Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 2010"

Letters Home: Banaras pandits and the Maratha regions in early modern India

Abstract: Maratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts. They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order. Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution of such disputes.

A New Hope: India, the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Abstract: This paper explores India's role in the development and design of the United Nations (UN), refracted through the Commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Through an analysis of sovereignty, citizenship, nationality and human rights from the 1940s to 1956, the paper discusses what India hoped the UN to be, and more generally what they intended for the new world order and for themselves. The paper challenges existing interpretations of international affairs in this period. It seeks to reform our understanding of Jawaharlal Nehru's intellectual vision, and in the process attempts to recast the very concept of post-coloniality.

The New Life Movement in Jiangxi province, 1934-1938

Abstract: This paper discusses the origins and the implementation of the New Life Movement (NLM) in the Jiangxi Province between 1934 and 1938. Based upon primary sources produced during this period, it explores how the Nationalist Party utilised the NLM for the purposes of national reconstruction and social mobilisation. The first section analyses how elements of anti-communism, Christianity and state Confucianism came into play in the NLM; the second section analyses how the Nationalists reinforced the idea of ‘hygienic modernity’ by projecting it into the realms of state building and mass mobilisation; the third section discusses the changes introduced in society by the Nationalists with the creation of semi-governmental organisations; and the fourth section examines the involvement of the NLM with preparation for the war against Japan (1937–1945). The paper argues that the NLM had a lasting impact on Chinese society, and it contributed to shape citizenship and national identity.

Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court

Abstract: Brajbhasha literature is a domain of Mughal culture seldom investigated by scholars, to the detriment of our understanding of both. While the Mughal court is famed for its lavish support of Persian writers, a surprising number of Brajbhasha poets also attracted the notice of Mughal patrons. In this paper I look at the lives and texts of important Braj writers who worked in Mughal settings, with a view to uncovering the nature of the social, political and cultural interactions that this kind of patronage represents. Why these poets have been largely lost to social and literary history is another concern, along with the challenges of trying to recover their stories.

In the Hindutva Laboratory: Pogroms and Politics in Gujarat, 2002

Abstract: Communal violence wracked the state of Gujarat and the city of Ahmedabad once again in 2002, leaving some 2,000 people dead. Because the ruling BJP party had proclaimed Gujarat the ‘Laboratory of Hindutva’, analysts throughout India saw the violence as BJP policy and debated its possible spillover effects elsewhere. This paper finds that in a period already marked by stressful economic and cultural change and attended by political uncertainty, some BJP leaders gambled that an attack on Gujarat's Muslims, and on the rule of law in general, would attract followers and voters. Their gamble proved correct at least in the short run. This paper examines the cultural, social, geographical and educational restructuring that is occurring, through legal and illegal struggles, and the impact of the violence upon these processes. It examines the declining status of Muslims as a result of continuous propaganda against them. It analyzes the degree to which the state was damaged as a result of the decision for violence and asks about the degree to which leaders do, or do not, wish to ‘put it behind them’, and suggests that Ahmedabad's problems are widely shared in both the developing and developed worlds.

The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge Between Person and Paper

Abstract: This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa 1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of ‘knowledge’ in this period? After addressing these questions on ‘modes’ of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of ‘means’ of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘bibliocentric’ attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge or takiyya.

Conceptions of Citizenship in India and the ‘Muslim Question’

Abstract: This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt to understand how, despite profound social divisions, India's nationhood holds together. The paper advances the proposition that the Indian polity incorporated a deeply divided and conflict-ridden population by offering multiple notions of citizenship upon which a sense of membership in the nation, and a share in the enterprise of the state, could be sought. By negotiating and balancing distinct overlapping conceptions for competing membership claims in the nation, diverse social groups could find a viable place in the nation, without entirely resigning their various group identities. The analysis focuses as a lens on the Muslim citizens who are amongst the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry. It provides perspectives into how even some of the most marginalised members in Indian society found sufficient prospects for a meaningful participation within the nation. Multiple conceptions of citizenship enabled the state to manage its diverse social groups and contain many of their underlying conflicts.

Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal

Abstract: This paper examines themes related to cooking, food, nutrition, and the relationship between dietary practice and health in late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Bengal, and argues that food and cuisine represented a vibrant site on which a complex rhetorical struggle between colonialism and nationalism was played out. Insofar as they carried symbolic meanings and ‘civilisational attributes’, cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content. The Bengali/Indian kitchen, so strongly reviled in European colonialist discourses as a veritable purgatory, became a critically important symbolic space in the emerging ideology of domesticity during the colonial period. The gastronomic excesses of gluttonous British officials—crucial in asserting the physical superiority of a ‘masculine’ Raj—became an object of ridicule in Bengali culinary texts, signifying the grossness of a materialistic. The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism.

Modern Burma Studies: A Survey of the Field

Abstract: Burma has never been a popular subject for academic research but, since a massive pro-democracy uprising drew worldwide attention to the country in 1988, the number of scholars and students engaged in the field has grown considerably. However, they still face a number of major challenges. Along with other kinds of area studies, Burma studies have been accused by academics from the more ‘scientific’ disciplines of being too narrowly focused and lacking theoretical rigour. Also, it has been difficult to conduct research in Burma's closed society. While the latest military government has relaxed some controls, field work is still constrained and reliable sources are hard to find. Often, the knowledge gap has been filled by myths and misconceptions. Adding to these problems, since 1988 the Burma studies community has become highly polarised, with political and moral factors often featuring more prominently in the public debate than considered arguments based on objective analysis. All these factors have adversely affected modern Burma studies and restricted understanding of this deeply troubled country by both scholars and the wider community.

‘Signs of churning’: Muslim Personal Law and public contestation in twenty-first century India

Abstract: For many Muslims, the preservation of Muslim Personal Law has become the touchstone of their capacity to defend their religious identity in modern India. This paper examines public debate over Muslim Personal Law, not as a site of consensus within the community, but rather as an arena in which a varied array of Muslim individuals, schools and organisations have sought to assert their own distinctiveness. This is done by discussing the evolution of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the most influential organisation to speak on such matters since the 1970s, with particular focus on its recent disintegration at the hands of a number of alternative legal councils formed by feminist, clerical and other groups. These organisations have justified their existence through criticism of the organisation's alleged attempts to standardise Islamic law, and its perceived dominance by the Deobandi school of thought. In truth, however, this process of fragmentation results from a complex array of embryonic and interlinked personal, political and ideological competitions, indicative of the increasingly fraught process of consensus-building in contemporary Indian Muslim society.

‘Fill Full the Mouth of Famine’: Voluntary Action in Famine Relief in India 1896–1901

Abstract: This paper considers non-governmental famine relief in India during 1896–1898 and 1899–1901. It details the efforts of a broad spectrum of middle-class Indians, Christian missionaries, British non-officials and off-duty civil servants who were drawn into voluntary service on semi-official committees which were responsible for distributing record sums raised through international appeals. It also explores the extension of relief work by independent agencies in the 1890s. The paper considers evolving British attitudes to indigenous relief methods and the sometimes fraught relations between government and voluntary agencies. It suggests that voluntary famine relief activities during the 1890s mark a transition from traditional religious philanthropy to organised social service. Voluntary relief at this time differed from earlier responses to famine hunger because it was marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the personal service of volunteers. In conclusion, it is shown that participation in relief in the 1890s inspired a new generation of educated Indians to channel their nationalism into practical social service after 1900.

Buddhist ‘nuns’ (mae chi) and the teaching of Pali in contemporary Thailand*

Abstract: This paper presents an ethnographic account of Buddhist ‘nuns’ involved in the teaching of Pali language and Abhidhamma in contemporary Thailand. It also reflects on both the emic-Buddhist (Pali and modern vernacular) and etic-interpretative (English-language) vocabularies which have been used to describe these women and their social role(s) and status(es). The aims of the paper are to go beyond the Weberian vocabulary usually used to describe what we will call ‘professionally celibate Buddhist women’, to escape from the ubiquitous emphasis on the issue of re-establising the Nuns’ Order (bhikkhunī-s) in the modern world in scholarship dealing with such women, and to encourage further ethnography and further civilizational interpretation of gender and asceticism.

Indonesia's Salafist Sufis

Abstract: Islam's devotional and mystical tradition, Sufism (tasawwuf), is commonly cast as antithetical to Salafi Islam. Self-identified ‘Salafis’, with their ideological roots in anti-liberal strands of twentieth-century modernist Islam, do commonly view Sufis as heretics propagating practices wrongly introduced into Islam centuries after the time of the pious ancestors (the Salaf). Yet reformist zeal that fixes on the singular importance of the Salaf (particularly the Prophet Muhammad and his principal companions) as models for correct piety can also be found amongst Sufis. This paper calls attention to the Salafist colouration of Sufism in two areas of popular culture: television preaching and the popular religious ‘how-to’ books and DVDs that make the preachers’ messages available for purchase. It reprises the teachings of two of the best known Indonesian Muslim televangelists, ‘Hamka’ (b. 1908, d. 1981) and M. Arifin Ilham (b. 1969), both of whom also happen to be champions of Sufism, and analyses the different rhetorical uses each has made of references to the ‘Salaf’ and the notion of ‘Salafist’ Islam.

Commercial recruiting and Informal Intermediation: debate over the sardari system in Assam tea plantations, 1860–1900

Abstract: This paper engages with Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument that the importance accorded to the intermediation of sardars/jobbers in colonial labour arrangements followed from the perception of the Indian peasant as static and immobile, requiring especial effort at recruitment, but that, over time, employers grew resentful of the power and control acquired by these intermediaries. Drawing on this insight, the paper examines the role of sardars in the recruitment system of the Assam tea plantations and the ways in which they were promoted by the planters and the state in an attempt to loosen the stranglehold of professional contractors. The sardars were presented as the solution to abuses of Assam recruitment and portrayed as non-market agents recruiting within the closed world of kin, caste and village relationships. Towards the late-nineteenth century, however, a nexus developed between the contractors and sardars, which successive legislative interventions failed to break. Moreover, the notion that the sardar would be a more benign agent of recruitment was repeatedly proved false.

Discipline and Morale of the African, British and Indian Army units in Burma and India during World War II: July 1943 to August 1945

Abstract: Towards the end of World War II, the morale of British units stationed in Burma and India was on a downslide. In contrast, the morale of Indian units was quite high. In fact, after the 1943 Arakan Campaign, the morale of Indian units rose slowly but steadily. The morale and discipline of Indian troops are also compared and contrasted with another colonial army: the African troops. By making a comparative study of the Commonwealth troops deployed in Burma and India, this paper attempts to show how and why the contours of morale and discipline changed among the various groups of troops at different times. The study of morale and discipline of the troops deployed in these two regions represents two extreme conditions: while Burma remained a war front, India did not experience any actual warfare except for some skirmishes with Indus tribes at the northwest frontier. In general, bad discipline is partly responsible for bad morale and vice versa, which adversely affects the fighting power of armies. This turns to the issue of ‘why do men fight’? The ‘will to war’ is directly proportional to good discipline and strong morale amongst troops. This paper will look for the causative factors shaping discipline and morale of both metropolitan and colonial soldiers, based mainly on military intelligence reports on morale. We will see that rather than grand ideas like nationalism and anti-fascism, mundane factors like the supply of good rations, access to sex and service conditions, influence the morale and discipline of soldiers, and hence their combat-worthiness.

Shakila Yacob and Nicholas White, ‘The “unfinished business” of Malaysia’s decolonisation: the origins of the Guthrie Dawn Raid’

Abstract: In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. This ∗ The authors wish to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education and Nottingham University Malaysia Campus’s Business School in the research and writing of this paper. Nicholas White would additionally like to thank the International Institute of Public Policy and Management (INPUMA), University of Malaya, where he was a visiting fellow during October and November 2007. Embryonic versions of this paper have also been presented at the European Business History Association conference, ‘International Business, International Organizations and the Wealth of Nations’, University of Geneva, 13–15 September 2007, at the Department of History Seminar Series, University of Malaya, 9 November 2007 and at the ‘The Economic and Social History of Malaysia: Celebrating 50 Years of Independence’ conference, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, 15–17 November 2007. The authors are grateful for the comments of participants at these academic colloquia. The writing of this paper would not have been possible without interviews and correspondence with the following individuals: Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim, Tan Sri Mohamad Desa Pachi, Mark Gent, Sir Donald Hawley, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, John Gullick and Henry Barlow, and to whom the authors are particularly grateful for giving up their valuable time to share their thoughts and reminiscences. However, the authors alone are responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. Extracts from the Tan Cheng Lock articles

Chinese Tong as British Trust: Institutional Collisions and Legal Disputes in Urban Hong Kong, 1860s–1980s

Abstract: By the nineteenth century, with the advance of British colonial activities, British corporate laws had been transplanted to maritime Asia with varying degrees of vigour. In British Hong Kong, these laws often clashed with native customs. Through a reconstruction of the legal disputes found in urban Hong Kong, this paper discusses how British and Chinese business traditions interacted with each other during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before assessing the historical implications and consequences of these legal decisions, this paper will also explore whether the Chinese institution of tong is compatible with British law in urban Hong Kong.

A post-colonial patriarchy? Representing family in the Indian nation-state

Abstract: That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men's property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.

Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India

Abstract: One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws.

Coolie Drivers Or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System

Abstract: This paper traces the evolution of the indenture labour system in the tea plantations of Assam and, simultaneously, the shaping of the attitudes of British planters towards the labour force. Also explored are: the significant fact that only a small number of British managerial personnel were in charge of a huge migrant labour force; how the need to step up tea production for the competitive world market while keeping down costs—i.e. labour costs, being the main production cost—fostered an exploitative labour system, with planters taking frequent recourse to physical and economic coercion; and the ensuing extra-legal measures needed to keep the labour force under control. The paper also demonstrates that the colonial state was in full cognizance of the injustices of the labour system. Legislation by the government had laid the foundations of the indenture system and, while there were provisions for protecting the interests of labour force, these were on the whole ignored, with the state turning a blind eye to the planters’ use of physical and other extra-legal measures. One instance involved Chief Commissioner Henry Cotton, who attacked the injustices of the system. This attack was silenced swiftly, and the stance taken by Viceroy Curzon as the incident played out is a clear pointer to the government's willingness, to side with tea-industry interests at all costs.

The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity

Abstract: Through a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

Reterritorialization of a Balinese Chinese Community in Quanzhou, Fujian

Abstract: This paper is about a special category of guiqiao or ‘returned overseas Chinese’, in southern Fujian. Arriving in China from Bali, Indonesia in 1961, the people were settled in an overseas Chinese farm. The paper illustrates how the re-migrants coped with life in China and how they see themselves today. The returned overseas Chinese reterritorize their Indonesian and Balinese cultural life in China, and they, including the local-born children, speak Balinese and eat Indonesian food. Their experiences provide much food for thought on acculturation, migration and identity as well as on the idea of ‘homeland’.

Sectarian Socialism: The Politics of Sri Lanka's Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)

Abstract: This paper explores the politics of Sri Lanka's Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the post-1994 period, when it re-created itself as a mainstream parliamentary political party and came to play a critical role in the collapse of the 2001–2004 peace process. The fundamental analytical enigma of the JVP lies in explaining its hybrid Marxist/Sinhala nationalist persona, which enabled it to craft a highly effective campaign of opposition to the Ranil Wickremasinghe government's two-track agenda of peace with market reforms. This paper examines how the JVP's Marxism relates to its Sinhala nationalism, and how it fits within the Sri Lanka's Marxist tradition as a whole. It argues that the JVP's increasing emphasis on Sinhala nationalism post-1999 has occurred in the context of de-radicalisation and parliamentary habilitation, and discusses the relevance of its ideological orientation to the material basis of Sinhala nationalism and its relationship with the social democratic state.

The ‘Unfinished Business’ of Malaysia's Decolonisation: The Origins of the Guthrie ‘Dawn Raid’*

Abstract: In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. This was the most dramatic Malaysian acquisition of a foreign company during the restructuring of the country's post-colonial economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Guthrie Dawn Raid remains a celebrated but, at the same time, contested juncture in contemporary Malaysian memory. Drawing upon a variety of sources—including original interviews and correspondence with key participants in, and observers of, the Guthrie Dawn Raid, as well as newly released British documents related to the Anglo-Malaysian events of September 1981—this article presents a new interpretation of the origins of this most iconic of Malaysian corporate takeovers. In particular, it stresses the long-term aspirations of a key (but often overlooked) figure within the late and post-colonial Malay bureaucratic and economic elite, Ismail Mohamed Ali. At the same time, the article emphasizes the specific requirements of Malaysia's New Economic Policy against the backdrop of burgeoning intra-Malaysian ethnic business competition.

Caste Away? Subaltern Engagement with the Modern Indian State

Abstract: Mayawati's recent victory, in May 2007, in the Uttar Pradesh elections has been hailed as a ‘spectacular display of subaltern power’. The questions remain: who are these subalterns? To what extent do they form a coherent block, with similar fears, hopes and aspirations, and how are subalterns’ visions of the state, social justice and equality articulated? This paper explores some of these questions, by examining the example of the boatman community in Banaras, belonging to the Mallah (Nishad) caste, and the strategies they use to be heard as legitimate citizens of the state. Such strategies and techniques reveal a sophisticated and organized apparatus of caste and community associations that call into question some recent theoretical formulations of the Indian state as one dominated and manipulated by powerful elites, while subalterns remain passive or, at best, compliant.

God's Kingdom on Earth? Politics of Islam in Pakistan, 1947–1969*

Abstract: This paper evaluates in detail the policies adopted and the religious ideas held by the power elite of Pakistan during the years from 1947 to 1969. It has been argued that the religious worldview of the power elite was shaped by the discourse of Islamic modernism which allowed envisioning of a state in which (at least theoretically) democracy, rights of minorities, sovereignty of the parliament and flexibility of Islamic laws could be propagated as the guiding principles of the state. Also, by focusing on the life and ideas of Ghulam Ahmad Parvez and by disclosing the details of his close connivance with General Ayyub Khan during the 1960s, the paper will highlight the steps taken to institutionalize Islamic modernism in Pakistan.

Bullion for trade, war, and debt-relief: British movements of silver to, around, and from Asia, 1760-1833

Abstract: This paper provides the first detailed assessment of British exports of silver to Asia during the initial phase of imperial expansion in India. It demonstrates that, contrary to the views of some historians, exports of silver were at times very considerable, notably after 1785, when they were used to fund war and debt-relief in India, as well as for trade. Focus is on the East India Company, but attention is paid to private exports, to British transfers of silver around Asia, and the paper ends with an analysis of ‘reverse’ flows to Britain established after 1810.

Exogenous colonialism: Java sugar between Nippon and Taikoo before and during the interwar Depression, c. 1920-1940

Abstract: This paper discusses the commercial history of the Java sugar industry in the interwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Java's late colonial industry had a uniquely exogenous character, in that, amongst the world's major producers of cane sugar in the late colonial era, it was singularly devoid of metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan markets. Instead, it sought its markets pre-eminently on the Asian ‘mainland’ to its north and northwest. The Indian subcontinent formed one such market, but East Asia formed the second, and it is the Java industry's fortunes in China and Japan that provide the focus of the present paper. This focus highlights the extent to which the partial collapse of the industry in the mid-1930s related to factors altogether more complex than a simple fall in consumption and drop in prices associated with the interwar Depression. Fundamentally, it was evolving economic autarchy throughout east Asia, encouraged by Depression conditions, which lay at the heart of the Java sugar industry's problems in this sector of its market. Key factors were Java's ambivalent relationship with an expanding but crisis-ridden Japanese sugar ‘empire,’ and the effect on its long-standing links with British sugar refineries in Hong Kong because of the latter's increasing difficulties in the China market. In tandem, they underscored the commercial hazards inherent in Java sugar's exogenous situation.

Industrialisation and Handicraft Cloth: The Jiangsu Peasant Economy in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract: This paper analyses the trajectories of handicraft cloth production in three major sub-regions of Jiangsu Province in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to traditional focus on the bankruptcy of rural handicrafts in the face of competition from the modern industry, it argues that the fate of handicrafts depended on the specific characteristics of each sub-regional economy. Thus in Song-Tai, handicraft weaving declined as labour was drawn off into modern industry. In Tong-Hai the availability of machine-spun yarn in the market enabled the development of a commercialised handicraft weaving sector. Finally, in Xu-Huai-Hai machine-spun yarn enabled the inhabitants to substitute their own subsistence handicraft production for cloth purchased from elsewhere.

‘The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-Naked One’: Or the Indian Nation's Contradictions Personified

Abstract: This paper explores the interplay between development, identity politics and middle-class aspirations amongst low-caste Chamar women in rural north India. It argues that this interplay has reinvigorated notions of women's domesticity, education and modern conjugality as they emerged in the reforms and ‘modernising’ efforts of sections of Indian society, since the nineteenth century, in their encounter with the colonial ‘civilising mission’. It will show how the long-term effects of this ‘legacy’, through its reconfiguration and appropriation by members from a low caste, have affected a historically marginalised community in their pursuit of middle-class aspirations. In addition to the criticality of Indian women and their gender roles as ‘sites’ where nation and community transformations are symbolically and practically negotiated, scholars of South Asia have also highlighted the separation between historical and anthropological discourses on women. This paper brings these discourses together and addresses this separation by showing that Chamar appropriation of the ‘modernising’ agenda has initiated a dual process. On the one hand, a minority of women have embarked on an embourgeoisement trajectory predicated on education, ‘modern motherhood’ and aspirations to white collar employment, and on the other hand, underprivileged women (with their ‘unfit’ personas) have become increasingly vulnerable to stigmatisation as a result of being in ‘menial labour’. It is further argued that dialectic study of the ‘two [groups of] Chamar women’ will provide an insightful lens through which inner conflicts within low-caste communities in contemporary India may be understood, and suggests that there are contradictory trends concerning women, their development prospects, and their membership within the nation.