In the book compiled by Mervyn Jones after Kingsley Martin's death in 1969, Asa Briggs recalled that ‘no country meant more to Kingsley Martin than India’. Martin's writing, campaigning and travelling all confirm this. His life also confirms his priorities for development and poverty reduction. Famously, however, he was not an economist, and he does not seem to have brought these concerns together, or to have asked how aid might best be used to help. This paper, in a small way, aims to fill that gap.

In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a ‘small but select’ group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, the dakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā. The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, while so many of the other associations in that lush growth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India have disappeared. It has been instrumental in forging a Jain ethnicity, in creating a new sense of a specifically Jain past and present, and in fostering new habits of education and of social intercourse among Jains. A good proportion of what is today taken for granted by Jains about southern Digambar samskrti, ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, was moulded by Jains acting in and through the Sabha.

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Photographs taken in Lahore in 1946–47 record the mass participation of women in the pro-Muslim League demonstrations against the Khizar Unionist government. This was the first such mass public mobilization of Muslim women anywhere in pre-independent India. The mobilization of women became a vital element in the League's tactics during the dramatic last months leading up to Independence and Partition. A small group of relatively emancipated female Muslim Leaguers from the Punjab who had been at the vanguard of the anti-Khizar demonstrations were also instrumental in mobilizing the unemancipated women of the North-West Frontier Province to protest against the Khan Sahib Congress ministry. This latter mobilization was evidently so successful that the British governor of the province, on seeing the crowds of burqa-clad women, was reported to have declared that ‘Pakistan is made’. It is perhaps no mere coincidence, then, that Jinnah made his statement about ‘awakening the political consciousness’ of Muslim women at the same session of the AIML at which the demand for Pakistan was made official League policy. The political awakening of Muslim women seemed to be inextricably linked to the struggle for a separate Muslim state in India. The question that this paper deals with, however, is whether in fact the Pakistan movement had a surplus of meaning for women over and above the nationalism of the Muslim League and why it was that many Muslim women were, in Begum Jahan Ara's words, ‘more impatient for Pakistan than men.’

Indonesia is no obvious entity. The present borders of the largest archipelago in the world are the result of its colonial past; the only deviation from the borders of the former Netherlands Indies is the eastern part of the island Timor, which was annexed shortly after the departure of the Portugese in 1975. Thirty years earlier, following the declaration of independence of 17 August 1945, the young Republic of Indonesia had unambiguously proclaimed its ambition: the formation of a unitary state of Indonesia, encompassing all the former Asian territories of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Several times separatist movements in different regions ran up against the barrier of the unitary state doctrine.

On 11 January 1943, Britain signed the ‘Treaty Between His Majesty In Respect Of The United Kingdom And India And His Excellency The President Of The National Government Of The Republic Of China For The Relinquishment Of Extra-Territorial Rights In China And The Regulation Of Related Matters (With Exchange Of Notes And Agreed Minute)’ with China.

Tokyo: 25 November 1970, midday. The parade ground of the Self Defence Force's Ichigaya garrison was crowded with personnel. All looked up at the balcony of the main hall, knowing that in the adjoining room the commandant had been taken hostage. On the parapet of the balcony stood one captor, dressed in a brown uniform and donning a headband with an ancient samurai motto, shichishōhōkoku (‘serve the nation for seven lives’). He was Mishima Yukio, the famous writer and founder of a militia named Tatenokai (Shield Society). Hardly able to make himself heard through the wail of sirens and the jeers from the crowd, Mishima held a speech in which he called the constitutional curtailment of the military a threat to Japan's culture. Nothing new, as he had been flirting openly with the extreme right for years. His plea to the men below to follow him in a revolt was greeted with howls of derision.