During the latter part of the nineteenth century and until after the First World War the imperial cities of the Indian Ocean became thriving centres for cultural exchange and intellectual debate. Entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state. Learned elites drawn from the ranks of civil servants, company clerks, doctors, teachers, public inspectors, communications workers, merchants, bankers and (above all) from the legal profession began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves in discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic. The Bhadralok of Calcutta, the Theosophists of Madras and the peranakan (local born) Chinese reformers of Singapore, to name but three of these groups, shared similar concerns for reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. Associational life and journalism flourished in this environment, both in the bureaucratic centres of the British Empire and beyond, in such places as the Dutch port of Batavia and French-administered Saigon, to such an extent that one can fairly speak of a transformation in the public sphere across the Indian Ocean region.

On a hot summer's day in August 1937, Kita Ikki, a pan-Asian visionary and political activist, was executed in the wake of the unsuccessful army rebellion of 26 February 1936, in which he had not participated. As he had stared at the barrels of the rifles of the execution squad, he must have reflected on the life he had led. Whether his last-minute reflections led to any conclusion, we cannot possibly know. It seems likely, however, that the meaning of his life eluded him in his last moments just as it has eluded the historians who have since striven to understand him.

This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have emphasized the moral and sexual worries of the British and the aspiring indigenous middle classes, coupled with a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity. In UP too, endeavours were made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine literature, entertainment and the domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, and to forge a respectable, civilized and distinct Hindu cultural and political identity. Less, however, has been said on how a rich variety of literary practices and complexities of cultural imagination were at the same time placing limits upon projections of respectability and homogeneity. As a result, I will argue, there was no single code of Hindu middle-class morality and no final triumph of sexual conservatism in this period. The efficacy of disciplinary power was considerably diluted. Feminists have also pointed out that though women are often victims of violent crimes and aggressive patriarchal displays, the persistent fore-grounding of pain and political correctness marginalizes women's sexual pleasures and desires.

Introduction

The Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.

In the late 1860s, the colonial state received a petition signed by Keshub Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj to legislate for marriages amongst their members, such that they could freely marry according to their ‘rites of conscience’. Paying little attention to the specific demands and circumstances of the Keshubite petition, the Governor General's Legislative Council began to consider the introduction of a civil marriage law for all Indians, so that those choosing to dissent from the religious practices of their marriage rites could find state sanction for their acts even if they were disowned by their families, castes or ethno-religious communities. The debate that followed the publication of this intention, presented ‘native’ society in a state of anxious turmoil, eager to represent itself as both morally and culturally superior in matters of marriage and kinship relations as opposed to the degenerate ‘Europeans’. Using archival petitions from Indians appealing against the legislation of the first civil marriage law in the late nineteenth century (‘Act III of 1872’), in this paper I detail some of the ways in which love-marriage couples have historically come to inhabit a social space of extreme moral ambivalence. Despite the enormous significance of this nineteenth-century debate, as well as the importance of civil marriage legislation in a country with contradictory and conflicting ‘personal laws’, there has been virtually no academic work (historical or anthropological) that addresses the import of ‘Act III of 1872’ and its legacy to post-independence India. However, the law for civil marriage was nonetheless passed (albeit in a truncated form), thus opening up a theoretical space within which any two Indians could legitimately marry out of choice and love rather than by the dictates of ‘birth’.

I do not understand very clearly what has happened at the Opium Conference except that Japan is taking sides with America against us. This no doubt means that Japan is glad to show America that in spite of the exclusion clause she has no objection to friendly cooperation on occasion. It is also a hint to us. . . . Japan also sometimes feels it prudent to defer to this same powerful country though in so doing she may to her great regret inconvenience her former ally.

This is what Sir Charles N. E. Eliot (1862–1931), the British Ambassador to Japan from 1920 to 1926, wrote home regarding the Japanese representatives' stance at the International Opium Conference held in Geneva from November 1924 to February 1925. At the initial meetings of the conference, unexpected arguments between the representatives of Britain and Japan puzzled the British officials. This paper examines why the Japanese delegates took such a firm attitude on the occasion, and why Japan failed to adopt policies which might have altered the situation.

At the beginning, a warning is due: this is a study of a false trail to real events. Between the years 1883–86, a mixed community sprang up on a side stream of the river Albazikha, a right tributary of the upper Amur. The discovery of gold, in a Chinese territory previously unfamiliar to any but the local Evenki tribes, had brought about a stampede of fortune seekers. Since Russia's annexation of the Amur District by the Aigun treaty of 1858, and its acquisition of the Maritime District by the treaty of Peking in 1860, the Amur and the Ussuri had marked the eastern borderline between the two empires, and the left banks of both rivers were by now dotted with Cossack settlements. Russians thus made up the bulk of the arrivals to the newly discovered deposits of placer gold, opposite the Cossack station Ignashino. However, estimates at different points in time spoke of up to ten percent of Chinese gold-seekers, while persistent reports mentioned the presence among the miners of the representatives of many other nationalities, from Siberian and Chinese native peoples to European and American adventurers. It must have been the Russians who gave the name Zheltuga to the stream along which gold was extracted. The name derived from a tributary of the Shilka river in the Nerchinsk mining area in Eastern Siberia, where gold had been discovered as early as 1860 (and where, in the territory of modern Chita District, the small river Zheltuga still flows today). Soon after its foundation, the rapidly growing gold camp became widely known in the Russian Far East as ‘the Amur California’. It was the need to describe the phenomenon in terms more familiar to readers in European Russia, but also the temptation to project on the miners' assembly such political aspirations that it did not possess, which led later writers to create the fanciful label of a ‘Zheltuga republic’.