Encounters between Sufi saints and Muslim rulers have played a long and important role in the textual historical traditions of Muslim South Asia. Historians of the sultanates of Delhi and the Deccan writing in Persian such as Ziya al-din Barani and Abu'l Qasim Firishtah peppered their accounts with such narratives, much to the distaste of their nineteenth century British translators who frequently excised such episodes wholesale. Some of the earliest Sufi literature composed in South Asia, such as the ‘recorded conversations’ (malfuzat) written in the circle of Nizam al-din Awliya of Delhi (d.725/1325), make clear the importance of this topos of the interview between the saint and king. The actual historical nature of such encounters is sometimes difficult to ascertain in view of the didactic and moralizing dimensions to both medieval historiography and Sufi literature in Persian.

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, with its sub-discipline of colonial discourse analysis. In part because of the politically justifiable emphasis on race in postcolonial research and theory (and only later, through feminist insistence, was that emphasis broadened to include gender), we have yet to develop as sustained, various, and subtle a critique of class as that which now exists for race and gender.

Maunsell, a lieutenant in the 23rd Native Infantry of the Bengal Army set out on horseback in October 1812 from Agra, in what were then called the North-western Provinces, on a visit of inspection to Etawah, seventy-five miles south-east, accompanied by two sepoy orderlies and a horse carrying his belongings and equipment. All three were armed, Maunsell with sword and holster pistols, the sepoys with the Brown Bess musket and bayonet.

Recent scholarship has put forward two distinct interpretations of the origins of modern national and communal identity in South Asia. One sees colonial modernity as a radical epistemological break and judges the content of pre-colonial pasts irrelevant for understanding modern politics. According to this view, modern identities are responses to colonial constructions of Asian ‘tradition’. The other approach sees continuities between the late pre-colonial and early colonial periods. For these writers, the origins of modern national and communal identities lie not only in colonial interventions, but also in non-colonial eighteenth-century social formations and in early colonial interaction between the British and South Asians.

During the transition to colonialism, over thirty Indian political missions ventured to London. Representing the interests of Indian royalty directly in British public discourse, these Indian diplomats strove to reshape colonial policies. They also gathered first-hand intelligence, unmediated by Britons, for their Indian audiences; some later Indian diplomats evidently learned from their precursors. Nonetheless, they increasingly struggled against spreading British colonialism, with its expanding surveillance and control over political communication, growing colonial archives, ever more dominant military force, and cultural assertions. Nor did their relatively isolated efforts accumulate into unified Indian policies. The dynamics of these unequal contests reveal how multi-centered, conflicted, and contingent was political intercourse over this period, in Britain and in India. This article analyzes these Indian missions, concentrating on two: one from early in the transition to colonialism when all parties were exploring the nature of such interactions, and the other late in that process when some Indian diplomats and, even more so, the Company's Directors, had learned to deploy more sophisticated tactics against each other. The 1857 conflict, which ended the Company's rule and established British royal authority over India, altered imperial relations with India's ‘princes’ profoundly, ushering in high colonial rule.

In February 2002, Cambodians voted in a multi-party contest for commune councils to govern at the sub-district level in accordance with the Law on Commune/Sangkat Administrative Management promulgated in March 2001. Foreign observers regarded this election as a crucial stage in democratic consolidation. Communes, however, were elected in 1981 and much consolidation of their function occurred during the regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Whether the commune council will differ radically from the commune People's Revolutionary Committee is debatable.

This is a narrative of events and panics in India in 1907: the fiftieth anniversary of 1857. After the East India Company's political ascendancy in 1757, the uprisings and insurrections of 1857 shook the very foundations of British rule in India. In the summer of 1907, several different strands of protest came together: the nearly all-India telegraph strike was barely over when a revolutionary terrorist network was unearthed, bringing the simmering political cauldron to the boil. The burgeoning swadeshi and boycott movement splintered, partly through the experience of Government repression, into political extremism within the Indian National Congress and revolutionary terrorism via secret societies. The growing radicalism within nationalist politics culminated in the split of the Congress at the meeting at Surat in 1907. Through this process the Indian National Congress changed from its constitutional and elite politics of reform into a more popular and mass-oriented organization. Though much has been written about this period of Indian politics, this paper delineates the larger international technological and informational entanglement through a case study of India, and in particular, Bengal.

This paper examines the maps of India published under the supervision of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) during the 1830s and 1840s. The Society was established in London in late 1826 to educate poor adults and the working classes in a variety of intellectual and practical subjects. It published an encyclopaedia, a magazine and a series of monographs, including a book on The Hindoos. But it also published, in instalments, an atlas that featured India in twelve sheets together with a detailed map of Calcutta. The maps were first issued in the 1830s and reissued a decade later. The India maps of the SDUK are the first multi-sheet maps that were sold explicitly for non-elite British audiences and, as such, are of great interest. Moreover, they were among the most detailed, well-drawn maps generally available, and were sometimes eagerly sought-after. A close examination of the maps – their symbols, names, regions and perspectives – reveals how the Company's Indian empire was depicted, described, taught and made ‘useful’ to the working classes.

Along the river Jamuna in North India are two, virtually contiguous, towns—Mathura and Vrindavan—which are important centres of Hindu pilgrimage. The region around and containing these two towns, known traditionally as Vraja or Vrajabhoomi, is the legendary place of the god Krishna.

This article explores both Western and Asian imaginings of national histories beyond the boundaries of the nation. It seeks to contribute to the history of Asian modernities, and to the anthropological study of nationalism. Its focus is on thinkers and political actors whose visions of both the colonising and decolonising processes were translocal, rather than narrowly territorial in scope.