One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws.

In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. This was the most dramatic Malaysian acquisition of a foreign company during the restructuring of the country's post-colonial economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Guthrie Dawn Raid remains a celebrated but, at the same time, contested juncture in contemporary Malaysian memory. Drawing upon a variety of sources—including original interviews and correspondence with key participants in, and observers of, the Guthrie Dawn Raid, as well as newly released British documents related to the Anglo-Malaysian events of September 1981—this article presents a new interpretation of the origins of this most iconic of Malaysian corporate takeovers. In particular, it stresses the long-term aspirations of a key (but often overlooked) figure within the late and post-colonial Malay bureaucratic and economic elite, Ismail Mohamed Ali. At the same time, the article emphasizes the specific requirements of Malaysia's New Economic Policy against the backdrop of burgeoning intra-Malaysian ethnic business competition.

This paper provides the first detailed assessment of British exports of silver to Asia during the initial phase of imperial expansion in India. It demonstrates that, contrary to the views of some historians, exports of silver were at times very considerable, notably after 1785, when they were used to fund war and debt-relief in India, as well as for trade. Focus is on the East India Company, but attention is paid to private exports, to British transfers of silver around Asia, and the paper ends with an analysis of ‘reverse’ flows to Britain established after 1810.

Social justice is a key concept in the theory and practice of affirmative action. In India, social justice has come to serve as shorthand for affirmative action for disadvantaged groups, mainly lower castes. This paper provides a detailed analytical interpretation of social justice in a landmark legislative debate on quotas in India, namely the 1990 Mandal debate. It unpacks political rhetoric to reveal distinct conceptions of social justice, shows that claims for quotas for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the bureaucracy drew substantially on principles of social justice and democracy and argues that, despite appearances, several arguments for OBC representation in government jobs were compatible with the principle of merit. In doing so, the paper demonstrates that contrary to common opinion, political rhetoric deserves close attention. A reconstruction of political arguments over affirmative action advances understanding of some puzzling features of lower-caste politics in India. It also illuminates important questions in political theory debates on social justice.

On 10–11 December 2007, a conference was held in Trinity College, Cambridge, in honour of Dr Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953–2006), at which a large number of his former doctoral students and closest colleagues offered research presentations. This special issue of Modern Asian Studies brings together a selection of these papers, revised and extended for publication. It is intended to offer a partial record of the event, and the breadth of research covered within these eight essays is itself testament to the diversity of scholars whom Raj influenced, and the wide array of subjects upon which his work has continued to have an impact.

Maratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts. They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order. Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution of such disputes.

This paper discusses the commercial history of the Java sugar industry in the interwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Java's late colonial industry had a uniquely exogenous character, in that, amongst the world's major producers of cane sugar in the late colonial era, it was singularly devoid of metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan markets. Instead, it sought its markets pre-eminently on the Asian ‘mainland’ to its north and northwest. The Indian subcontinent formed one such market, but East Asia formed the second, and it is the Java industry's fortunes in China and Japan that provide the focus of the present paper. This focus highlights the extent to which the partial collapse of the industry in the mid-1930s related to factors altogether more complex than a simple fall in consumption and drop in prices associated with the interwar Depression. Fundamentally, it was evolving economic autarchy throughout east Asia, encouraged by Depression conditions, which lay at the heart of the Java sugar industry's problems in this sector of its market. Key factors were Java's ambivalent relationship with an expanding but crisis-ridden Japanese sugar ‘empire,’ and the effect on its long-standing links with British sugar refineries in Hong Kong because of the latter's increasing difficulties in the China market. In tandem, they underscored the commercial hazards inherent in Java sugar's exogenous situation.

When India gained independence in August 1947 the world watched with excitement as well as trepidation as to what would happen following this unique and major event. The political destiny of the world's largest democracy would lie in the hands of an infinitesimal portion of the population – the political executive. India's new institutions had new operators to act in new conditions. There were few precedents. Within this Westminster system, refounded in India with its emphasis on executive flexibility and ambiguity, the leading political figures often had conflicting opinions and interpretations as to their powers. The relationship between Nehru as Prime Minister and other leading political figures, such as Patel as deputy Prime Minister, Prasad as President, and their definitions of their roles, would forge a new India. This paper revisits those debates and ideas in the first decade following independence, which allow greater understanding of the workings and conventions of today's Indian executive.

This paper evaluates in detail the policies adopted and the religious ideas held by the power elite of Pakistan during the years from 1947 to 1969. It has been argued that the religious worldview of the power elite was shaped by the discourse of Islamic modernism which allowed envisioning of a state in which (at least theoretically) democracy, rights of minorities, sovereignty of the parliament and flexibility of Islamic laws could be propagated as the guiding principles of the state. Also, by focusing on the life and ideas of Ghulam Ahmad Parvez and by disclosing the details of his close connivance with General Ayyub Khan during the 1960s, the paper will highlight the steps taken to institutionalize Islamic modernism in Pakistan.

This paper discusses the origins and the implementation of the New Life Movement (NLM) in the Jiangxi Province between 1934 and 1938. Based upon primary sources produced during this period, it explores how the Nationalist Party utilised the NLM for the purposes of national reconstruction and social mobilisation. The first section analyses how elements of anti-communism, Christianity and state Confucianism came into play in the NLM; the second section analyses how the Nationalists reinforced the idea of ‘hygienic modernity’ by projecting it into the realms of state building and mass mobilisation; the third section discusses the changes introduced in society by the Nationalists with the creation of semi-governmental organisations; and the fourth section examines the involvement of the NLM with preparation for the war against Japan (1937–1945). The paper argues that the NLM had a lasting impact on Chinese society, and it contributed to shape citizenship and national identity.

This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa 1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of ‘knowledge’ in this period? After addressing these questions on ‘modes’ of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of ‘means’ of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘bibliocentric’ attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge or takiyya.

This paper engages with Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument that the importance accorded to the intermediation of sardars/jobbers in colonial labour arrangements followed from the perception of the Indian peasant as static and immobile, requiring especial effort at recruitment, but that, over time, employers grew resentful of the power and control acquired by these intermediaries. Drawing on this insight, the paper examines the role of sardars in the recruitment system of the Assam tea plantations and the ways in which they were promoted by the planters and the state in an attempt to loosen the stranglehold of professional contractors. The sardars were presented as the solution to abuses of Assam recruitment and portrayed as non-market agents recruiting within the closed world of kin, caste and village relationships. Towards the late-nineteenth century, however, a nexus developed between the contractors and sardars, which successive legislative interventions failed to break. Moreover, the notion that the sardar would be a more benign agent of recruitment was repeatedly proved false.

This paper traces the evolution of the indenture labour system in the tea plantations of Assam and, simultaneously, the shaping of the attitudes of British planters towards the labour force. Also explored are: the significant fact that only a small number of British managerial personnel were in charge of a huge migrant labour force; how the need to step up tea production for the competitive world market while keeping down costs—i.e. labour costs, being the main production cost—fostered an exploitative labour system, with planters taking frequent recourse to physical and economic coercion; and the ensuing extra-legal measures needed to keep the labour force under control. The paper also demonstrates that the colonial state was in full cognizance of the injustices of the labour system. Legislation by the government had laid the foundations of the indenture system and, while there were provisions for protecting the interests of labour force, these were on the whole ignored, with the state turning a blind eye to the planters’ use of physical and other extra-legal measures. One instance involved Chief Commissioner Henry Cotton, who attacked the injustices of the system. This attack was silenced swiftly, and the stance taken by Viceroy Curzon as the incident played out is a clear pointer to the government's willingness, to side with tea-industry interests at all costs.

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.

The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

Mayawati's recent victory, in May 2007, in the Uttar Pradesh elections has been hailed as a ‘spectacular display of subaltern power’. The questions remain: who are these subalterns? To what extent do they form a coherent block, with similar fears, hopes and aspirations, and how are subalterns’ visions of the state, social justice and equality articulated? This paper explores some of these questions, by examining the example of the boatman community in Banaras, belonging to the Mallah (Nishad) caste, and the strategies they use to be heard as legitimate citizens of the state. Such strategies and techniques reveal a sophisticated and organized apparatus of caste and community associations that call into question some recent theoretical formulations of the Indian state as one dominated and manipulated by powerful elites, while subalterns remain passive or, at best, compliant.

Towards the end of World War II, the morale of British units stationed in Burma and India was on a downslide. In contrast, the morale of Indian units was quite high. In fact, after the 1943 Arakan Campaign, the morale of Indian units rose slowly but steadily. The morale and discipline of Indian troops are also compared and contrasted with another colonial army: the African troops. By making a comparative study of the Commonwealth troops deployed in Burma and India, this paper attempts to show how and why the contours of morale and discipline changed among the various groups of troops at different times. The study of morale and discipline of the troops deployed in these two regions represents two extreme conditions: while Burma remained a war front, India did not experience any actual warfare except for some skirmishes with Indus tribes at the northwest frontier. In general, bad discipline is partly responsible for bad morale and vice versa, which adversely affects the fighting power of armies. This turns to the issue of ‘why do men fight’? The ‘will to war’ is directly proportional to good discipline and strong morale amongst troops. This paper will look for the causative factors shaping discipline and morale of both metropolitan and colonial soldiers, based mainly on military intelligence reports on morale. We will see that rather than grand ideas like nationalism and anti-fascism, mundane factors like the supply of good rations, access to sex and service conditions, influence the morale and discipline of soldiers, and hence their combat-worthiness.

Brajbhasha literature is a domain of Mughal culture seldom investigated by scholars, to the detriment of our understanding of both. While the Mughal court is famed for its lavish support of Persian writers, a surprising number of Brajbhasha poets also attracted the notice of Mughal patrons. In this paper I look at the lives and texts of important Braj writers who worked in Mughal settings, with a view to uncovering the nature of the social, political and cultural interactions that this kind of patronage represents. Why these poets have been largely lost to social and literary history is another concern, along with the challenges of trying to recover their stories.

In the winter of 1945, the multinational Chinese Maritime Customs Service opened an inquiry into the cooperation of hundreds of its own employees with Japanese occupation forces in China. This was, as far as the historical record allows us to say, the most thorough investigation undertaken in China into collaboration during World War Two. This paper represents the first historical analysis of the Customs ‘Staff Investigation Committee.’ It argues that the investigation represented a new direction for the Customs Service in China. The investigation's underpinning rationale was that Customs staff, Chinese and foreign, served the Kuomintang government before any other notion of Chinese or Service interests—a dramatic change in direction for an organisation that had been emblematic of treaty-port China. The investigation thus offers historians an insight into the understudied final years of the Customs Service, into the late Republican government's efforts to deal with the legacy of imperialism, and into the extent and rationale of collaboration in Nationalist China.

Islam's devotional and mystical tradition, Sufism (tasawwuf), is commonly cast as antithetical to Salafi Islam. Self-identified ‘Salafis’, with their ideological roots in anti-liberal strands of twentieth-century modernist Islam, do commonly view Sufis as heretics propagating practices wrongly introduced into Islam centuries after the time of the pious ancestors (the Salaf). Yet reformist zeal that fixes on the singular importance of the Salaf (particularly the Prophet Muhammad and his principal companions) as models for correct piety can also be found amongst Sufis. This paper calls attention to the Salafist colouration of Sufism in two areas of popular culture: television preaching and the popular religious ‘how-to’ books and DVDs that make the preachers’ messages available for purchase. It reprises the teachings of two of the best known Indonesian Muslim televangelists, ‘Hamka’ (b. 1908, d. 1981) and M. Arifin Ilham (b. 1969), both of whom also happen to be champions of Sufism, and analyses the different rhetorical uses each has made of references to the ‘Salaf’ and the notion of ‘Salafist’ Islam.

This paper explores the interplay between development, identity politics and middle-class aspirations amongst low-caste Chamar women in rural north India. It argues that this interplay has reinvigorated notions of women's domesticity, education and modern conjugality as they emerged in the reforms and ‘modernising’ efforts of sections of Indian society, since the nineteenth century, in their encounter with the colonial ‘civilising mission’. It will show how the long-term effects of this ‘legacy’, through its reconfiguration and appropriation by members from a low caste, have affected a historically marginalised community in their pursuit of middle-class aspirations. In addition to the criticality of Indian women and their gender roles as ‘sites’ where nation and community transformations are symbolically and practically negotiated, scholars of South Asia have also highlighted the separation between historical and anthropological discourses on women. This paper brings these discourses together and addresses this separation by showing that Chamar appropriation of the ‘modernising’ agenda has initiated a dual process. On the one hand, a minority of women have embarked on an embourgeoisement trajectory predicated on education, ‘modern motherhood’ and aspirations to white collar employment, and on the other hand, underprivileged women (with their ‘unfit’ personas) have become increasingly vulnerable to stigmatisation as a result of being in ‘menial labour’. It is further argued that dialectic study of the ‘two [groups of] Chamar women’ will provide an insightful lens through which inner conflicts within low-caste communities in contemporary India may be understood, and suggests that there are contradictory trends concerning women, their development prospects, and their membership within the nation.