This article provides a commentary on a painting entitled Dancing Girls, Madras, c. 1805, by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey shown in an exhibition of privately owned works from East Anglia at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 18 May-1 August 1999, entitled, ‘In the Public Eye’ (Catalogue No. 95) fig. 1.

The Man with the Brief-case

I once met a man with a brief case on a train . . . I forget between where and where. If you have travelled by train in India you may have met him too. He is conscious of cultural difference and wishes you to understand that Indians have family values - on account of which they don't go in for divorce or extra-marital sex. It was possibly he who first told me (though I have read it somewhere since) that actuarial calculations reveal that one in three marriages in Britain, and one in two in the United States, is destined to end in divorce. I find his contrast confirmed in a scholarly study of the subject. By comparison with its ‘alarming rate’ in the West, ‘divorce was unknown to the Hindu institution of marriage. Husband and wife were bound to each other not only in this life, but even in the lives to follow’ (Pothen 1986: ix).

In the first week of January 1951, the Raja of Ettaiyapuram was combating the forces of modernity on three fronts. In Madras High Court, he was filing a writ petition questioning the legality of the Madras Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act of 1948, which came into force on 3 January and authorized the government to take over his zamindari estate.Zamindar of Ettayapuram v. The State of Madras, Civil Miscellaneous Petition no. 13388 of 1950. Simultaneously, Tirunelveli District Court was hearing a case brought in his capacity as hereditary Trustee of Kalugumalai Devastanam, seeking to prevent the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Board from assuming administrative control of the temple and appointing one of its employees as Executive Officer.Zamindar of Ettayaparum vs. Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Board, Original Suit 22 of 1949, later Appeal Suit No. 462 of 1951 in Madras High Court. The ‘Devastanam’ is the administrative organization of the temple. Meanwhile, he had two further law-suits pending in Kovilpatti Munsif's Court, questioning the authority of the newly-formed Kalugumalai Panchayat Board on the grounds that the entire town was temple property.O.S. No. 252 and O.S. 253 of 1950.

This paper investigates the late colonial origins of Home Science in British India. It deals most intensively with the institutionalization of Home Science in Madras Presidency and attends to the roles played by both the colonial state and Indian women's organizations in its establishment. Though the focus is on Madras because the efforts of those based there influenced the later course of Home Science education, the activities of Madras educators, policy makers and reformers are also situated within a wider frame of transregional and imperial relations forged through reform projects, missionization, travel and education. Consideration of Home Science education in this wider context reveals the socio-political constraints an opportunities of, as well as the ideological interests at work in, its establishment. The paper finds that, at its inception, Home Science was the product of strategic alliances among colonial authorities, Indian social reformers, and Indian nationalists — all of whom, despite other differences, considered the home a site of and symbol for nationalist modernity. Home Science is shown to have relied on and helped shape a set of discourses that can be deemed ‘feminist nationalist’ in that they were engaged dialectically with anti-colonial nationalisms and with internationalist feminisms. Using Home Science as a lens, this paper provides a window on a set of late colonial debates that, informed by nationalist struggles and goals, sought to reshape the meaning and scope of both female agency and domesticity.

The night has passed,

The whole day has gone,

Lady, tie up your hair,

The hair so dishevelled:

One December 12th has passed,

Another December 12th has come.

Have you forgotten?

Did you believe that your hair could be tied?

Did you believe that this day would ever return?

(poem by Hijam Irabot)

The story of what V. P. Menon euphemistically termed the ‘integration’ of the Indian States has still not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.

The spectre of civil society is haunting South East Asia. Witness Manila's ‘People Power’ in 1986, Bangkok's ’No-More-Dictatorship‘ demonstrations in 1992, and, most recently, the Reformasi movements centered on Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 1998. Indeed, these recent waves of popular mobilization have underscored the significance of civil society—as political discourse and social terrain—for the successful launching of challenges against the non-democratic state in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of the political discourse of ‘civil society’, a common claim to spontaneous voluntarism and cross-class universalism was articulated and celebrated in some form by each of the four mobilizational campaigns identified above.

An orthodox marriage in the Chinese traditional system was marked by a complex negotiation between the two families concerning the dowry the bride took with her on marriage and the bride price paid by the groom to the bride's natal family. This protracted form of gift-giving posed a considerable economic burden on both families. For this reason, throughout the imperial period, considerable flexibility was exercised in interpreting what constituted an orthodox marriage in order to allow impecunious families to marry off a daughter or obtain a bride for a son. This study will focus on one such form of marriage, one so ‘deviant’ and ‘primitive’ that it is usually relegated to the dawn of the history of the Han Chinese race or placed in the category of ‘objectionable customs’ (lousu) of the imperial past. I am referring to a form of marriage by abduction, commonly known as qiangqin (seizing the bride), which was prevalent in many areas of China until the 1940s. It is argued here that marriage by abduction should be considered less a ‘primitive’ remnant from China's ancient past than a socially acceptable response to the irrationalities of the dowry/bride-price system, in other words, a local ‘institution’.

The existing literature has examined the Chinese nationalism of Chinese overseas merchants, detailing their financial contributions to the anti-Japanese war and their participation in boycott movements of Japanese goods. This paper uses Japanese consular reports, prewar Japanese publications, as well as Chinese and Japanese newspapers from Taiwan, Fujian, Japan, Singapore, and the United States to study the adoption of multiple nationalities, including Japanese nationality, by overseas Chinese merchants to reduce commercial risk and seek out economic opportunity. The phenomenon suggests that overseas Chinese merchants were not simply agents of Chinese nationalism.