The notion that tribal peoples are destructive of the forest environment is not a new one. The political struggles that fostered it are only just beginning to engage the attention of historians. This essay is a preliminary exploration of the experience of the indigenous minorities—the Orang Asli—of peninsular Malaysia during the period of colonial rule. It examines their relationship to the society outside the forest. The politics of the forest it addresses are not narrowly environmental. Indeed, what follows is based on the assumption that the relationship of the aborigines to their environment was transformed, not so much by the changing ecological conditions of the forest as the colonial economy expanded, but by the changing political circumstances of the frontier as the Orang Asli were drawn into a widening orbit of relations with external powers. ‘Orang Asli’ means literally ‘original people’. It is a polite term that took on a legal status from the 1950s. Before then, in common parlance, the aborigines were ‘Sakai‘—a derogatory term synonymous with ‘slave’. The term Orang Asli encompasses three basic types of communities: the Negritos, nomadic hunters and gatherers of the northern forests; the Senoi —whose two main subdivisions, the Temiar and the Semai, together make up the larger part of the Orang Asli population of the central highlands, following more settled forms of swidden agriculture; and the proto-Malays of the south, fishermen and cultivators with a more similar economy to neighbouring Malays.1 Their shared history has become an issue of great sensitivity in modern Malaysia, and Malaysian politicians have in recent years bitterly questioned the legitimacy of western criticism of the present circumstances of the Orang Asli. To explain why this is so, I want to examine the preoccupations of British administration during the period when it was trustee of the forests of the peninsula and directly responsible for the welfare of their inhabitants. Three themes dominate the discussion that follows.

A major transformation has occurred in rural China since reform policies were initiated in 1979. It has been particularly dramatic in the highly commercialized Pearl River delta region of the southern province of Guangdong, provenance of most North Americans of Chinese origin. The delta region has become firmly incorporated into the global economy and its external linkages, especially to Hong Kong, have been central in the process of change. The responses to reform in the areas of the delta dominated by an Overseas Chinese presence have been distinctive. Varied family economic strategies have arisen to meet the opportunities implicit in the new policies for rural reform in a region in which remittances from abroad are significant. There has also been the revival of complex kinship groupings (lineages) energized by Overseas Chinese communities, which have assumed important roles in regional economic development.

A new class is emerging in rural Kerala. Though it was christened a bourgeoisie by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the chief minister of Kerala state during the two phases of land reform (1957–59 and 1967–69), it is not an extension of the modern industrial bourgeoisie into a rural society. Rather it is a distinctly new social formation emerging from among the farmers. The opportunities for farmers to adopt bourgeois aspirations have been created by the particular form of Keralaʼns capitalism interacting with recent changes in localized agrarian society.

The British in India have always fascinated their fellow countrymen. From the eighteenth century until the demise of the Raj innumerable publications described the way of life of white people in India for the delectation of a public at home. Post-colonial Britain evidently still retains a voracious appetite for anecdotes of the Raj and accounts of themores of what is often represented as a bizarre Anglo-Indian world. Beneath the welter of apparent triviality, historians are, however, finding issues of real significance.

This paper is directed first at identifying where and by whom military influences or topics manifested themselves in the periodical pressʼns coverage of India in the period up to the Indian Rebellion. How such manifestations changed over time, as well as the convergence of Anglo-Indian and British newspapers and magazines on Indian topics, will form an important component of this study. Stemming from these initial enquiries, I will further suggest that the model often employed to comprehend such representations —namely ‘orientalism’ —is, as it is often configured, too simplistic and reductionist to account for all the forces at work in the production of images of India. Instead, the mid-Victorian image of India was produced by a very fractured discourse. Racial stereotypes and affirmations of British superiority were certainly to the forefront, but these were frequently inflected by quite separate agendaʼns, such as the military's pursuit of political and professional status and influence, publishers’ search for profits, and the quest for suitable middle-class role models. Moreover, it was a discourse constrained by the dominant contemporary literary conventions and tropes, notably the historical romance in fiction and didacticism in history and biography. Yet there is one strand that runs through these various agendas and literary strategies and that is the one provided by the Indian army. India was by the third decade of the nineteenth-century as much a military as it was a commercial site. In 1850, the then reigning governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, was reminded by John Lawrence of this fact when the latter insisted that ‘public opinion is essentially military in India. Military views, feelings and interests are therefore paramount’.

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.

Pakistan is an ideologically inspired state and Urdu was a part of this ideology. During the development of Muslim separatism in British India it had become a symbol of Muslim identity and was the chief rival of Hindi, the symbol of Hindu identity (Brass, 1974: 119–81. Thus, after partition it was not surprising that the Muslim polemical and methodologically unreliable books. Some of them are, indeed, part of the pro-Urdu campaign by such official institutions as the National Language Authority, because of which they articulate only the official language policy (Kamran, 1992). Other books, especially by supporters of Urdu, invoke simplistic conspiracy theories for explaining the opposition to Urdu. One of them is that the elitist supporters of English have always conspired to protect it in their self-interest; the other that ethno-nationalists, supported by foreign governments, communists and anti-state agents, oppose Urdu (Abdullah, 1976; Barelvi 1987). While such assertions may be partly true, the defect of the publications is that no proof is offered in support of them.