The political history of Pakistan is characterised by incomplete constitution-making, a process which has placed the burden of constitutional interpretation on state instruments ranging from the bureaucracy to the military to the judiciary. In a penetrating and original study of the relationship between state and civil society in Pakistan, Paula Newberg demonstrates how the courts have influenced constitutional development and the structure of the state. By examining judicial decisions, particularly those made at times of political crisis, she considers how tensions within the judiciary, and between courts and other state institutions, have affected the ways political society views itself, and explores the consequences of these debates for the formal organisation of political power.

This is the first major study of gender and property in South Asia. In a pioneering and comprehensive analysis Bina Agarwal argues that the single most important economic factor affecting women's situation is the gender gap in command over property. In rural South Asia, the most significant form of property is arable land, a critical determinant of economic well-being, social status, and empowerment. But few women own land; fewer control it. Drawing on a vast range of interdisciplinary sources and her own field research, and tracing regional variations across five countries, the author investigates the complex barriers to women's land ownership and control, and how they might be overcome. The book makes significant and original contributions to theory and policy concerning land reforms, 'bargaining' and gender relations, women's status, and the nature of resistance.

Whereas previous studies of the end of British rule in India have concentrated on the negotiations of the transfer of power at the all-India level or have considered the emergence of separatist politics amongst India's Muslim minorities, this study provides a re-evaluation of the history of Bengal focusing on the political and social processes that led to the demand for partition in Bengal and tracing the rise of Hindu communalism. In its most startling revelation, the author shows how the demand for a separate homeland for the Hindus, which was fuelled by a large and powerful section of Hindu society within Bengal, was seen as the only way to regain influence and to wrest power from the Muslim majority. The picture which emerges is one of a stratified and fragmented society moving away from the mainstream of Indian nationalism, and increasingly preoccupied with narrower, more parochial concerns.

At the end of the First World War, Government of India officials and Indian nationalist politicians began to recognise the need for an organized communications network that could reach out to a large and diverse Indian population. The challenge for Government and nationalists alike was to create an effective propaganda machine that could both disseminate news and, at the same time, elicit the desired political response. Milton Israel's 1994 book describes the role of the press, news services and propaganda agencies in the last stage of the nationalist struggle in India before the departure of the British, emphasizing the media's participation in the development of a 'national' perspective. Within this context, the author examines the significance of the encounter between imperialism and nationalism and the influence one had upon the other in achieving often conflicting objectives.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar presents the first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton textile industry, its particular problems in the 1920s and 1930s and the mill owners' and the state's responses to them. The author also investigates how a labour force was formed in Bombay - its rural roots, urban networks, industrial organisation and the way in which it shaped capitalist strategies. In a subject dominated by the assumption of unities, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar convincingly demonstrates the fragmentation of class, on the side of both capital and labour. Their interaction sometimes exacerbated their internal differences. But, the author also asks on what terms, to what ends, and under what circumstances solidarities could be forged between workers.

West Bengal has the longest-ruling democratically elected Communist government in world history. Since 1977 the Left Front has governed a population of 68 million people and has received considerable world-wide attention as a positive example of Third World development and change. In this book, Dr Ross Mallick convincingly challenges this view of the Left Front government, arguing that it has been a failure in terms of redistributive development reform.

This book examines the politics and culture of landholding in eastern India. Professor McLane explores the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of the zamindars, the landed chiefs, in eighteenth-century western Bengal during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the British hegemony. He focuses on zamindari rent extraction, techniques of coercion, and the meaning of gift-giving and gift-receiving. He shows how the zamindars kept alive the rituals, patronage, and other traditions of normative Hindu kingship for their subjects in the villages while they extracted revenue from the peasantry and intermediate gentry for the government of the Mughals and then the English East India Company. He argues that the increased commercialization and efforts to maximize land revenues imposed severe strains on the paternalistic and gift-oriented culture of Bengal's huge landlords. This analysis is illustrated with a case study of Bengal's most important and controversial zamindari, the Burdwan raj.

Sri Lanka is one of the few new Commonwealth countries to have had a strong democratic tradition and a vibrant electoral life since Independence. In this book, Dilesh Jayanntha examines the basis for Sri Lankan electoral allegiance since 1947. He challenges the prevalent notion that caste is the basis for electoral allegiance and convincingly argues that the patron-client relationship is its primary determinant. Following an introduction outlining recent Sri Lankan political history, Dilesh Jayanntha then examines electoral allegiance in three contrasting constituencies which have a different history up until 1947. Yet, as the author demonstrates throughout, patronage networks determined electoral allegiance, and often, the patronage network was congruent with caste. Yet, as Jayanntha shows, where the patron-client tie cut across the caste tie it was the former which proved decisive in deciding electoral allegiance. This comparative analysis of electorates in Sri Lanka addresses issues that are relevant not only to South Asia but to the developing world in general.

In this book, Dr Sarah Ansari examines the system of political control constructed by the British in Sind between 1843 and 1947. In particular, she explores the part of the local Muslim elite, the pirs or hereditary sufi saints. Using a wealth of historical material and in depth interviews, the author looks at the development of the institution of the pir, its power base and the mechanics of the system of control into which the pirs were drawn. The overall success of the political system depended on the willingness of the elite to participate and Dr Ansari argues that it did indeed work in Sind. This enabled the British to govern while allowing the pirs to adapt to colonial rule, and later independence, without serious damage to their interests. The author demonstrates that only in the heightened nationalist atmosphere of the 1940s did the system break down.

From 1400 to 1750, Asian capital cities were often ruled in such a way that they became symbols of the power and influence their emperors extended over their states at large. These 'sovereign cities' became the empire in miniature. Shahjahanabad is the first study of a pre-modern Indian city (Old Delhi) as a sovereign city. Stephen Blake explores the way in which the emperors' and nobles' palaces and mansions dominated the landscape; how cultural life revolved around that of the emperors and their families; and how the households of the great men also dominated the urban economy and controlled a large percentage of state revenue. This study thus illuminates how Asian capitals were not the great amorphous agglomerations described by Marx and Weber. Instead they were urban communities with their own distinctive style and character, dependent on a particular kind of state organization.

This book presents a comprehensive and perceptive study of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh through the first two decades of its history from 1951. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was the most robust of the first generation of Hindu nationalist parties in modern Indian politics and Bruce Graham examines why the party failed to establish itself as the party of the numerically dominant Hindu community. The author explains the relatively limited appeal of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in terms of the restrictive scope of its founding doctrines; the limitations of its leadership and organization; its failure to build up a secure base of social and economic interests; and its difficulty in finding issues which would create support for its particular brand of Hindu nationalism. Bruce Graham ends with a major survey of the party's electoral fortunes at national, state and local levels.

To the modern world, the notions that freedom is an innate condition of human beings and that money possesses the power to bind people appear as natural facts. Bonded Histories traces the historical processes by which these notions became established as dominant discourses in India during colonial rule and continued into post-colonial India. Gyan Prakash locates the formulation of these discourses in the history of bonded labour in southern Bihar. He focuses on the emergence and subsequent transformation of the relationship of reciprocal power and dependence between landlords and labourers. The author explores the way in which these transformations were connected with broader shifts in the political economy of this part of the subcontinent; with the changing structures of agricultural production, land tenure and revenue demand; with local social hierarchies and the ideology of castes; and with Hindu cosmologies, spirit cults and their articulation in ritual practices.

In The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500–1650 Sanjay Subrahmanyam explores the relationship between long-distance trade and the economic and political structure of southern India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He questions the more traditional views that external demand was the force behind pre-colonial Indian economic growth or that external trade was insignificant in quantitative and qualitative terms compared with the vastness of the internal economy. Instead, Dr Subrahmanyam authoritatively demonstrates the interaction between south Indian developments and larger international processes within certain economic institutions - most notably the network of marketing villages, great coastal emporia and operations of revenue-farmers and 'portfolio' capitalists. This book is based on extensive and previously unused Portuguese and Dutch archival sources. Its secondary theme is to explore the relationship between the documentation used and the context within which it was generated, thus illuminating how Europeans and Asians reacted to one another.

South India is often portrayed as a land of Hindu orthodoxy, yet in fact three great 'world religions' have inter-acted in the region over many centuries. Saints, Goddesses and Kings uses a powerful combination of oral, literary and archival evidence to investigate the social and religious world of those large and influential groups of South Indians who came to identify themselves as Christians and Muslims, while retaining powerful links with the religion and culture of the wider society. Susan Bayly shows how Christianity and Islam spread along the military and agricultural frontiers of southern India, and how certain beliefs and practices derived local force from an ambiguous relationship with the worship of existing Hindu goddesses. Saints, Goddesses and Kings thus illumines not only the meaning and history of religious conversion and the nature of community, but wider processes of social and political change within the sub-continent and, indeed, colonial societies in general.

This innovative study of the power of lineage in India across two centuries examines some of the traditional social structures which transcended so successfully the political upheavals of British rule. Under the Maratha Kingdom, the Devs occupied a privileged position in the ritual, social and economic hierarchies of the state from the 1620s onwards, their continuing influence stemming principally from obtaining grants of rent-free land around Pune and successfully maintaining this inheritance from generation to generation. With the British conquest of Maharashtra in 1818, the close relations between state and privileged subject were slowly broken and by the 1850s, the British sought to settle the Devs' landed rights. Basing their inquiries on preconquest vernacular documents, they became entwined in disputes over the tenure of the Devs' lands and the mode of inheritance within the lineage that reveal a telling ignorance of the customary relations between the Indian State and its privileged subjects.

Religion under Bureaucracy is an innovative study of religion and politics in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu which focuses on the relationship between the state and the central religious institution of the area, the Hindu temple. Religion, politics, economy and culture intersect in the temple and Tamil Nadu has 52,000 in all, many richly endowed with land and prominent locally as sources of patronage and economic and political power. Dr Presley examines the institutional challenge that Hindu temples have presented to the developing South Indian state over the last century and a half and the ways in which a government publicly committed to non-intervention in religious matters has come to involve itself deeply in temple life - establishing a presence in temple management, regulating the use of the temple's material and symbolic resources and, beyond this, seeking to control many details of Hindu organisation, economy and worship.

A pioneering piece of ethnohistory, The Hollow Crown uses a variety of interdisciplinary means to reconstruct the sociocultural history of a warrior polity in south India between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries. Central to the book is the belief that comparative sociology has systematically denied the importance of the Indian state and obscured the political basis of Indian society by representing caste as fundamentally a religious system. In reconstructing the history of the polity that eventually became the colonial princely state of Pudukkottai, Dr Dirks therefore raises a whole series of issues concerning the methodologies of history and anthropology, the character of Tamil kingship and social organization, the relationship between politics and ritual, the impact of colonialism and 'modernization', and the dynamics of the whole last millennium of south Indian history.

As well as being an outstanding contribution to Indian economic and social history, this book draws important conclusions about peasant politics in general and about the effects of international economic fluctuations on primary producing countries. Dr Bose develops a general typology of systems of agrarian production in Bengal to show how these responded to different types of pressure from the world economy, and treats in detail the effects of the world Depression on Bengal. Separate chapters are devoted to the themes of agrarian conflict and religious strife in east Bengal, the agrarian dimension of mass nationalism in west Bengal and sharecroppers agitations in the frontier regions. The conclusion attempts a synthesis of the typology of agrarian social structure and the periodisation of peasant politics, placing this in the wider context of agrarian societies and protest in other parts of India and in South-east Asia.

This analysis of the role of government in eradicating India's rural poverty raises a whole series of crucial contemporary issues relating to the state, its degree of autonomy in the developing world and the problems of effecting genuine redistributive reform. The particular importance of the book is that it focuses attention on the nature of ruling political parties as an important factor influencing the success or failure of redistributive and welfare politics in a democratic capitalist setting. Dr Kohli compares in detail three state-level Indian governments of the late seventies: Communist-ruled West Bengal, Karnataka under the Congress Party, and Uttar Pradesh under the Janata Party. Comparing these in terms of their success in redistributing agricultural land and creating employment for the rural poor, the author argues cogently that well-organised, left-of-centre parties in government - like that in West Bengal - are the most effective in implementing reform.

Dr Kozlowski's important study pioneers a fresh approach to the study of a critical Muslim institution: the endowments or awqaf which almost everywhere in the Islamic world provide support for mosques, schools and shrines. The wealthier Muslims who establish endowments inevitably have an eye on social, political and economic conditions and have traditionally used awqaf as part of an effort to preserve their wealth and influence, especially in periods of change and uncertainty. The book focuses on the use of endowments by Muslims suffering the dislocations caused by the imposition of British rule in India and examines in detail the social and political implications of the controversy over endowments that took place in the imperial courts and councils. The author's observations and insights can be applied to many periods and places in the Muslim world and his novel approach will attract all those interested in the study of Islam.