Search

In parts of southern and western Asia, as elsewhere, the cannon once served as one of the most dramatic tools in the inventories of state executioners. The practice of 'blowing from a gun', by which the condemned was bound to the front of a cannon and quite literally blown to pieces, was most infamously employed in British India and the Princely States, and the vast majority of English-language scholarship focuses on these regions. However, blowing from guns was commonplace in several other contemporary states, and the British use of the practice has rarely been situated in this context. The tactic was considered especially useful in Persia and Afghanistan, where weak governance, rebellion, and rampant banditry all threatened the legitimacy of the nascent state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a history of the practice of execution by cannon in southern and western Asia, positioning it within the existing literature on public executions in the context of military and civilian justice. In doing so, the article seeks to situate the British use of the tactic within a broader regional practice, arguing that, whilst the British—following the Mughal tradition—used execution by cannon primarily in maintaining military discipline, states such as Persia and Afghanistan instead employed the practice largely in the civilian context. This article also provides a brief technical review of the practice, drawing upon numerous primary sources to examine execution by cannon within the Mughal empire, British India, Persia, and Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes a legal and a South Asian perspective to the emerging scholarship on the materiality of the Qur'an, exploring and analysing the development of the laws and regulations that protect the Qur'an as a sacred object against the risk desecration, defilement as well as heretical translations and interpretations. Starting with the enactment of Indian Penal Code, 1860 in colonial India and ending with amendments to the Punjab Holy Quran (Printing and Recording) Act, 2011 in 2022, this paper identifies multiple layers of statutes and regulations that accompany the life-cycle of the Qur'an from 'cradle to grave'. In analysing the legal developments that have fused the object and the text of the Qurʾan into a legal entity that demands particular interpretations of Islam, this paper identifies an Islamic state doctrine that asks and expects the Pakistani state to protect and promote Islamic law and religion in an increasing number of contexts and occasions, the protection of the Qurʾan being only one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917, the United Provinces government in British India proscribed Lakshman Singh's play titled Kuli Pratha arthat Biswin Shatbdi ki Gulami (The System of Recruiting Coolies, in other words, Slavery in the Twentieth Century), under the Indian Press Act of 1910. This essay analyzes Kuli Pratha's proscription when indenture was an important issue on the nationalist agenda and shows that legal control of literature was shaped not only by issues within the subcontinent but also by British imperial policies and practices in the Empire's colonial outposts beyond India. Analyzing the play in tandem with its proscription, its extra-legal contexts, and its official English translation that served to direct authorities about its political subject matter, thus, provides a layered understanding of the complicated entanglements of colonialism, nationalism, and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association of colonial power with turban has not been made since the beginning of British rule in India. This link has been developed through various setbacks. The Britishers' perceptions about the dress of the native employees was not as same in the 1880s–90s as it was in the 1800s. As the time progressed, the body-politics related to colonizer's sartorial manners in India matured. By attaching the tag of "civilized" to own sartorial etiquette, the Britishers made their social etiquette inaccessible to the natives for power's sake. It was from this mentality that the Britishers created an English-educated class in Indian Native society, who used to consider following many indigenous customs and manners tantamount to their backwardness. Wearing a turban was among one of them. Based on the turban, the sphere of symbolic power that was constituted in colonial India until the end of the nineteenth century will be discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an examination of historical documents and official pronouncements of the United Nations, Pakistan, and India, this paper analyzes the historical genesis and evolution of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan and argues that the conflict was and remains an international one, despite India's claims to the contrary. In that context, India's unilateral abrogation in 2019 of Article 370 of its Constitution has not only stripped Kashmir of its political autonomy, but has also effectively denied Kashmiris their right to self-determination, in violation of both the Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan, and of the numerous Security Council resolutions issued on the Kashmir dispute. This paper argues that the UN, more specifically the General Assembly, has a responsibility to complete the decolonization of Kashmir and to intervene to ensure that the Kashmiris can fully exercise their right to self-determination, which entails erga omnes obligation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom of religion and the application of blasphemy laws remain critical issues in Pakistan. The issues have deep historical roots in British India, where British administrators attempted to preserve peace between and within religious communities but, faced with growing challenges, occasionally misused such laws. This article juxtaposes the Angare case from the 1920s with that of Asia Bibi in the 2020s. It attempts to illustrate that religious minorities in Pakistan remain vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the third article published in Pakistan Horizon in a series of six articles on the radio waves clashes during the Second World War. In the present article I deal substantially with some tangible, crucial and specific issues and aspects that were severely confronting the British during the Second World War. These factors, in conjunction with technical advantages of Germany in radio waves transmission, as well as in the establishment of radio stations, firmly contributed towards the effectiveness of Nazi Germany's radio waves propaganda beamed to India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks afresh at the notion of the British–Indian colonial state as an 'ethnographic state', as formulated by Nicholas Dirks. It does so through a case study of gangs of 'foreign Asiatic vagrants' whose forays into British India during the last decades of the nineteenth century created panic among colonial officials and further argues that such panic was due to the difficulty of identifying the members of these gangs. Ethnography proved of little help in the process, as the people involved did not easily fit into the disciplinary grid of colonial ethnography, with its preference for settled communities neatly divided into discrete castes over semi-nomadic groups with shifting habits and habitats. The resulting uncertainties translated themselves into a kind of bureaucratic anarchy, as various officials took different views of the nature and composition of these groups. Eventually, their mobilities were controlled through police measures, with no significant contribution from ethnographic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the second article in a series of six articles examining and assessing the radio waves propaganda situation prior to and, to some extent, during World War II. 772*s will be followed by an article on Nazi Germany's propaganda broadcasts beamed at India, another on Subhas Chandra Bose and the Japanese propaganda perpetrated on British India, next on Axis propaganda aimed towards north-western India, especially on, and exploiting the then aggrauating situation uis-a-vis the Hurs in Sind and the Pashtun tribes in the North-West Frontier Prouince of British India. The last article will be on the British counterblast to Axis propaganda, a comprehensive broad spectrum strategy that amalgamated retaliation as well as diffusion tactics combining both electronic and print media, censorship, personal and physical intervention by ICS district officers, as well as those in the federal and provincial secretariats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influences of British colonialism still persists even in the 21st century, and many debates on whether such influences of the British Empire were fundamentally beneficial or not exist. To contribute to this debate, we'll measure the effects of British colonialism on political boundaries, education, and socio-economic relationships in British Africa and India to determine if there was anything good about the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I consider religion in international political scholarship and suggest a study of its epistemological politics and conceptual history. I argue that scholarship which strives to 'engage' or 'recognize' religion in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, I ask if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of recognition scholarship. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jens Bartelson I argue that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. In order to assess the costs of recognition I propose a study of its conditions of possibility, that is, a study of the ways in which the subjects of recognition become recognizable as such. In the final section of the paper, I apply this to the example of religion in global politics and the formation of the Muslim subject in the lead-up to the partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines Russia’s planning of warfare in Central Asia in 1878 while preparing for a possible war with the coalition of Great Britain, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. The development of the war plan was caused by the inability of the Russian army weakened by the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 to conduct active military operations in Europe. Instead, it was aimed to influence Great Britain by creating a threat to its richest colony - India. In the historical literature there is no clear answer to the question about the goals of the unsuccessful Jam expedition. In this regard, the aim of this research is to reveal the content of the failed campaign’s plan based on the available historical sources and try to reconstruct Russia’s war plan against Great Britain in Central Asia, as well as to show its significance in the further process of war planning in the region. The author comes to conclusion that the Russian military-political leadership initially expected to invade India, but due to the changed situation they conducted just demonstration actions. The failure of the Jam expedition showed the Russian commanders the need to search for a springboard for future actions against India. Moreover, based on the experience of the unsuccessful campaign, the Russian commanders began regular planning for war against Great Britain in Central Asia which provided for the conduct of offensive operations in the direction of Herat.

Critical family history expands the frame of a life story beyond the accumulation of facts and figures to an acknowledgement of context, a deeper understanding of structure, a reckoning of circumstance and response and a comparison across time and space. This article explores the complexity of family history in the context of colonial pasts in British India; the possibilities offered by group analysis of colonial actors; and the moral obligation of the family historian to address difficult pasts in all their complexity. Through the migratory careers and migration stories of colonial actors—the dislocated people, objects and memories that sustain identity—a longitudinal dimension is added to family history. Taken collectively, the family history of a domiciled British community in India reveals not just important blood ties, but critical associational links and shared characteristics that structure experience and enhance power. Colonial power must always be measured by its negative effects, but is also relational, situational, variable, commutable and resisted. The article further reflects on the ways in which critical research into settler-colonial migrations delivers our family histories to the doorstep of the present; their possibilities for informing truth-telling at individual and national levels; and the need for a pedagogy of historical contextualisation and ethical citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the (contested) concept of political representation in Urdu during the colonial period to address "deceptive familiarities" and highlight multilingual and transnational influences on contemporary Indian Muslim claims. Drawing on official documents, letters, speeches, and newspapers from the late 1850s to 1919, it argues that the "politics of presence"—or descriptive representation—of "Old Party" leaders stemmed from their aristocratic concept of representation as trusteeship (wakālat). Despite changes in terminology, the concept was only challenged in the 1910s by the "Young Party" and by the embracing of democratic values. Conceptual change was then materialized by the appropriation of the Persian numā'indagī in Urdu—a term that might have consecutively accredited descriptive claims and the use of religious symbols in election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses British ventures for English education in the Indian subcontinent which had signified the inevitable relevance of English language both for education policy and practice. Looking at the phenomena in pre-19th century context, English language was introduced in the subcontinent for the sake of training Indian interpreters who could also act as mediators between other Indians and the British officers of East India Company. During 19th century, after establishing their rule over the Indian subcontinent, English education was being used as a vehicle of colonial enlightenment. Those were times when English language was introduced as a taught subject side by side with vernacular subjects in schools. While early 20th century had witnessed demands for educational change from within and from without, English language had sustained its status as a compulsory taught subject in schools even as a part of the suggested revisions in education system of the subcontinent. Based on primary data evidence from the public record files of the then Ministry of Education and of Education Commissions, conferences, etc. comprising of British officers and educated Indian leaders, this article provides a significant insight into why and how the British official vision for strategising English language in the mainstream school education of the subcontinent was being carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I look at a curious intersection – the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the interwar era and the end of indentured labor. A genealogical reading suggests that Indian diplomacy takes "birth" primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of the new, seemingly upper caste Indian, in contrast to the lower caste "coolie" of the past. Diplomacy here becomes a practice through which this difference between the upper caste Indian migrant as a rights-bearing individual, and the lower caste Indian migrant as a non-rights bearing individual is enacted. This interrogation of Indian diplomatic practice is primarily an effort to reveal the ways in which caste, rarely explored as a factor in Indian diplomacy, is indeed central to its making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyses the problems of changes in the representation of the body and the metamorphosis of corporality in South Asia in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Methodologically, the author uses the ideas proposed in interdisciplinary studies of nationalism, combining them with the achievements of the visual turn. It is assumed that, on the one hand, the cultures of the region were able to form their own unique traditions of perceiving naked feminine corporality. On the other hand, the article shows how British colonialism changed these ideas, promoting a moderate Westernisation of cultural spaces, including the idea of ​​naked feminine corporality. The author analyses the role of Hinduism as one of the factors that significantly influenced the development of ideas about corporality. The author analyses the problems of mass culture as the main space for the disclosure of images of the body and physicality in the modern consumer society. The article analyses the role of “high” and “low” culture in the development of collective ideas about the body. The author analyses how the perception of nudity changed under the conditions of post-colonialism in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is assumed that the Indian model of the imagination of corporality and its perception in the discourses of mass culture claims the status of a universal paradigm that significantly affects the perception of corporality in the cultures of neighbouring states. The author analyses how intellectuals used forms of physicality in their attempts to visualise ethnic and cultural identities, emphasising and actualising, on the one hand, the differences of their own ethnicities from the identities of neighbouring nations. On the other hand, the author believes this trend is archaic, transitional and temporary, since the modern mass cultures of South Asia tend to assimilate local cultural and ethnic traditions. Therefore, the article shows that traditional ethnicity in visualisation of body turned into one more strategy used for attracting attention. The author analyses some cultural phenomena as invented traditions of mass culture. Therefore, spaces and forms of visualisation and actualisation of naked feminine corporality, including films, posters, comics, beauty contests are perceived as a visual type of invented traditions that legitimise the identity of the consumer society and mass culture.

Traditionally, when studying the campaign of the Orenburg military governor V.A. Perovsky to Khiva in 1839-1840, among the motives that prompted the Russian authorities to sanction this approach, researchers primarily noted economic interests and the desire to end the raids of Khivans on Russian caravans. At the same time, the international context of this campaign which coincided with the first Anglo-Afghan war was pushed into the background. The purpose of this article written within the framework of a systematic approach to the study of international relations is to prove the correlation between the actions of the Russian and British authorities in Central Asia at the turn of the 1830s and 1840s. Studying the logic of the events preceding the Khiva campaign of V.A. Perovsky and referring to documents directly related to the preparation of this campaign allow us to conclude that the concern of a number of Russian political figures (among whom V.A. Perovsky was) with the activation of British agents in Central Asia and the actions of the British army in Afghanistan was one of the main motives for organizing the campaign, the purpose of which was to strengthen Russian positions in the named region. Despite the failure of V.A. Perovsky’s idea, the authorities of British India, frightened by the movement of Russian troops and suffering defeats in Afghanistan, contributed to the settlement of contradictions between Russia and Khiva in order to preserve the regional status quo. The actions of the British side, as well as the insufficient interest of the Russian authorities in the Central Asian direction in comparison with the European and Middle Eastern ones, contributed to a decrease in Russia’s activity in Central Asia after the unsuccessful campaign of V.A. Perovsky.

Labour movement had its origin in England with the emergence of industrialization and capitalism. The industrial revolution has impoverished the British peasantry, which forced them to migrate to the industrial centers in search of work. The competition of jobs depressed the wage rates and provided ultimate power to the employers. As a result workers of different field realized the fact that they could not withstand the power of the employer alone and have to bargain collectively. It resulted in widespread protest and formation of trade unions. The period between the two World Wars constitute an eventful phase in the history of organized labour movements in India as well as Assam. A wave of organized labour movements started in both plantation and non-plantation sectors in Assam. These labour strikes were influenced by different political ideologies and received political as well as national support from the worker sections of the country and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A geophysical perception of the ecumene had always existed in the consciousness of Indians even in precolonial days. But with the advent of the British, and with the establishment of territorial mapping and institutionalised education, there was a growing awareness of differences and similarities related to ethnicity, race and space. Colonial schools and education played a critical role in developing a sense of belongingness to a shared space. As Bengal was the hub for colonial administration as well as for dissemination of education, a look at history and geography textbooks, in both English and Bengali, highlights how the Bengali educated class negotiated this construction of knowledge. The article analyses the production of knowledge as a complex imagining of a 'national' space that refashioned and forged intricate geopolitical consciousness, which then went on to have vital implications for the future conception of nation-state in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates how the princely state of Mysore used gardens and horticulture for shaping the urban development of Bangalore between the late-19th and mid-20th century. Despite being constrained by the British colonial regime's policies of indirect rule; the Mysore State drew on an approach to modernisation and urban development which their pre-British predecessors had initiated during the eighteenth century. Between 1881 and 1947, it pursued this home-grown modern approach in Bangalore City by using gardens and horticulture to expand urban industry and shape the urban landscape, establishing Bangalore as one of the most progressive cities in British India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maulana Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women's potential role in individual and societal "improvement," the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi's teachings included generic elite male "best practices" on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral medicine in its Indian form. His text caught a historical moment when medical treatments were more craft than industrial, and when the professionalization of discrete Muslim and Hindu "systems" of Unani Tibb and Ayurveda, with Ayurveda increasingly incorporated into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, was only incipient. Health maintenance in Thanawi's hands was a matter of empowering women to both spiritual and practical competence and responsibility, freeing them from resort to (as he saw it) quacks, ignorant midwives, and untrained women, along with dubious healers and holy men, Muslim or Hindu or any other. In its description of challenges, strategies, and resources related to health, his text offers a window into women's everyday world. But it also raises comparative questions about the history of medicine, the history of emotions, ethnicity in a colonial context, and the potentially empowering implications of Islamic socio-religious reform for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the post-indenture choice of Hindustani indentured labour migrants in Suriname either to settle in Suriname or repatriate to India between 1873 and 1940. Based on extensive demographic statistical analyses and the autobiography of Rahman Mohammed Khan, this research concludes that familial relations, especially those formed in Suriname, had a strong effect on the relative share of Hindustanis settling themselves in Suriname after their contract period. Additionally, this study convincingly proves that the Surinamese context had an important effect on the development of the individual life courses of Hindustanis.

Jane Austen's surviving music manuscript books contain a wide variety of the songs popular in her time. The European fashion for music with vaguely "oriental" themes is evident, and on the face of it the most extreme example of this is Edward Smith Biggs' "The Hindustani Girl's Song," with words by Amelia Opie. Austen titled it "Hindoo Girl's Song" in her manuscript. Austen had family links to India through her aunt, Philadelphia Hancock, though India is barely mentioned in her novels. A note at the foot of the first page of this song in the printed version (London, 1800) claims that it originated from a song overheard by bearers of a palanquin returning "an Hindoo girl" who had "lived in the family" of an Englishman to her parents. The young woman "was so affected at parting with him, that ... she could not be prevailed on, to receive any sustenance during the journey." The actual provenance of the words and music is uncertain and it is thought unlikely that this story has any factual basis. The lyrics, attributing undying love and submissiveness to the woman, show that the relationship was an amorous and sexual one. In this paper we explore the dark side of this song, written for an English audience during the ascendancy of the British East India Company. The pathos of the woman's words and her submissive attitude are calculated to excite sympathy, but also enact the imperial power relations the British envisaged with the Indian subcontinent. The women's words also clothe in sentimentality the actual plight of local women abandoned by foreign men throughout the colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between British colonialism and Islamic sectarianism, and its consequent impact on the Shias, the largest Muslim minority in British India. In the critical decade leading up to independence and partition in 1947, politics in British India were dominated by the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan. However, leading Shia organizations were opposed to the League's idea of an Islamic nation and supported India's independence without partition. Instead, they demanded that the British recognize the Shia as a Muslim minority, and thereby confer statutory protections from Sunni domination. The British government arbitrarily and unjustly ignored Shia entreaties for constitutional protections. Imperial realpolitik required the colonial state to acknowledge the Muslim League as the sole political representative of all Muslims, thus, rendering Pakistan a fait accompli. The intersection of the colonial government's political calculations with the League's political ambitions compelled both to discard the Shias. This study of the complex issue of minorities and their uncertain position in the nation promised for all Muslims has relevance for current debates on the nation and nationalism, on minorities and their rights, on sectarianism and majoritarianism, and on the politics of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new interpretation of the "Indian Wahhabi" beyond an ostensibly religious identity. Examining encounters between a centralizing state and decentralized circulatory regimes, the study thus illuminates an overlooked sociolegal genealogy of the jihadi militant in colonial India. From 1818, the East India Company secured its sovereignty by designating as deviant or permissible a host of itinerant figures in and around South Asia. In police records, court transcripts, and legislative archives, pilgrims with links to Arabia accordingly began appearing as suspected Wahhabis. Yet, in then seeking to distinguish "faqirs" from "fanatics," colonial law used logics and exceptions with two important implications. First, as the "Wahhabi" came to imply a violent counterclaim to sovereignty, it also became a juridical formulation more political than religious. The faqir pilgrim here supplied the conceit of religion. Second, the complex question of jihad produced a deeper paradox, as grappling with a "religious" problem without "religion" stretched secular jurisprudence to breaking points. Until 1857, around South Asia, states of emergency hence dominated official responses to Wahhabis. Ultimately, colonial law's gestures not only rendered unexceptional its regimes of exception. Ironically, they also reified religion, such that Islam and violence became culturally consubstantial in colonial thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port's boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port's development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century's first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State's partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an ideological domination of Western academic discourses with respect to international law, there is a lack of a holistic approach to international law with a distinct disadvantage to third world nations and their citizens. History of international law has most often been documented from a European perspective. This paper attempts to fill this gap by narrating an alternative history of international law and thus seeks to move beyond this Euro-centric 'turn to history' with a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) perspective. The paper traces India's relationship with international law by examining this anomalous position of colonial India and its princely states at the international organisations. It recognises that although Indian membership at the ILO was merely representative with a deep and entrenched British control, Indian representatives at the ILO attempted to further true Indian multicivilizational interests at their meetings. In the above context, the paper traces the Indian struggle to be represented at international fora, including the ILO. Finally, the paper concludes by questioning the legitimacy of international law in the colonial period. Thus, the paper attempts to reflect on this history of international law, from a diverse and inclusive perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the topic lies in the strategic significance of Tibet both in the first half of the twentieth century and now. Historical analysis of international competition on the issue of the status of Tibet allows us to draw important theoretical conclusions about the typology of international relations and forms of statehood in the East. The novelty of the work is that the author introduces new sources in foreign languages into scientific circulation. Changes in the status of Tibet in the context of great power competition and differences in the typology of forms of political and territorial structure in Chinese and Western political traditions are revealed. The author determined that the Simla Convention of 1914 preserved the status of Outer Tibet as part of the state territory of China and Chinese suzerainty over Outer Tibet. The Simla Convention recognized Outer Tibet as an Autonomous state with political autonomy rights. However, this international act limited China's position in Tibet. China was granted the right to observe the state of Affairs in Outer Tibet, nothing more. British India found more opportunities in Outer Tibet than China. Western countries and China perceived the meaning of the Simla Convention in a negative way, in accordance with their political and legal traditions. Therefore, China refused to ratify the Simla Convention. After the signing of the Simla Convention, Tibet tried to secede from China and obtain official recognition of its sovereignty. The author gives an interpretation of the types of territorial and political structure, revealing the differences between unitary, Federal, Confederation, monarchical Union and forms of autonomy in unitary States. The similarity of vassal States in the Chinese tradition and Autonomous entities in the Western sense is noted. From China's point of view, Tibet was part of the geopolitical belt of vassal political entities that did not have independence. China wanted the United Kingdom and the United States to revoke Tibet's political autonomy and allow China to establish military and administrative control over Tibet. These interests of China were not supported by the British Empire and the United States.

This article examines the 'afterlife' or posthumous reputation of Warren Hastings, one of the most important and controversial figures in the foundation of British India. Exploring a wide range of sources, it argues that Hastings was a symbolic figure through which generations of imperial commentators vented the political and moral concerns of their own day. Accordingly, it uses his afterlife as a key indicator of the rise and fall of imperial sentiment and confidence in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. Hastings's afterlife can be divided into three distinct phases. In the first, between 1818 and 1890, the image of Hastings as a flawed hero – an empire-builder who committed crimes – was propelled into popular memory. In the second, between 1890 and 1915, Hastings was transformed into an untouchable imperial icon. Driven by contemporary concerns, a group of ex-Indian officials attempted to vindicate Hastings's actions and exculpate his 'crimes'. The third section explores the apotheosis of Hastings's reputation amidst the growing uncertainty over the future of British India between 1915 and 1947. Following the elevation of a deeply controversial figure into an imperial hero, this article explores the methods and motivations behind the propagation of heroic reputations, demonstrating that our understanding of imperial figures has been mediated through the vagaries of contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at dealing with the dawn of Pashto studies, from the first mention of this language, in the 16th century, till the first scientific treatises on Pashto grammar, literature and lexicology by Bernhard Dorn, published between 1840 and 1847. The questions this article tries to answer is: how was the documentation of Pashto collected? By whom? For which purpose? The aim of the following overview of all western authors who dealt with Pashto in the initial epoch is also to show how general knowledge increased more and more quickly with the military involvement in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of Australian horse-grooms who travelled to India, but often ended up destitute, at least for brief periods, before travelling on or settling in India. This case study of destitute Australian horse-grooms in British India provides a lens to explore intercolonial politics within the British Empire, particularly the complex socio-political dynamics of intercolonial labour migration during the later nineteenth century. In so doing, the different ways class and race intersected in Australia and India, and the conflicts between colonial governments that stemmed from these differences, are revealed. Vagrant European horse-grooms were regarded as both a problem and in need of assistance in India, while in Australia they were simply regarded as the undeserving poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of tea planting in British India was exogenous, and the aborigines of Assam region in the northeast India had no history of planting, making and drinking tea. Successfully employing a large number of skilled workers to cope with the contradiction between labor shortage and expansion of production scale was the primary problem to be solved for the rise and development of tea industry in British India. This paper centers on the tea planting of Assam, which is the major production areas of the modern British India, combs historical stages and characteristics of the employment of tea labor comprehensively and systematically, and analyzes the basic problems such as the ways of labor employment, the labor management acts introduced by British India colonial government in different stages. It tries to point out the influence to the modern development of Assam and even the whole northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Indian Subcontinent, many commercial advertisements still use white children's images to promote their products and push forward the idea that Indian children need to become better versions of themselves, both physically and mentally. Such views are neither encouraged nor accepted in the western world. We argue that these ideas are not new and that they were introduced during the British Raj. We further argue that the hegemonic culture promulgated by the British colonial rulers is still prevalent in this postcolonial era and is being used by international and local manufacturers, intentionally or unintentionally, as part of their promotional activities for Indian consumers. Drawing from historical and contemporary evidence, we offer arguments to this claim and analysis of the workings of the hegemonic culture in producing such advertisements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From December 1922 to February 1929, two Englishmen, Lieutenant-Colonel John Champion Faunthorpe and Arthur Stannard Vernay, led six expeditions to the Indian subcontinent to collect animal specimens for the newly refurbished American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This article argues that the Vernay-Faunthorpe Expeditions were an expression of a new form of Anglo-American relations that engaged the language of scientific knowledge in maintaining Western hegemonic influence in the early twentieth century. Inspired by genuine scientific objectives as much as by aspirations to reassert Western hegemony in a time of rising nationalism and declining imperial influence, this timely collaboration reimagined imperialism beyond territorial expansion, but in the discursive spaces of indigenous nature and wildlife exhibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical family history expands the frame of a life story beyond the accumulation of facts and figures to an acknowledgement of context, a deeper understanding of structure, a reckoning of circumstance and response and a comparison across time and space. This article explores the complexity of family history in the context of colonial pasts in British India; the possibilities offered by group analysis of colonial actors; and the moral obligation of the family historian to address difficult pasts in all their complexity. Through the migratory careers and migration stories of colonial actors—the dislocated people, objects and memories that sustain identity—a longitudinal dimension is added to family history. Taken collectively, the family history of a domiciled British community in India reveals not just important blood ties, but critical associational links and shared characteristics that structure experience and enhance power. Colonial power must always be measured by its negative effects, but is also relational, situational, variable, commutable and resisted. The article further reflects on the ways in which critical research into settler-colonial migrations delivers our family histories to the doorstep of the present; their possibilities for informing truth-telling at individual and national levels; and the need for a pedagogy of historical contextualisation and ethical citizenship.

The formal demarcation of what is today the Burma-China border began following the British conquest of Upper Burma from the Konbaung dynasty in 1885 and the signing of international agreements with the Qing Empire (1886, 1894, 1897), the process only completed in the 1960s. Around the turn of the century and into the twentieth, therefore, the highlands between British Burma and Qing (later Republican) China remained a contested 'borderland'; specifically, one over which successive lowland states had never been able to exert direct control – a space James C. Scott and others have named 'Zomia' – but toward which they had been expanding by the mid-nineteenth century (if not earlier). This article looks not at the ways in which Zomia's inhabitants contested this expanding state authority, which has been the focus of most work on this space, but how the British pressed their territorial claims over part of this contested borderland vis-à-vis the Chinese. Salt was a monopoly of both the Government of India (of which Burma was a province until 1935) and the Qing and Republican states. Smuggling – trade, to British eyes – salt from Burma into China thus undermined Chinese sovereignty qua the expression of the latter's monopoly powers. Complaints about smuggling were met with 'masterly inactivity', not only because the colonial administration was weak in Upper Burma and along the frontier, but also because it meant the British imperial state could permit the expansion of 'legitimate' trade and thereby contest Chinese sovereignty qua its territorial claims over the borderland. In contrast to other works positing that smuggling over defined borders undermined state power, this article shows how a permissive attitude to complaints about smuggling undergirded British sovereignty and was very much part of the making of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1883, Thomas Patrick Hughes, the director of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Peshawar published a romance novel set along the Afghan frontier of British India. This paper argues that Hughes's romance novel, Ruhainah, offers an alternative perspective on the role of evangelism in the empire by attending to the importance of affect and desire in the mission's project. Scholars of Christian missionary work have debated the role of missionaries in projects of empire, but this scholarship is frequently limited by a dichotomous debate: Did missionaries of the British Empire reify imperial control? Or, in the name of Christian universalism, did these missionaries resist the empire's violence and racism? Through heuristically adopting Ruhainah as a guide to the numerous publications of the CMS in Peshawar and the archives of personal correspondences of CMS officials, this paper cuts across these dichotomies by demonstrating that Hughes used his various writings to train his readers to romanticise and desire the Christianization of the Afghans. While Hughes's variously resisted and reified imperial policies, his writing used this very tension between Christian universalism and racist particularism to cultivate 'an affect of empire' and a desire for the religious encounters possible along the Afghan frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II, thousands of Chinese soldiers were sent to India for training. Many of them deserted from the army and made a new life in India. Chen Ching Lin was one of these deserters. Following the course of his journey in India from 1943 to 1946, this article not only unearths the little-known experiences of the Chinese deserters in India, but also explores how the Chinese Nationalist Government's aim to discipline the overseas Chinese communities conflicted with the agenda of British geopolitics. It further contends that modern Chinese and Indian history could be integrated into a single narrative framework from subaltern perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War saw extraordinary movements of people, before, during and afterwards. Civilian internees are rarely considered part of this, and especially not those in South and Southeast Asia. Between December 1941 and May 1946, nearly 2700 Japanese civilians and colonial subjects from across Japan's empire were interned in camps in British India. Mainly residents of Singapore and Malaya, these civilians were arrested and transferred by ship and train to India, where they were interned for all or part of the war. Their first 'temporary' camp was in Purana Qila, the Old Fort in New Delhi, from where some were repatriated to Japan in August 1942 as part of the Anglo-Japanese Civilian Exchange. The remaining civilians were moved to a more permanent camp at Deoli (Ajmer) in 1943. The internees experienced several hardships, including inadequate accommodation and disease. To date, little has been written about these internees and their journeys, especially in English. Weaving together archival sources, internee memoirs and non-English publications, this article seeks to reveal the experience of incarceration on internees in British India as forced migrants of war, and to consider reasons why the history of these internees remains largely invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the nineteenth century in British India, a rapidly-evolving political and cultural landscape drove Muslims to re-evaluate their relationships with other groups in the Subcontinent. Questions regarding proper clothing, inter-sect marriages, the status of the legal system, and even requirements of eating beef were posed to scholars in an attempt to define the contours of Sunnī identity. This article investigates the questions and answers provided to these and other questions in the fatwā collection of Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy (1848-1886), the preeminent scholar of the Farangī Maḥall seminary in Lucknow, British India. It focuses on the fatwās issued regarding the interaction with the three largest non-Sunnī Muslim groups in the Subcontinent during this period: Shīʿa Muslims, the Hindus, and the British government. By analyzing the questions posed to ʿAbd al-Ḥayy and his answers, the article argues that he applied a methodology of negotiated adherence to the Ḥanafī School in order to emphasize the differences between the Subcontinent’s diverse communities, while simultaneously encouraging communal cohesion. Through his fatwās ʿAbd al-Ḥayy both moderated and catalyzed the shaping of Sunnī identity, giving religious legitimacy to those who emphasized Muslim difference while at the same time left room for cooperation with other communities. These fatwās would form the backdrop for Muslim political involvement in the Indian independence movement and eventually form the foundations of both India’s unique religious-secular national fabric and calls for Muslim independence as British colonialism came to an end in the twentieth century. Keywords: Abd al-Hayy, Islamic law, British India, Sunnī identity, Communalism

This paper analyzes Bithia Mary Croker's ghost stories of the British Raj to argue that Croker in her texts reframes the eighteenth-century Orientalist Gothic writing tradition to critique British imperial presence in India. I specifically discuss two of Croker's short stories, namely "To Let" (1893) and "If You See Her Face" (1893) published in her anthology of Indian ghost fiction To Let (1893). The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society--the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows--which continued into early-nineteenth century British India under the vigilance of the Empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. In my critique of the two stories, I take a transhistorical approach wherein my analysis starts with and builds upon the eighteenth century and moves into the late nineteenth century. The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society--the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows--which continued into early-nineteenth century India under the vigilance of the British empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. The short stories build upon and expand the eighteenth-century gothic tradition that threads together the internal and the external, in this case the "others" of the British empire. They use Orientalist gothic elements to reflect the growing contentions in the Indian city of Lucknow against British imperial forces that also compromises the apparently safe and secure domestic space of the colonial dak bungalows. In doing so, Croker uses the figures of racial and gendered others to subvert the politico-cultural hierarchies of race, class, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]