‘[P]ower of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas…. The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.’ (John Maynard Keynes, 1964[1936], 383)

Following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992, the discipline of archaeology has been increasingly exploited for meeting the demands of religious nationalism in India, for offering material proof for the primordiality of Hindu dharma, and for substantiating claims that the ‘Vedic Hindu’ had an indigenous origin within the subcontinent. Over the last decade, statements such as ‘new astrological and archaeological evidence has come to light which suggests that the people who composed the Vedas called themselves Aryans and were indigenous to India’ (Prinja 1996: 10), have not only propped up the doctrinaire of Hindutva, but have also acquired an official sanctioning from many within the professional community of Indian archaeologists (e.g. Lal 1998), who are actively involved in a programme of promoting the premise that it is possible to unearth true histories objectively through archaeological means (Gupta 1996: 142).

As they increasingly embrace neo-liberal economic policies (especially since the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis), the Northeast Asian NICs of South Korea and Taiwan are now said to be losing their uniqueness as alternative capitalist models. Central to the neo-liberal project is labour flexibility. This entails the reform of employment legislation and of the wider social settlement between state, business and labour. This article will argue against the ‘homogenization’ thesis by revealing the distinctive political, economic and ideological characteristics that distinguish the recent market-oriented labour reforms in South Korea and Taiwan from neo-liberal transitions elsewhere. The sources of variation in the pathways of labour market reform within the Northeast Asian NICs will also be explained.

My book Leveling Crowds was published in 1996, and around the same time and in succeeding years there was a spate of books on much the same topic, but primarily focused on India. This essay discusses the implications of some of these studies for my chief submissions, and also responds to the comments of some reviews of my book. It is hoped that this postscript will amplify and enrich our investigation of the dynamics of ethnonationalist conflicts in South Asia.

After September 11 2001 questions about the nature and society of Islam were asked all over the world. Unfortunately in the rush to provide answers inadequate and even distorted explanations were provided. Muslim groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan with their brutal ways came to symbolise Islam. The need to understand society through a diachronic and in-depth study was thus even more urgent. The following work is an attempt to explain how Muslims organise their lives through an examination of rituals conducted by women. This particularistic account has far-reaching ramifications for the study of Muslim society.

This article seeks to contribute to the general debate on Islamic societies. In particular it contributes to the ethnographic discussion on the Pukhtun. First, it seeks to establish the distinctive sociality of Pukhtun wealthy women or Bibiane in terms of their participation, within and beyond the household, in gham-khadi festivities, joining them with hundreds of individuals from different families and social backgrounds. Second, the article makes a case for documenting the lives of this grouping of elite South Asian women, contesting their conventional representation as idle by illustrating their commitment to various forms of work within familial and social contexts. Third, it describes the segregated zones of gham-khadi as a space of female agency. Reconstructing the terms of this agency helps us to revise previous anthropological accounts of Pukhtun society, which project Pukhtunwali in predominantly masculine terms, while depicting gham-khadi as an entirely feminine category. Bibiane's gham-khadi performances allow a reflection upon Pukhtunwali and wider Pukhtun society as currently undergoing transformation. Fourth, as a contribution to Frontier ethnography, the arguments in this article lay especial emphasis on gham-khadi as a transregional phenomenon, given the relocation of most Pukhtun families to the cosmopolitan capital Islamabad. Since gham-khadi is held at families' ancestral homes (kille-koroona), new variations and interpretations of conventional practices penetrate to the village context of Swat and Mardan. Ceremonies are especially subject to negotiation as relatively young convent-educated married Bibiane take issue with their ‘customs’ (rewaj) from a scriptural Islamic perspective. These contradictions are being increasingly articulated by the female graduates of an Islamabad-based reformist religious school, Al-Huda. Al-Huda, part of a broader regional and arguably national movement of purist Islamization, attempts to apply Quranic and hadith prophetic teaching to everyday life. This reform involves educated elite and middle-class women. These women actively impart Islamic ways of living to family members across metropolitan–rural boundaries. The school's lectures (dars, classes) provide a basis for questioning ‘customary’ or Pukhtun life-cycle practices, authorizing some Bibiane to amend visiting patterns in conformity to the Quran. The manipulation of life-cycle commemorations by elite and middle-class women as a vehicle of change, Islamization and a particular mode of modernity furthermore becomes significant in the light of recent socio-political Islamic movements in post-Taliban Frontier Province. More broadly, the article contributes to various sociological and anthropological topics, notably the nature and expression of elite cultures and issues of sociality, funerals and marriage, custom and religion, space and gender, morality and reason, and social role and personhood within the contexts of Middle-Eastern and South Asian Islam.

This essay raises a single question for which it ventures two kinds of answers, one historical and the other historiographical. On the one hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to express an interest in finding out about transformations over time in the activities, experiences, and social placement of pandits—for present purposes in the context of colonial Bengal. Taken in this sense, the question reflects a desire to examine the diverse experiences of Sanskrit pandits, perhaps to inquire about the degree to which they either may or may not be illustrative of other sorts of changes taking place in colonial Indian society. On the other hand, to ask ‘What's become of the pandit?’ is to suggest that it may be worth investigating what we mean by the word ‘pandit’ and how we have come to view pandits as we do. What we're asking thus is really, ‘What's become of the pandit in modern scholarly discourse?’ In this sense, the question is a historiographical or methodological one. It suggests there may be important reasons why scholars tend to conceptualize the life and work of pandits as they do, and reminds us that becoming aware of these reasons might allow us to gain a better perspective on our own field of study.

The basic objective of this paper is to assess India's acquisition of nuclear weapons in light of the general debate why states ‘go nuclear’ and build nuclear arsenals. In general, analysts proffer four arguments about proliferation of nuclear weapons. They are: (1) security concerns; (2) prestige; (3) technological imperatives; and (4) domestic politics. The first posits that security concerns directly related to a state's physical security and survival might drive a state to acquire nuclear weapons. A state, when operating in an environment of anarchy and acute security dilemmas, remains very concerned with national security and survival. Depending on the intensity of security dilemmas, states often resort to developing lethal military forces, including, in some instances, nuclear weapons. For example, the ‘first generation’ nuclear powers (the USA, the USSR, the UK, France and China) and the ‘second generation’ nuclear states (India, Pakistan etc.) acquired nuclear weapons because they each faced an acute security threat from a strategic adversary.

Hikayat Panglima Nikosa (HPN) is one of northwest Borneo's earliest available texts. First published in 1876, its importance is enhanced by the relative paucity of other written material and still limited progress in the collection and transcription of the region's rich corpus of oral literature. Although written material survives from the Lingga River area, the Oya and Limbang districts, as well as from the courts of Brunei and Pontianak, the HPN is the earliest known Malay document from the Sarawak River region itself. HPN was uncovered among a group of pamphlets in Rhodes House Library in 1981. The previously unnoticed work was republished in 1983, together with a transliteration and translation by P. L. Thomas, and an ‘Introduction’ by Reece and Thomas.

Contemporary South Asian women writers write from almost anywhere in the world; from all parts of Asia, from Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, and USA. Many of these women writers choose to focus their writings on their experiences of life as South Asian women. In this article, the diasporic literature I will be working with is by South Asian women writers from Canada, UK, and USA, and I therefore may occasionally group these countries under the term, ‘the West’, for ease of reference. For the same purpose, writers writing from within South Asia have been designated the term ‘home writers’. (It must be noted that home and diasporic South Asian women writers are inclined to define themselves as such, based on race, culture, and family background, rather than on nationality and political status.)

The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. By MUHAMMAD QASIM ZAMAN. Princeton, N.J. and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. By OSKAR VERKAAIK. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. By PNINA WERBNER. London: Hurst and Company.

In late nineteenth century Malayalee society, the project of social reforming was caught up in the concern to evolve an alternative to established Jati-based mode of ordering human beings. The criticism by the missionaries of the CMS, LMS and the Basel Mission of the established order in Malayalee society as entirely unnatural and inimical to (universal) human values was heard right through the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, the nascent modern educated of Tiruvitamkoor, Kochi and Malabar were beginning to echo such viewpoints actively. The terms on which these groups perceived their identities and assessed local society were more or less set by colonial sociology and the codification efforts by both imperial and local powers. Interpreting locally existing jati in terms of the construction of ‘caste’ (i.e., ‘Nair’, ‘Ezhava’, ‘Araya’ etc.) these groups sought to form organisations for the reform of caste, to transform these into full-fledged modern communities.

A little over a hundred years ago, on 18 July 1903 to be exact, Francis Younghusband, preceded a few weeks earlier by a small band of officials and an escort of 500 men, crossed the forbidding 17,500 feet high Kangra la and quartered at Khamba Jong, an odd 25 miles inside Tibet. His ostensible objective, to negotiate with officials from the Dalai Lama's administration and those of the Chinese Amban in Lhasa. A number of minor irritants on the Sikkim frontier and alleged Tibetan impediments to cross-border trade were the principal issues that needed to be sorted out. A bipartite conference with the Tibetans, with the Chinese acting as facilitators, it was reasoned, would help find a solution.