The mystical method of taḥqīq (‘realization’ or ‘verification’ of divine truth), as promoted by the Andalusian thinker Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), was central to the project of managing religious difference in the Mughal empire. The key architect of deploying taḥqīq for imperial purposes was emperor Akbar's senior minister, ideologue, and spiritual devotee, Abu al-Fazl. Specifically, I analyse how the concept of taḥqīq appears in Abu al-Fazl's 1587 preface to the Razmnāma (‘Book of War’), the first translation into Persian of the Sanskrit religious epic Mahābhārata. The Mughal Razmnāma was a monumental achievement, the foremost product of Akbar's push to translate non-Islamic religious works into Persian. In its elaborate preface, Abu al-Fazl clearly outlines that this translation was an exercise in taḥqīq, made possible by a sovereign who had achieved spiritual perfection, and he calls the Mughal empire a ‘Caliphate of Taḥqīq’. As such, this study bridges two scholarly conversations which have been previously distinct. One is the renewed focus in Islamic studies on Ibn ‘Arabi's ideas, specifically on taḥqīq in the late medieval and early modern periods across the Islamic world. The other is the recent interest in Mughal historiography on ṣulḥ-i kull (Total Peace). This article positions Ibn ‘Arabi's taḥqīq within an elite Persianate intellectual milieu that carried the concept to Mughal South Asia, and it demonstrates, through an analysis of the Razmnāma's preface, that taḥqīq was politicized by Abu al-Fazl and Akbar to develop the imperial policy of managing religious difference, which came to be known as ṣulḥ-i kull.

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).

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 is with reference to the article ‘British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar’ published in Modern Asian Studies 50 (5) 2016. I would be grateful if MAS could publish this letter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pakistan is today moving toward a population crisis with two dimensions. The source of this crisis is both internal and external. Internally the country is experiencing one of the greatest population growths in the world, externally the conflict in Afghanistan has resulted in the world's greatest refugee migration. Together these two dimensions of population pressure have generated a potentially explosive condition.

British history on the occupation of Japan is largely a blank. Government publications on the Far East, political biographies, regimental histories and diplomats' memoires offer slim pickings. Historians interested in postwar Japan have tended to conclude from the apparent paucity of evidence that British influence on the conduct of the Allied occupation was negligible. Standard works on the period have repeated the conventional wisdom and then moved on. Those who were involved at a policy level rarely made any concentrated attempt to correct this picture. Cabinet ministers certainly did not spend any time confiding in their diaries and have not preserved private papers to indicate any particular fascination with the subject. Diplomats have been equally unforthcoming in print. Consequently, any research into British diplomacy and Japan before the opening of the British archives for 1945 and 1946 would have been an endless disappointment. The position has recently changed. Indeed, with a Thirty Year Rule also applying to the Japanese Diplomatic Record Office and with the material available at the Washington National Records Centre, there is suddenly an abundance of material.

There are several reasons for taking a special interest in Hao Ran's Yan Yang Tian (Bright Skies), a novel about the Chinese countryside of which Part One was brought out by the author's Publishing House, Peking, in late 1964 and Part Two by the People's Literature Publishing House in March 1966. The third and final part has yet to be issued. It is the first published novel by Hao Ran, a writer born in 1932 and chiefly known for his short stories. It shows that gloom about the state of contemporary Chinese writing is not always justifiable and, perhaps more significantly, gives a reasonably full and frank account of some critical days in the history of a Chinese village. In providing a very detailed record of the behaviour of a number of peasants in the collectivization movement, it does much to supplement the official reports in the Chinese press and the interpretations of outside observers. Not the least of the book's achievements is the creation in the village boss, Ma Zhiyue, of one of the most significant villains in modern Chinese fiction.

Chinese secret societies have usually proved to be enigmatic topics for scholarly study. Although a considerable amount of writing and research in several languages has been published about Chinese secret societies during the past hundred years, the topic remains beset by a variety of contradictory information.

While various scholars of Indian economic history have focused on the progress of import substitution in India after the 1920s, few have studied why this led to hardly any export of industrial products during the colonial period. One of the most probable reasons for the lesser popularity of this issue could be attributed to a commonly shared view that there was less hope for the export of industrial products in colonial India since import substitution had progressed only so far. Although it is accepted that the industrial development of colonial India was generally stagnant, this does not necessarily apply to specific products in specific industries. For instance, the iron and steel industry achieved almost a full self-sufficiency rate for some of its steel products during the 1920s, although the industry hardly exported the products afterward. This paper aims to clarify why hardly any steel of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), the only steel producing company with modern technology until the mid-1930s, was exported. A detailed study of the company's archives will show that the steel export of the company was fundamentally hindered by a fact which had its origin in British imperial policy: the strict quality specifications in the production of steel.

Being the concluding part of the study on the Chinese in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements, the inquiry has a twofold aim: to construct a social alignment pattern of the Chinese in Penang, and to compare the pattern with those in Singapore and Malacca. Altogether 14,500 names of donors from epigraphic sources were processed.

The Penang Chinese exhibited a rather unique social alignment pattern in that the Hokkiens had been very active in a number of community oriented associations. Cases of cross-dialect-group participation were few, as compared to the other two settlements, for the various dialect groups in Penang, particularly the Hokkiens, were largely attracted to the inter-provincial associations. This was a unique social alignment pattern.

The findings from Penang, together with those in Singapore and Malacca were used to reconstruct an unidimensional scale for measuring the system rigidity of Chinese voluntary associations.

Between 1800 and 1950, the Bengali gentry experienced—over five or six generations—dramatic changes in fortune. The broad outline of the story of landed society in Bengal is well known. There emerged, in the first generation, families from widely varying background who owed their fortunes to the Permanent Settlement. In the next two generations they successfully integrated themselves into the rural world as an influential class of gentry with a well-marked-out life style. The fixity of revenue demand, the extension of cultivation and the perfected machinery of legal coercion contributed towards the development of high landlordism by the mid-nineteenth century. The end of the century, however, brought with it a gradual crumbling of the basis of landed society which gathered momentum with the Great Depression and the second world war, forcing an increasing number among the last two generations to seek supplementary or alternative means of livelihood.

What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-à-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

The assumption of the passive peasant in Indian history has been existent at least since the time of Max Weber, and continues to return, phoenix-like in its appearance, every few decades. Its importance, however, lies in the responses the generality spawns. Morris D. Morris refuted Max Weber's thesis, detailed in The Religions of India, in 1967, while Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was aptly rebutted by Kathleen Gough in 1974. Since then, the concept of the rational peasant, particularly during colonial times, has undergone a metamorphosis. Various modes of peasant dynamics have been amply demonstrated in recent works, stepping into the realms of peasant rebellion, desertion, banditry, and the like. Of particular import, in terms of peasant consciousness, has been the rise of the ‘Subaltern School’ of study. Beginning with Ranajit Guha's seminal work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and continuing with volumes of articles by a variety of authors, the Subaltern Studies group has attempted, in their own words, to offer an alternative to historical writing ‘that fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contributions made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite.…’ These scholars thus use the term subaltern for those social groups which they believe have been ignored through the course of history.

Unlike the State Department Officials of the United States who were subjected by the Senate to postwar Congressional investigation in the Pearl-Harbor hearing, British Far Eastern policy-makers were saved such parliamentary ordeals. The loss of the whole British position in the Far-East at the hands of the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942 was humiliating enough. It was, as Winston Churchill later claimed, ‘the worst disaster and the largest capitulation of British history’.