Islamic political rhetoric has had a wide variety of meanings in twentieth-century South Asia. This variety has often been obscured by observers who assume Islamic political symbols to have a single set of meanings as well as by contemporary political figures who attribute to earlier figures their own particular views. In Pakistan today, for example, all national heroes of the past are assumed to have used Islamic symbols exactly as does the current regime. In a recent contest—in which so far no winner has emerged—prizes were offered for portraits depicting Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, the urbane, westernized lawyer, in Islamic dress. Such re-interpretation can force resort to explanations of expedience to reconcile apparent inconsistencies, arguing, for example, that political figures spoke differently to different audiences. What else could one make of a Jinnah if he is clothed as a fundamentalist? But desire for legitimacy—here as everywhere—outweighs accurate history.

Current events are always likely to turn academic and public interest back to the well-worn topic of conflict between members of India's major religions. The manner in which antagonism between Bengali immigrants and local people in Assam has taken on the form of a strife between communities, the revival of Sikh militancy, even the film ‘Gandhi’-all these will keep the issue on the boil. There are more scholarly reasons for awakened interest also. The rapid expansion of work on Indian Islam pioneered by scholars such as S. A. A. Rizvi, Imtiaz Ahmed and Barbara Metcalf has given us a new awareness of the structure and attitudes of Indian Muslim learned classes and sufis which inevitably reopens questions about the ideological component in communal consciousness. Nearer the theme of this paper, the work of Dr Sandria Freitag has provided valuable new insight into the popular mentalities which informed Hindu and Muslim behaviour in cases where violence occurred as a result of clashing religious festivals in Indian cities.

The subject of agricultural growth is a matter of central importance in the evaluation of the impact of colonial rule on India. Given that the agricultural sector provided a very large share of total output and employment, movements in the per capita agricultural output would be a good indicator of changes in per capita income. Despite the usual caveats made about the dangers of using per capita income as a measure of welfare, a sustained fall in such income would imply a failure of state economic policy in a crucial respect.

From the size of India's population alone the economic history of India constitutes an important segment of the economic history of mankind. But with the middle of the eighteenth century, it assumed a further, special significance: subjugated by the first industrial nation of the world, it offered the classic case of the colonial remoulding of a pre-modern economy. Not surprisingly, the changing nature and consequences of this process and all its surrounding conditions have formed the constant theme of a long and continuing debate.

In 1947 the British partitioned India and transferred power to two separate Dominions. Partition, however, did not mean the division of India between two ‘successor’ states. ‘India’ inherited British India's unitary centre, while ‘Pakistan’ consisted of areas with Muslim majorities which were merely seen as ‘contracting out’ of the ‘Union of India’. Congress's inheritance of the existing union centre gave it effective control over the joint assets of the two Dominions. The notion of a common Governor-General was, on the face of it, intended to safeguard Pakistan's share in the division of assets. The Indian Independence Bill was drafted on the implicit assumption that Mountbatten would remain as Governor-General for both Dominions until the division of the Indian army had been completed. As common Governor-General, Mountbatten could supervise the reallocation of assets and at the same time encourage co-operation between the two Dominions. But the reallocation of assets could not take place until a new centre had been created for the ‘seceding’ areas. The implication was that if a Pakistan centre was not formed, the assets would not be divided, and a Governor-General with a common touch could guide the Muslim areas back into the ‘Union of India’. Mohammad Ali Jinnah clearly recognized what might happen if there was a common Governor-General for two Dominions, one of which was to be regarded as the ‘successor’ and the other as the ‘seceder’.

Surat, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795. The lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books. This was the response of a collapsing social order to the thrust of a highly adaptive banking and trading group which had adroitly allied itself to the rising English power on the West Coast of India. A combination of circumstances in the half century following 1750 had resulted in the formation of a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay. The violent protest by the Muslims against the new order served only to reaffirm the significance of the Anglo-Bania alliance as the central fact in the unfolding political and commercial situation on the West Coast. The once powerful Mughal ruling élite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates1 were no longer in a position to offer much resistance to the English East India Company and its Bania allies. Likewise the popular Muslim disaffection failed to shake by violence the foundations of the emerging Anglo-Bania order. An analysis of the August riots in Surat would afford the historian a unique opportunity to assess the nature and impact of the new order on the West Coast and to understand the crumbling social structure of a traditional port city—the composition of its lower orders and its burgher groups and their responses to the major changes that were taking place in the political and trading structure of Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century.

For the last few years an imaginative programme for training Buddhist monks in basic health care has been in operation in Thailand. The scheme, originally based on two wats (temples) in Bangkok, is now being extended to the Northeast where poverty and malnutrition are most acute. The originator of the programme, Dr Prawase Wasi, a distinguished haematologist, has received several awards for his work, which is increasingly recognized as a major landmark in the implementation of health care in developing countries.

The study of coercion and how it is applied within a political system is useful for a number of reasons. As a strategy of control and management it is in itself worthy of investigation. Moreover, an examination of how coercion is applied can tell us much about the nature of a particular polity. Indeed, as Weber emphasized, the state itself is distinguished from other political systems to the extent that it successfully upholds the claim to the legitimate application of force. The willingness of a regime to use coercion against opponents or dissidents, or to regulate the political participation of the ordinary citizenry, has a direct bearing upon such questions as human rights, democratic values, authoritarianism, and the degree of consensus within a given polity.

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.

Kinnaird College alumnae who did not work often expressed regret for having been ‘just’ wives and mothers, and a feeling of not having lived up to expectations. In some cases, these women's parents planned for them to have professional careers, but more often, such women mentioned the expectations of their college teachers that alumnae would contribute to their society in some concrete way.Educated women, in short, left Kinnaird with a sense that their education implied obligations to society. Women with careers, whether or not they had married, were satisfied that they had ‘used’ their educations fittingly. Women without careers often expressed dissatisfaction, at least to a foreign observer, butat the same time, they justified their education by pointing with pride to the way they had reared their own children, recognizing that mothers are active transmitters of social identities within the family. Alumnae who remained in primarily domestic roles as wives and mothers frequently expanded their world to include non-domestic social work and other activities beyond their immediate kin group.

If Indian history is not timeless, some parts of Indian historiography certainly seem to be. Habib's paper is a notable example, with its reverence for sacred texts, vigilant even of the order in which the great ones are mentioned, and its repetition in substantially unchanged form of arguments that have been made and answered several times already.

I have no stomach for this ancient battle, and do not propose to answer Habib point by point. But those new to the literature should be warned of some of the peculiarities of his style of controversy.

Perhaps the most striking and significant divergence between the Sunni and the Shi'i legal systems as a whole lies in their respective laws of inheritance. From a comparative standpoint the outstanding characteristic of the Shi'i law of inheritance is its refusal to afford any special place or privileged position to agnate relatives as such.…

Economic nationalism may seem rather too grand a term for the contents of this paper. And indeed, I have not attempted any analysis of the economics of economic nationalism. My concern is with the nationalist element in the equation, in particular the basic perceptions of nationalists inside Korea who responded to the plight of their colonially oppressed nation. The question, ‘Is economic nationalism viable under colonial occupation?’ may be answered negatively in Korea's case. But one may equally assert that all nationalist movements and all economic action, of left or right, were not viable in Korea at this time. Even if a certain theory of the determinative role of economic superstructures is employed, I suspect this question of viability may generate only fruitless dispute over whether we strictly mean non-viability or simply failure. Hence I willingly leave the theoretical aspects of the case to those equipped to deal with them.

Despite a growing interest by anthropologists in the process whereby peasants have been incorporated into a modern industrialized economy as ‘post-peasants’, ‘peasant-workers’, or ‘part-time farmers’, comparatively little research has focused upon the community level of social integration as an important facet of this process (see Barlett 1980: 553, 560–1). For the most part, this lack of concern can probably be attributed to the fact that much of the research devoted to post-peasants has been conducted in European societies where community-wide types of cooperation do not seem to have been particularly important with regard to the production strategies peasants followed in their adaptation to conditions of rapid sociocultural change since the second world war (see Holmes 1983; Symes 1972; Redclift 1973; Minge-Kalman 1978; Franklin 1969: 10–15, 225–33; Tamanoi 1983).

For too long, considerations of state formation in India have divided on the colonial threshold of history, and the British regime in the subcontinent has been treated as completely different from all prior states. The most important reason for this seems to be that the historiography of the British empire was created by those who ruled India; it was therefore a kind of trophy of domination. Other reasons include the vast and accessible corpus of records on the creation of the British colonial state, the recency of its emergence, and the foundational character of the colonial state for the independent states of the subcontinent. Continuity of the British colonial state with its predecessors is acknowledged only in the case of the Mughals owing, in part, to the prolonged process of separation of the Company's government from its Mughal imperial cover before the Mutiny. Thus, long after they had ceased as a governing regime, the Mughals were considered by contemporaries and subsequently by historians to be the old regime of India.

The Japanese question was denned by British diplomats as the search for the earliest possible international agreement by which Japan might regain its sovereignty. It proved to be a protracted task with ramifications for Anglo-American cooperation elsewhere in east Asia. The evidence from newly available British and American records suggests that previous views on the international aspects of the Japanese peace process may have to be revised and that the degree of amity displayed by both sides on occasion deserves to be noted. The British files partly bear out President Truman's remark on being presented with a progress report on Anglo-American peace conversations that it was refreshing to learn of one Asian issue on which the two powers appeared to be working together.

Of the eleven states in West Malaysia, it may be said that Penang presents a somewhat different situation from the other ten in terms of demography, economics, geography and politics, to mention a few basic features. Situated in the northern part of the country, the state of Penang (which comprises the island and a narrow strip, Province Wellesley, on the mainland) does not exhibit the features of a typical Malay state—a Malay-majority population, a predominantly Malay agricultural economy and a Malay Mentri Besar (Chief Minister) leading a Malay-dominated State Assembly which governs the state for the sultan, the symbol of Malay political power. Instead it has a Chinese-majority population, an economic infrastructure based primarily on commerce and trade rather than agriculture and a Chinese Chief Minister leading a Chinese-dominated State Assembly.In contrast to the other Malay states, the central political role in Penang is played by the Chinese community. Whichever political party is aspiring to come to power in the state must have significant Chinese electoral support.Against the background of a Malay-dominated Federal Governmentstriving to ensure uniformity of political, cultural, linguistic and socio-economic goals, Penang poses a challenging situation.

Thispaper is exclusively concerned with developing broader conceptions of state and state-formation in pre-colonial India, and thus with problems of synthesizing diverse elements separately discussed and researched in the literature. It seeks to argue that certain critical aspects of the development of state and society in the long term have been neglected with serious consequences for overall conceptions and expectations.