In this paper I argue that the manner in which piety is perceived and propagated among Muslims in Sri Lanka must be understood as located within the context of ethnic conflict and the polarization between ethnic groups that occurred in its wake. I explore the work of one Muslim women's da'wa (preaching) group—Al Muslimaat—that pioneered the process of making piety popular among lower-middle and middle-income Muslim women in a semi-urban Colombo neighbourhood. Looking at the group's activities and specifically through analyses of the bayan or lay sermons delivered by their most charismatic member, I look at the nature of the pious practice that is preached. I argue that in making a self-consciously pious Muslim female subject, Al Muslimaat bayans are affecting ideas of masculinity and femininity among the suburban Muslims with whom they work, and recasting Muslimness in a manner exclusive of ethnic others. I argue also that by marginalizing the kafir in propagating the new Muslim, Al Muslimaat and the greater piety movement in Sri Lanka is mirroring the particular incommensurable identities already espoused by the violently strident Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms in the country.

This article is concerned with the role of kinship and kin morality in contexts of work in South Asia. It focuses on the highly ambivalent nature of kin morality when mobilised outside the household and the family. Ethnographic evidence from a small-scale industry in Tamilnadu, South India, shows how employers frequently invoke the morality of kinship and caste in an attempt to secure a reliable and compliant labour force and to avoid overt class confrontation. However, employers’ efforts to promote kinship—real or fictive—and its morality in the workplace appear inadequate in the face of high labour turnover and frequently collapsing employer-worker relationships in small-scale industries. While employers’ repeated use of kin ideology succeeds in silencing the workers on the shop floor, it is much less effective in securing a stable labour force in the long run. The argument put forward here points to the limits of kin morality and questions its effectiveness in informal contexts of labour employment. The discussion sheds new light on the role of caste and kinship in recruiting, retaining and disciplining labour in India's informal economy.

From the 1870s onwards, debates about famine policy were central to both colonial and nationalist conceptions of the role, effectiveness and legitimacy of the state in India. Although opinions on how best to relieve famines varied, ideological opposition to a narrow laissez-faire paradigm was given short shrift in the years preceding the formulation of the Indian Famine Codes. However, specific empirical critiques of the making and implementing of famine policy were more effective. This article explores the ways in which such challenges put scientific and statistical experts within the colonial edifice at odds with those at the top of the political hierarchy, focusing on disputes over relief wages and famine mortality calculations between Sir Richard Temple and Surgeon-Major W. R. Cornish. It further examines how proto-nationalist groups and newspapers seized on the value given to statistics by the state to hold it to account for its failure to relieve famine.

This paper uses a study of strikes of railway workers in Bihar and Bengal from 1918 to 1922 to set out and examine the complexities of workers' politics. Three broad themes related with workers' politics, viz. racial ideology, actual ‘event’ of striking and the related activities of workers, and techniques of mobilization have been covered in this paper. In each of these cases, it has been argued that rigid categories like racialism or nationalism are of little help in unravelling the complexities of workers' choices and their politics. Their politics were more flexible than what meets the eye, and their choices were created through dialogue, if not determined by the various factors surrounding them. However such choices were also being limited by the larger context provided by the ideologies and institutions of racialism, nationalism, and colonialism.

Thich Tri Quang has long been one of the most controversial actors in the history of the Vietnam War. Scholars on the right have argued that Tri Quang was in all likelihood a communist agent operating at the behest of Hanoi. Scholars on the left have argued that Tri Quang was a peaceful religious leader devoted to democracy and a rapid end to the war. This article argues that neither of these interpretations is persuasive. As American officials rightly concluded throughout the war, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Tri Quang was a communist agent or in any way sympathetic to the goals of Hanoi or the NLF. Drawing on the extensive archival evidence of Tri Quang's conversations with American officials, it is apparent that Tri Quang was in fact strongly anti-communist and quite receptive to the use of American military power against North Vietnam and China. The main factor that led to conflict between the Buddhist movement and the Johnson administration was Tri Quang's insistence that the military regimes that followed Ngo Dinh Diem were hostile to Buddhism and incapable of leading the struggle against Communism to a successful conclusion.

This article examines the rise of dowry system in Janta, a West Bengali village in the Bankura district, where the dowry payments are a relatively new phenomenon. The oldest generation in Janta had experienced times when no demands for money or other gifts had been made during marriage arrangements, but since the 1950s huge dowry payments have become the central financial transactions in the region. In addition to oral history interviews on dowry practices, I draw from my research on the changes in caste, gender and class relationships in the village. I argue that the dowry payments do not merely represent economic considerations in a class conscious society, but that they reflect a rearticulation of both the tradition and market, of gender, ritual, and class identities, and that paying attention to the multiplicity and local variation of dowry practices provides a key to its understanding.

In the wake of the Government of India Act of 1935, provincial politics emerged as a challenge to the authority and legitimacy of all-India, centralised political parties. While the Congress and the Muslim League set up a binary opposition between secular and religious nationalism, provincial politicians refused to succumb to the singularity of either alternative. Partition historiography has been concerned with the interplay of national and communal ideologies in the 1940s, overshadowing this third trajectory of regional politics that was informed by provincial particularities. This article traces a short-lived alternative that emerged in Bengal between 1940 and 1943 under the premiership of Fazlul Huq. Huq produced a peculiar form of identity politics that appealed not only to religious sentiment but also to regional loyalty that cut across the religious divide. Significantly, he did so without resorting to secular claims. By challenging Jinnah's claim to being the sole spokesman of Muslims in India and highlighting the different concerns of a province with a Muslim majority, Huq reconciled the twin identities of religion and region within the same political paradigm, and foreshadowed the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.

There is very little information or analysis on middle class youth in Vietnam. This paper begins to fill this gap in our knowledge by utilising data on urban, educated professional youth from the Survey Assessment of Vietnamese Youth (2003–04) and an ethnographic investigation in Hanoi between 1999 and 2002. It considers some of the conceptual and analytical issues in addressing the character and definition of the middle class in Southeast Asia more generally, and provides contextual information on the emergence of the middle class in Vietnam and the transformation of the class structure there. The information available suggests that the expanding young middle class in Vietnam exhibits many of the characteristics of the middle class everywhere—possession of cultural capital, a firm interest in and commitment to education, an orientation to consumption and to accessing news and information, and aspirations to improve and develop in personal and career terms. However, the continuing close relationship between members of the middle class and the Vietnamese state suggests that there is little evidence as yet of the middle class developing a political identity or of the emergence of civil society. The data demonstrate continuity in state-generated employment and education between the current generation and its predecessor, which arises from the continuing influence of the state on Vietnamese society in its role as provider of employment, career paths, education and scholarships, as well as from the continuing influence of the senior generation on their children.

In many religious traditions, those who mediate relations between men and gods are often the focus of controversy and moral ambiguity. The ethnography in this paper outlines a number of perspectives on the role of such intermediaries (here ‘saints’) in Muslim society in western India. In the South Asian literature, historians have provided a thorough treatment of the doctrinal history and content of these debates. However, very little attention has been paid to how living individuals interpret and rehearse these debates in practice. The examination of the changing perspectives of three Muslim men on the question of saint worship over a 10 year period reveals the following. First, an individual's relationship with ‘saints’ is often determined primarily by social context rather than simply by doctrinal allegiance or the compulsions of particular ‘beliefs’. Second, discourses of religious reform are also powerful social objects that can be used as political instruments for purposes other than simply refining the religious practices of a community. Finally, many commonplace assumptions in the literature—notably on the nature of belief and the significance of doctrinal divisions among Muslims—do not withstand ethnographic scrutiny.

Secularism has been a defining norm for the modern, liberal Indian state. The constitutionally secular Gujarat state is believed to have undergone a paradigmatic shift in 2002, when it supported a massacre of Muslim citizens. This article investigates the empirical as well as normative state in situations of inter-religious violence. It traces the journey of the secular norm over a 45-year period, in the context of contests over identity, political ideology and socio-political dominance. The picture that emerges is much more nuanced than that projected by stark pronouncements of paradigm shifts and the inauguration of a Hindu rashtra.2

This article examines the revival of adat (custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise of adat revivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratization and decentralization which followed the end of Suharto's authoritarian rule. The third is the oppression of marginal population groups under the New Order. The fourth root is historical, having to do with the positive role which adat has played in the country's political imagination since the beginning of Indonesian nationalism. Adat as a political cause involves a set of loosely related ideals which, rightly or wrongly, are associated with the past: authenticity, community, order, and justice. These ideals have been invoked in varying proportions to pursue a wide variety of political ends, including the control of resources and the exclusion of rivals as well as the protection, empowerment, and mobilization of underprivileged groups.

This article argues that villagers' weakened trust in local governments has caused the officials to develop new strategies to cooperate with people and groups who enjoy traditional forms of authority. More specifically, the article shows how the officially established Old People' Associations in some areas have gained political influence far beyond what their official status as an “NGO” (minjian zuzhzi) would warrant. Villages of Fujian have a long history of being organised around patrilinear lineage organisations, and especially the older men still enjoys authority among the population. Local authorities, as well as business people, are therefore actively trying to engage and mobilise this traditional senior authority for their own political and economic purposes, thereby creating new relations of local power.

This paper explores the responses of women living in a small town in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan to the Islamizing policies of the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties elected to provincial government in the North West Frontier Province in October 2002. Its focus is on women in the region who vocally and publicly criticize Chitral's politically active madrasa-educated ‘men of piety’. Documenting the ways in which these women and the region's ‘men of piety’ debate with one another on matters concerning personal morality, comportment and self-presentation illuminates dimensions of small-town Muslim life that are rarely considered important in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. In particular, by exploring these complex and multi-dimensional debates, I seek to emphasize the inherently unfinished nature of Chitralis’ responses to ongoing Islamizing processes, a growing and pervasive sense of disenchantment amongst many of the region's Muslims with the authenticity of public expressions of personal piety, and, in this context, the continuing emergence of new ways of being Muslim, modes of self-presentation and categories of Islamic public opinion forming figures.

This paper is a critique of popular and academic assumptions about the Muslim ‘community’ and Islamist organizations, especially in the context of displacement and reconstruction after the 2002 riots in Ahmedabad, western India. It explores the internal politics of Jamaat-led organizations and the engagement of survivors with ideas of reform and piety. Contesting contemporary understandings of reformist Jamaats, I argue that the growing influence of the latter organizations had little co-relation with their resettlement plans and policies. The reconstruction patterns were more closely linked to the history of labour migration to the city, and the subsequent movement of violence-affected people from the mill areas to larger Muslim ghettoes. My ethnography shows how the survivors strategically engaged with reform initiatives and negotiated with local Islamist organizations for ‘safe housing’. By illustrating certain ambiguities within the everyday practices of Islam, my paper also problematizes notions of ‘piety’ and ‘agency’, primarily after people's experiences of communal violence.

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.

I describe here a nascent ‘Islamic feminist’ movement in India, dedicated to the goal of achieving gender equity under Muslim Personal Law. In justifying their demands, these women activists refer neither to the Indian Constitution nor to the universalistic human rights principles that guide secular feminists campaigning for passage of a gender-neutral uniform civil code of personal law, but rather to the authority of the Qur'an—which, they claim, grants Muslim women numerous rights that in practice are routinely denied them. They accuse the male ‘ulama of foisting ‘patriarchal’ interpretations of the Qur'an on the unlettered Muslim masses and assert their right to read the Qur'an for themselves and interpret it in a woman-friendly way. Their activities reflect an increasing ‘fragmentation of religious authority’ in the globalizing Muslim world, associated with the spread of mass education, new forms of media and transport and a mobile labour force, in which clerical claims to exclusive authoritative knowledge are being questioned by a wide variety of new voices, women's among them. Whether it can ultimately succeed is an open question but the movement is clearly having an impact, even on the clerical establishment itself, insofar as the legal issues it considers most pressing for women are concerned.

In South Asia, Muslim reformers have often attempted to ‘rationalize’ and gentrify the everyday behaviour of ordinary Muslims. Yet, despite the existence of discussions of contraceptive techniques in the yūnān-ī tibb curricula of 19th century India and the apparent affinity between rationalism and fertility regulation, contraception was rarely discussed in public debates involving Muslim reformers. In this paper we discuss some of the relationships between élite debates among Muslim leaders and the grassroots behaviour of villagers in rural Bijnor, in western Uttar Pradesh. Villagers' voices are ambiguous, with fears for mother and child health surfacing as often as concerns for religious orthodoxy and one's destiny in the afterlife. In addition, many of the villagers' views of Islam were much more restrictive than those of the locally accepted authoritative voices: although the staff at Daru'l ‘Ulūm, Deoband, saw much modern contraception as an unwelcome sign of modernity, their discussions of the acceptability of family planning circled round notions of majbūrī [compulsion], repentance, and the unfathomable mercy of Allah. We conclude that focusing on local notions of Islam to understand the fertility behaviour of rural Muslims is less fruitful than considering a “political economy of hopelessness” that, increasingly since 1947, affects many Muslims in north India.

Islamists' ideas about the position of women are readily invoked to portray them as ‘anti-modern’. The operating assumption is that Islamism (mutatis mutandis Islam) sanctions gender hierarchy. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research and written sources of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India, founded in 1941, I question such assumptions. While defending Islam against the ‘epidemic’ of westernization, Maududi (b. 1903), the Jamaat's founder, called women ‘the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture’. Invoking the Quran and Prophetic traditions, he argued that women should not step outside of the home, and must veil themselves from head to toe. He stood against any political role for women. For decades, Maududi's interpretation went uncontested. However, from the 1970s onwards many members of the Jamaat began to critique Maududi and offered an alternative reading of Islam. They argued that women could indeed leave the home, assume key economic and political roles, unveil their faces, as well as act in films. By highlighting such voices and analysing the sociological coordinates of the contestations within the Jamaat, I underscore the transformation in the Jamaat's discourse. I conclude by discussing whether the critiques of Maududi by his own followers inaugurate an alternative discourse of Islamic feminism.