The current article examines temple building and shifting monastic patronage in twentieth and twenty-first century Sri Lanka. Drawing heavily on fieldwork conducted in two separate upcountry villages over the past five years, the author argues that far from passively accepting the failings of local monastics, lay Buddhists are actively and directly involved in shaping their own religious experiences. In examining closely numerous conversations centered on temple construction, this article pays particular attention to how notions about ideal ritual performance, caste discrimination, and merit-making provide lay donors with the needed impetus for building new monastic institutions and, thus, establishing a choice of temple patronage where little or no such choice previously existed.

Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille (2003a: 75) comments: ‘Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians…[who] tend to oscillate between self-recrimination and self-congratulation’ (cf. Béteille 2003b: 185). The former is exemplified by Pavan Varma's The Great Indian Middle Class (1998), which excoriates this class for its selfish materialism and the ‘retreat from idealism’ that was manifest in the smaller, ‘traditional middle class’ of the earlier, post-independence period (ibid.: 89). A good example of the opposite tendency is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2002), which celebrates ‘the rise of a confident new middle class’ (ibid.: 280). Das's diagnosis of what has changed is actually very similar to Varma's, but he insists that the new middle class is no ‘greedier’ than the old one, and the ‘chief difference is that there is less hypocrisy and more self-confidence’ (ibid.: 290).

On April 1st 1768, a Parsi servant of Mancherji Khurshedji, a merchant and -broker of the Dutch Company, came to Surat to whom another Parsi servant of Dhanjishah, a merchant under the English protection, asked wherefrom he came and without any further argument he inflicted a blow with his fist to the first mentioned who then fell down and meanwhile he gave him a slap, then the defender inflicted two pricks with his knife to the offender, many people witnessed this fight, and the Parsi who still had the knife in his hand, was attacked with bamboos with such force that the knife fell from his hand, he was further beaten up till he fell down.

Around a century ago, in his “The Ideals of the East”, Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzô) proclaimed that “Asia is one”. This phrase, quoted repeatedly ever since, has been interpreted as representative of the ideology of Pan-Asianism (Han-Ajiashugi) or Asianism (Ajiashugi) in Japan. However, Okakura's writings were not widely read in Japan during the Meiji era and his originally English writings were translated into Japanese only in the 1930s. It must have been other authors that defined Pan-Asianism as a comprehensive ideology and brought this ideology closer to politics, a sphere where pan-Asian approaches were mostly rejected until the 1910s. This paper introduces the writings of Kodera Kenkichi (1877–1949), a politician and long-time member of the Lower House of the Imperial Japanese Diet, and identifies his “Treatise on Greater Asianism” (1916) as a central work in the history of the ideology of Asianism in modern Japan.

During most of the nineteenth century, the economy of the British crown colony Ceylon depended almost exclusively on the export of plantation products. After modest beginnings in the 1820s and 1830s, coffee cultivation spread on the island in the 1840s. During the 1880s, the coffee plantations were superseded by plantations of a new crop—tea. Both cultivation systems were almost pure export monocultures, and both relied almost exclusively on imported wage labour from South India. Thus, it is surprising that labour immigration—a process vital to the efficient functioning of the plantation economy—received practically no government attention for the better part of the nineteenth century. Migration between South India and Ceylon was free of government control, support or regulation. Instead, certain functional equivalents—such as the kangany system—organised immigration and coordinated supply and demand. Only very late in the century, when the kangany system had revealed a number of dramatic organisational weaknesses, the Ceylon Government started to get directly involved in labour and immigration policy.

The author can be contacted at roland.wenzlhuemer@staff.hu-berlin.de

The Raj Quartet is a novel in which Scott has transmuted contemporary history into fiction—the many forces at work in India over a period of five years, from the ‘Quit India’ motion of the Congress Committee in 1942 to the eve of Independence and Partition. Deeper than Scott's interest in history and politics, however, is his aim to probe the nature of human destiny, conveying a philosophy of life that shows man's destiny and moral sense sometimes at variance. He also focuses an ordinary human point of view on the world around him, valuing integrity and decency. Staying On is not a political or historical novel, although its background has political implications. It focuses mainly on problems relating to personal destiny. Scott's later novels constitute a major achievement in colonial, indeed, all, literature.

Khandesh region in Maharashtra is an extensive plain interspersed with ranges of hills. It is nearly surrounded by broad chains of mountains covered with vegetation. It was inhabited by the Bhils. They lived in hovels which often crested the tops of isolated hills where approach was immediately discovered and easily defended. They shifted to new habitats after a few weeks or months. Turbulent by disposition and skilful hunters by necessity, they obtained their supplies of roots, berries and game from the jungles. As Captain D. C. Graham put it, ‘To barter anything but what was reaped by the hand of violence was an offence against the tribe; to cultivate or engage in mechanical craft deeply degrading; and no employment was considered to be correct which in any way interfered with the cherished burden of the long-bow, and the ponderous sheaf of arrows’.

This paper explores the relationship between Hindu nationalist ideology and the disciplinary practices of the Saraswati Shishu Mandir Primary School. It is an attempt to understand how the rhetoric that revolves around the creation of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ (Hindu nation) is translated and implemented in pedagogical terms and interpreted and articulated by children. Specific focus is on the way that primary school children experience and talk about the School's disciplinary enterprise, which is underpinned by ideas about Hindu superiority and the need to protect the Hindu nation against threatening cultural and religious minorities. With respect to the political end to which this enterprise is geared, it is argued that children interpret and value this enterprise not as a vehicle for the spread of Hindu nationalist ideals, but as a means by which educational success can be ensured.

Ethnographic work in an urban kampung in central Java reveals this community form to be both an administrative rationality and a set of locally meaningful social relations. The continued restatement of the relevance of community through the Javanese ritual meal known as the slametan and women's roles in these rituals of commensality are the focus of this consideration. State sponsorship of housewives as community welfare workers extends the long arch of kampung community formation as the ground for the dispersion of rituals of rule into the lives of Indonesian citizens as well as working-class recuperation through rituals of community. State formation conceived as process draws attention to everyday kampung culture as the matrix for reproduction of both rule and working class neighbourhoods, and provides a perspective on the state that is resolutely low, attuned to both the realities of institutional structure and the repertoires and routines of everyday practise.

Such modern cities as Breslau and Smyrna have suffered widespread destruction and demographic transformation in the wake of armed invasion. The neighbouring Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar shared this experience, at the time of the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent. Almost 40 per cent of Amritsar's houses were destroyed or damaged and its Muslim population fell from 49 per cent of the population on the eve of partition to just 00.52 per cent in 1951. Six thousand houses were damaged in Lahore and its Hindu and Sikh population who formed over a third of the population departed for India. The Luftwaffe had destroyed some 4185 houses in Coventry in an air raid for ever associated with the concept of concentrated bombing. The greater damage in peacetime Lahore and Amritsar was a result of disturbances surrounding the end of British rule. The cities lay at the heart of the region which bore the brunt of the 1947 upheaval. Ten million Punjabis were uprooted. In all around 13 million people were displaced by partition. This was the largest migration in a century whose wars and ethnic conflicts rendered millions of people homeless. The cities' proximity to the border (see map.) meant that they received large numbers of refugees. There were a million in Lahore alone in April 1948, two fifths of whom were housed in camps.

Land is a metaphor for power, wealth and status. Independent Gujarat's initial mass-development strategy centered on agriculture but the emphasis was on productivity and efficiency rather than land redistribution or social justice. A state apparatus and socio-political set-up dominated by elite landed upper and middle castes and classes ensured this. Primary fieldwork-based research shows that by the mid-1980s, with a growing acceptance of ideas of liberalisation at the national and international level, the elite consensus on land began to shift. This shift must also be placed within local socio-economic developments that had propelled dominant landed groups into agro-industry and small scale industry in the last third of the twentieth century. Gujarat's elite still wanted to control land, but they did not want the state to regulate land use or continue emphasising the diluted but powerful rhetoric of land to the tiller. The rightward shift of all political formations in Gujarat after 1985 and the growing importance of the upper caste-middle class merchant-trader-builder-small businessman dominated Bharatiya Janata Party further facilitated the moves towards a shift in land policy. Continuing changes in Gujarat's land policy are determinedly moving towards the complete liberalisation of land.

“The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”

Martin Heidegger

“Historical monuments, we can argue, live their modern lives primarily as images.”

Tapati Guha-Thakurta

The war in Afghanistan was one of the most brutal and long lasting conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century. Anthropologists specializing in Afghanistan who wrote about the war at the time reiterated the United State's Cold War rhetoric rather than provide objective analyses. Others ignored the war altogether. What happened in Afghanistan, and why, and the need for objective reassessments only came to mind after the September 11th attacks. This paper examines the genesis and various permutations of the Afghan war in terms of causal dynamics embedded in the broader interstate relations of the world system and its competing military complexes during the second half of the twentieth century and changes in that system in the post-Cold War period.

The paper first provides a broad overview of the structure of textile manufacturing and procurement in India in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. It then takes up for a detailed analysis the changes in this structure in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the assumption of political authority by the English East India Company in the subcontinent with special reference to the case of Bengal where such authority was exercised most intensively. A market-based system was replaced by one embedded in coercion of the intermediary merchants and the manufacturing artisans. In the concluding section, the paper makes a plea for a distinction being made between the distributive justice dimension and the implications for output dimension of the changed scenario and argues that the picture of a ruined textile industry in Bengal might be in need of substantive revision.

This paper analyses Manchuria's economic history between 1929 and 1936, as part of a larger project on the Great Depression's impact on China. Based on a new series for Manchurian GDP, 1924–1937, the paper advances four key arguments. First, early in the Depression, Manchuria's use of silver currency partially protected its economy from the global downturn, while creating serious problems for importers and Japanese-owned enterprises, resulting in a small net decline in GDP. Second, as elsewhere, the Depression's impact was deepest where cyclical effects were accompanied by structural change – here, the decline in the soybean trade. Third, output levels, especially in agriculture, declined most steeply in response to climatic and military disasters rather than economic shocks. Fourth, as in Japan, policies that were Keynesian in effect led to rapid growth of the modern sector, especially construction, and to the recovery of many sectors of Manchuria's economy from 1934–1935.

Christian missionaries were some of the most influential actors in colonial India. Yet they only began working recently in relation to larger British influence in the subcontinent. Originally banned from the territories of the East India Company for fears of upsetting Indian religious sensibilities, they were allowed to operate after 1843 in parallel with a rising Utilitarian and evangelist fervour in Britain and within particular Company circles; the latter often blurred the distinctions between ‘moral improvement’, civilisation and Christianity. Missionaries were influential in the debate over sati and the subsequent outlaw of its practice. Protestant encounters with Hinduism and Islam were defined by the rhetoric of ‘heathen’ and ‘unbelievers’, as missionaries derided the ‘idolatry’ of Hinduism and ‘bigotry’ of Islam. Some of the first mission schools established were in the Bombay Presidency, Bengal and the Punjab. During this period missionaries ascribed utility to the corpus of western scholarship as an ally against Indian religions. They hoped to ‘prove’ their falsehoods. The primary way to do this was through western education, arguing that western scholarship was saturated with Christian morals and that such ethoses would transform Indians accordingly. This was a period when the symmetry between Christianity and western scholarship was championed by missionaries such as John Murdoch and Alexander Duff. After the Indian Mutiny (1857–8), missionaries were held in check (at least officially) by the colonial state as a means of avoiding upsetting Indian religious sensibilities. Yet, ironically, in northern India missionaries came to be relied upon by a cash-strapped Education Department. They came to dominate education and were credited with doing much to push the frontiers of western pedagogy in their efforts to propagate their faith.

Scholarship on institutional history rarely brings the academe to a heightened state of excitement. However, when institutions cross spans of time and place while intersecting with multiple cultural identities and levels of power, things can become more captivating. An ideal institution for examination of this very process is the Court of Wards. Originally devised in Tudor England, the Court was later brought to India by members of the East India Company and put into wide use throughout the subcontinent. In India, its purpose was to shelter child heirs and their estates, eventually returning heir and estate to autonomy when ruling age was reached. However, while the Court in England and in India has received some critical review, we can extend its investigation one step further by examining its use in the ‘other India’, that of the princely states. How did this administrative unit become adopted and adapted to some of India's 560 princely states? To what degree were the Court and its administrators able to rectify an inherent tension within the Court's purpose? It was largely designed to protect child heirs and their estates, and return them in due time. But, in a princely state, in some circumstances, the ultimate ‘owner’ of any land was the chief prince. Did the Court mediate between the wishes of the ruling prince and his (or her) smaller ‘little kings?’ In short, to what extent was the Court of Wards at times a babysitter, and at other times a bank robber?

The release of Peter Clarke's biography of Sir Stafford Cripps in 2002, with much of its focus on the protagonist's time in India, meant that a thorough reappraisal of Lord Wavell's time as Viceroy to India was clearly needed. By giving an impartial account of Wavell's relationship with Whitehall during his time as Viceroy this article will also focus on such significant events as the 1945 Simla Conference, the 1946 Cabinet Mission and Wavell's dismissal in late 1946/early 1947. It is hoped that by the end of this article readers will be able to judge Wavell's overall performance as Viceroy and decide for themselves whether he deserved to be replaced by Mountbatten or not.

The famine of 1943 cost the Bengal province some three millions lives. Following Amartya Sen's proposition that the famine was not caused by a significant decline in food availability as such the last two decades or so have witnessed a renewed scholarly interest in the subject. On the basis of a fresh look at the available crop statistics this essay supports his basic contention. But at the same time it argues that his proposition is not quite new. Secondly, it suggests that for a fuller understanding of the severity of the crisis it will not be enough to analyse the problem exclusively from the point of view of exchange entitlement failure and with reference to the events in 1943 or thereabout. In other words, the crisis needs to be viewed from a broader and larger perspective.