This paper considers non-governmental famine relief in India during 1896–1898 and 1899–1901. It details the efforts of a broad spectrum of middle-class Indians, Christian missionaries, British non-officials and off-duty civil servants who were drawn into voluntary service on semi-official committees which were responsible for distributing record sums raised through international appeals. It also explores the extension of relief work by independent agencies in the 1890s. The paper considers evolving British attitudes to indigenous relief methods and the sometimes fraught relations between government and voluntary agencies. It suggests that voluntary famine relief activities during the 1890s mark a transition from traditional religious philanthropy to organised social service. Voluntary relief at this time differed from earlier responses to famine hunger because it was marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the personal service of volunteers. In conclusion, it is shown that participation in relief in the 1890s inspired a new generation of educated Indians to channel their nationalism into practical social service after 1900.

That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men's property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.

By the nineteenth century, with the advance of British colonial activities, British corporate laws had been transplanted to maritime Asia with varying degrees of vigour. In British Hong Kong, these laws often clashed with native customs. Through a reconstruction of the legal disputes found in urban Hong Kong, this paper discusses how British and Chinese business traditions interacted with each other during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before assessing the historical implications and consequences of these legal decisions, this paper will also explore whether the Chinese institution of tong is compatible with British law in urban Hong Kong.

This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt to understand how, despite profound social divisions, India's nationhood holds together. The paper advances the proposition that the Indian polity incorporated a deeply divided and conflict-ridden population by offering multiple notions of citizenship upon which a sense of membership in the nation, and a share in the enterprise of the state, could be sought. By negotiating and balancing distinct overlapping conceptions for competing membership claims in the nation, diverse social groups could find a viable place in the nation, without entirely resigning their various group identities. The analysis focuses as a lens on the Muslim citizens who are amongst the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry. It provides perspectives into how even some of the most marginalised members in Indian society found sufficient prospects for a meaningful participation within the nation. Multiple conceptions of citizenship enabled the state to manage its diverse social groups and contain many of their underlying conflicts.

For many Muslims, the preservation of Muslim Personal Law has become the touchstone of their capacity to defend their religious identity in modern India. This paper examines public debate over Muslim Personal Law, not as a site of consensus within the community, but rather as an arena in which a varied array of Muslim individuals, schools and organisations have sought to assert their own distinctiveness. This is done by discussing the evolution of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the most influential organisation to speak on such matters since the 1970s, with particular focus on its recent disintegration at the hands of a number of alternative legal councils formed by feminist, clerical and other groups. These organisations have justified their existence through criticism of the organisation's alleged attempts to standardise Islamic law, and its perceived dominance by the Deobandi school of thought. In truth, however, this process of fragmentation results from a complex array of embryonic and interlinked personal, political and ideological competitions, indicative of the increasingly fraught process of consensus-building in contemporary Indian Muslim society.