This article examines the literary strategies employed by a devotional poet who wrote about recent events in the eighteenth century, in order to shed light on contemporary notions of social responsibility. Taking the poetic treatment of Ahmad Shah Abdali's invasion of North India and the sacking of Vrindavan in 1757 as its primary focus, the article will discuss how political and theological understandings of lordship converged at a popular level, such that a deity could be called to account as a neglectful landlord as well as venerated in a bhakti context. It examines the redaction of tropes inherited from both vaisnava literature and late Mughal ethical thought, and considers the parallels between the Harikala Beli, a Braj Bhasha poem, and immediately contemporary developments in Urdu literature, particularly the shahr ashob genre. As such, it uses poetic responses to traumatic events as a guide to the interaction between multiple intellectual systems concerned with human and divine expectations and obligations.

In the early twentieth century, the Salvation Army in British India transformed its public profile and standing, shifting from being an organization seen by the state as a threat to social order, to being partner to the state in the delivery of social welfare programmes. At the same time, the Army also shaped discussion and anxieties about the precarious position of India's economy and sought to intervene on behalf of the state—or to present itself as doing so—in the rescue of India's traditional industries. The Army was an important actor in debates about the future of traditional industries such as silkworm rearing and silk weaving, and was able to mobilize public opinion to press provincial governments for resources with which to try to resuscitate and rejuvenate India's silk industry. Although the Army's sericulture initiatives failed to thwart the decline of India's silk industry, they generated significant momentum, publicity, and public attention, to some extent transforming the Army's standing in British India and beyond.

Theorists of globalization as well as activists' writing from a range of positions have argued that intimate practices are taking centre stage and becoming part of global discourses in the process. This holds true for the institution of marriage and the associated ideas about appropriate family forms, but also more generally for the ways in which ideas about ‘modern selves’ are realized in relationships based on reflexivity and self-knowledge through engagement with an intimate other.

Modern Asian Studies was first published in 1967. It was a manifestation of the enthusiasm for ‘area studies’ which swept academia in the mid-twentieth century. This in turn was prompted by a recognition in Western scholarly and other circles of the importance of understanding the history, languages, and cultures of the world beyond North America and Europe. Such knowledge was desirable in its own right, adding to the sum total of human experience and achievement, but, as societies and economies became increasingly interwoven, it was believed to have significant practical value for dealing with problems of business and trade, politics and diplomacy, the migration of peoples on an unprecedented scale, and fears and anxieties as differing cultures and religions came into contact with each other.

Through a description of the interactions of Christian missionaries in Chhotanagpur with the Oraons, this article illustrates the different ways in which the missionaries grappled with and restructured their notions of the ‘tribe’ and the ‘Oraon’ across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Oraon, I argue, was initially recognized in terms of his heathen practices, his so-called compact with the Devil, and his world of idolatry and demonology. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, he increasingly became, in missionary language, an animistic aboriginal tribe, a ‘primitive’ within an evolutionary schema. As the missionaries searched for an authentic Oraon language, for myths, traditions and histories, an array of categories—heathen, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—seemingly jostled with one another in their narratives. Indeed, the tension between religion and race could never be resolved in missionary narratives; this was reflected in colonial ethnographic literature that drew upon and yet eventually marginalized missionary representations. I conclude by referring to a case in the 1960s filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi, which was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court, that raised the question whether religion or race determined tribal identity.

This article examines pacification operations conducted by British colonial armies throughout the Maratha Deccan from 1803 to 1818. The East India Company assembled concentrations of coercive force by extending patronage to loyalist elites and mobile war bands. Military contingents from allied princely states were mobilized and combined with a policy of brokerage intended to demobilize hostile forces holed up in forts or engaged in brigandage. Pacification through a mixture of negotiations and force ensured loyalist groups a privileged place in the emerging colonial order.

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality.

Literary journals and newspapers aiming to reform the religious beliefs and domestic habits of women were common in early twentieth-century North India. Although most readings have focused on how these texts reflected male legislation of women's behaviour, we should look at Muslim reformist literature to understand male experiences; this investigation offers new insights into an emergent middle-class identity defined more by manners than birth. Readings of a previously little-researched Urdu newspaper, Madinah, and its women's section offer new insights on male experiences of reformism, characterized by profound ambivalence. Playfulness emerged in some reformist descriptions of women's voices, channelling the influence of rekhti. Ultimately Madinah cultivated pride in Islam's strict division of gender roles and conversely threatened men with shame for failing to regulate uneducated women. Descriptions of powerful, Ottoman women warriors were framed to incite men to acts of bravery, using reports from Europe as cautionary examples of the over-indulgence of women. While the newspaper offered outlets for men to express curiosity about women's experiences, ultimately reformist literature limited expressions of pleasure. Male ambivalence regarding the implications of the reformist project remained embedded in writing about women.

From the fourteenth century CE onwards, South Indian states ruled by Hindu kings were strongly influenced by politico-cultural conventions from Muslim-governed areas. This development was, for instance, manifest in the dress and titles of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire. As has been argued, they bore the title of sultan and on public occasions they appeared in garments fashioned on Persian and Arab clothing. Both adaptations exemplified efforts to connect to the dominant Indo-Islamic world. From Vijayanagara's fragmentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Hindu-ruled kingdoms arose. We may wonder to what extent those succeeding polities continued practices adopted from Islamic courts. With that question in mind, this article discusses royal dress at court audiences in four Vijayanagara successor states, chiefly on the basis of embassy reports of the Dutch East India Company and South Indian works of art. It appears that kings could wear a variety of clothing styles at audiences and that influences on these styles now came from multiple backgrounds, comprising diverse Islamic and other elements. Further, not all successor states followed the same dress codes, as their dynasties modified earlier conventions in different ways, depending on varying political developments.

This article traces the consilience of science and mythology in the history of fossil research in India: this is a narrative in which Indian fossil research met the Orientalist discovery of the Indian past. It demonstrates that in exploring the geological evolution of Indian fossils, British researchers such as Hugh Falconer invoked animals from the Puranas, picking up on a tradition of mythological hermeneutics first developed in India by the likes of William Jones. In exploring the nuances of this intellectual approach, the article thus identifies a hitherto obscured historical trajectory regarding the making of geology in colonial India.

With the exception of a few anthropologists working on gender, much of the recent literature on emerging intimate modernities in South Asia, and the middle class in India in particular, seems to support a view of social relationships evolving in a kind of linear development towards free choice, individualism, and identities based on sexual preference. This imagery is particularly prominent in the representation and self-representation of metropolitan, educated middle-class youths, whose views dominate popular media representations and are associated with secularism, individualism, and independence from family and community. In this article I argue that apart from the ostensibly overwhelming transformations that discourses on coupledom, love, choice and self-realization bring in their wake, new ways of choosing a spouse and of conducting conjugal relations among middle-class urbanites have to be interpreted in relation to much more subtle and long-standing social transformations as well as existing institutional forms, in particular the practical implications of patrilocality and the ideology and reality of the joint family. Based on fieldwork with Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Kolkata spanning two decades, the article charts continuities and subtle shifts in the way ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are related in conversations, and how young women and their parents negotiate marriage in the context of middle-class consumerism, status competition, and uncertainty.

It is now widely rumoured that the ‘Asian century’ is upon us. But what does this really mean? As late as 1988, Deng Xiaoping—in remarks made before the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi—expressed some scepticism about the facility of the formulation. As Deng stated then:

Whatever the doubts about his standing as a Marxist, then, we may say that Deng remained resolutely universalist in his perspective, at least outwardly.

The idea of Asia as a unity has appealed both to Europeans interested in differentiating themselves from a threatening, if inferior, Asiatic ‘other’, and to Asians keen to mark their distance from an alien and alienating Europe and West. For both groups, Asia is a useful term of alterity, although the place of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reversed. Near the beginning of his lecture Sanjay Subrahmanyam remarks that, ‘in the play between the -emic and the -etic, the insider's and the outsider's perspective, a concept like “Asia” falls decidedly on the side of the -etic’. This point is reinforced by the fact that the European concept of Asia goes back to the Ancient Greeks (as Subrahmanyam notes), whereas the interest of Asian insiders in the concept of a homogeneous Asia is a modern phenomenon, a reaction against the assumption of superiority inherent in Western imperialism and neo-imperialism. In the case of both the European and the Asian conceptions, however, it is the viewpoint of the observer, rather than the empirical features of what is observed, that gives shape and meaning to the concept. I will use this short response to take a look at Asia from a third perspective, one that is neither fully ‘insider’ nor ‘outsider’ in character, namely that of the early modern Armenians, whose travels took them across the length and breadth of Asia, and Europe too.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the city of Nanjing, China, the article analyses discursive practices of courtship and marriage in the context of post-Mao and post-Deng economic, social, and legal developments. Informants’ discussions often revolve around the tension between the idea that marriage should be about love and the increasing material demands that prospective grooms face upon marriage in a market-led consumer society. This tension also emerges in media debates on the hedonistic attitude of Ma Nuo, a contestant on the matchmaking programme Feicheng Wurao (If you are the one). Informants, on the other hand, articulate their feelings in terms of family responsibility and pursue marriages that, while based on choice, may also ensure financial stability and parental approval.

Secular governance in India was meant to have incorporated religion within public life, but the implementation of ‘Indian secularism’ has in important ways been premised on separating religious and secular lifeworlds. Public Hindu temples, whose assets and operations are managed by a melange of statutory bodies, courts, and state governments, exemplify this puzzling situation. The 2011 discovery of treasures within the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, Kerala, prompted extended public debate about the ownership of temple assets as well as litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court of India. Indian citizens, erstwhile princely rulers, and the deity of the temple were variously presented as the true owners of the wealth. Ultimately, both public discourse and judicial opinion largely reaffirmed the notion that religious institutions are to be treated as private, contractually defined properties, and that temple wealth, as specifically religious property, exists outside of market circulations.

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India.

By charting the activities of Ottoman experts in Afghanistan from 1908–23, this article demonstrates how their arrival precipitated a series of state-building practices rooted in the particular historical experience of Ottoman reform projects. The country thus became the object of an Ottoman mission civilisatrice and the beneficiary, in the eyes of certain figures within the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, of an avowedly Ottoman-Turkish modernity. Sharing this conviction were members of the Afghan royal family and its chief ministers, especially Maḥmūd Ṭarzī, who first invited the Ottoman advisers to Kabul. The provision of Ottoman technical assistance took a variety of forms, but is most evident in military, educational, and public health reforms enacted in Kabul in this period. Through the study of previously unexamined Ottoman, Afghan, and British sources, the aim here is to incorporate these events into discussions of Ottoman informal empire, Afghan developmentalism, and pan-Islam.

This article examines the ways in which rural elite collaborators mobilized recruits for the British Army during the First World War. It thus not only increases knowledge of Punjab's military history, but adds to the understanding of collaboration as a process involving competitive groups in which elites manipulated the process for their own ends. The case study material drawn from the Shahpur district of the colonial Punjab argues that while there may have been a degree of indoctrination into the colonial state's values, it was mainly the desire to use its patronage to bolster family influence or to transform local hierarchies that was the key factor in securing willing collaborators. The competition for local power and influence provided a local dynamic to the collaborative process. The state could of course take advantage of this competition to serve its interests, just as the Punjabi tribal chiefs could utilize state patronage to beat off rivals to their power. Collaboration was thus a dynamic two-way process, rather than, as it is often portrayed, a top-down, one-way relationship.

The article considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, South India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the article explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape postmarital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of postmarital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur's labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardize the much-needed kin support youngsters require to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship, and success in a post-liberalization environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement, and kin support to success in India's post-reform economy.

Late eighteenth-century colonial agrarian and judicial reforms had a direct impact on women from elite and non-elite backgrounds. Informed by British liberal ideologies and upper-caste Brahmanical norms, colonial policies marginalized women's access to, and control over, resources in the emergent political economy. In this article, I reconstruct histories of the ways in which Anglo-Hindu law compromised women's status as heirs, businesswomen, and members of society who wielded social capital with other community groups. Focusing on widows in Banaras who commandeered their property disputes, I illustrate that pre-colonial precedents of case-resolution under the Banaras rulers, and practices of ‘forum shopping’ by disputants themselves, shaped the widows’ approach to the colonial courts. Colonial judicial plans being incommensurable to everyday life, the courts incorporated pre-colonial forms of dispute handling and maintained a flexible approach to the practice of colonial law under the supervision of an Indian magistrate for a period of time. These characteristics made the courts popular among local society in the Banaras region. However, British officials, insistent on applying abstract scriptural laws, aligned customary practice to the dictates of Anglo-Hindu law. This article shows that the narrow legal subject position available to widows under scriptural law reordered their relationships with family and community networks to their disadvantage.