. Following a trend to increase textbook material on Japan's wartime aggression in the mid-1990s, after 2000 publishers approached this topic in contrasting ways, some expanding and some reducing their coverage, with dramatically varying results in terms of market share. Publishers’ decisions on content were related to their market position and to changes in local textbook adoption procedures that have increased the decision-making power of appointed boards of education at the expense of teachers. Increased market share since 2000 is associated primarily with a progressive pedagogy in tune with recent curriculum reforms. The recent spotlight on textbook adoption has exposed weaknesses in the system, such as inadequate representation of the local community and insufficient guarantee of teachers’ expert input in the adoption process. With the introduction of new textbook approval criteria requiring their conformity with the patriotic emphases of the revised Fundamental Law on Education of 2006, the content of future textbooks will clearly be strongly influenced by both approval and adoption processes.

A Common but curious sight of the Indian bazaar is the hijḍā, the ‘eunuch’ of Indian English. Obviously transvestites, the hijḍās beg from merchants who quickly, under threat of obscene abuse, respond to the silent demands of such detested individuals. On occasion, especially festival days, they press their claims with boisterous and ribald singing and dancing. Popular Indian opinion would label the hijḍās as nothing more than male prostitutes. Yet at the same time, and hinting at a more complex social function, they are expected if unwanted visitors at wedding parties and birth celebrations where they demand their share of the general largesse. Seen solely as one element in the fabric of contemporary society, the life of a hijḍā is surely ‘an alternative social role … which cater[s] not only for the temperamental misfits but also for disavowed yet persistent needs of the community as a whole’. However, such characterizations are made without much investigation of the ‘alternative social role’. The vast Indian underworld—the low caste and outcaste; the beggars, touts, petty criminals, and prostitutes; and also the hijḍā—has been much neglected as a subject of serious scholarship.

In the past 20 years, Bangladeshi migration to Southern European countries has gained an increasing importance. Portugal is no exception, and today more than 4,500 Bangladeshis live in the country. One of the more interesting facets of this population, though, is their educational and economic profile. They come from what has been roughly summed up as the ‘new’ Bangladeshi ‘middle classes’. Their families are both rural and urban, have properties, and own businesses. Other members of their domestic units work in NGOs, and private and state owned companies. Simultaneously, they have considerable educational backgrounds, with college and university degrees, and most are fluent in English. But what was their motivation to come to Europe in the first place? And what does this tell us about the young Bangladeshi middle class? For these young Bangladeshi adults, it is through geographic mobility that one can earn enough economic capital to access the ‘modern’ and to progress in the life-course. By remaining in Bangladesh, their access to middle class status and adulthood is not guaranteed and thus migrating to Europe is seen as a possible avenue for achieving such dreams and expectations. The main argument in this paper is that migration—as a resource and a discoursive formation—is itself constitutive of this ‘middle class’.

In 1926, when it contested the general elections to the Imperial and Provincial Legislatures for the first time, the Indian National Congress was embroiled in a protracted struggle between rival factions for control of the Congress organisation. Electoral rivalries exacerbated existing factionalism and highlighted the often contradictory aims, methods and interests pursued by competing groups within the loose framework of the nationalist movement. If the non-cooperation campaign of 1920–21 had witnessed a national awakening and initiated a more aggressive phase in the history of Indian nationalism, the unity imposed upon the Congress proved fragile and temporary. The curious alliance of forces which had adhered to the Congress in the more confident days of the movement and which were mixed so promiscuously with the survivors of the old Congress, exposed the organisation and its leadership to greater strain in sustaining the united front once the impulse of the agitation had subsided and provincial, regional and sectarian forces began to re-assert themselves with a vengeance. The price of a tenuous unity in 1920 was increased competition and disruption within the Congress throughout the decade; a whirlpool of differences which, to many contemporaries in the thick of events, threatened to overwhelm it.