Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and Mao eras made the region almost entirely inaccessible to outsiders, the study of Xinjiang began a long sojourn in the Western academic wilderness. After all, the earlier interest had always been tinged with Orientalist travel fantasy and imperial desires that required scholarly boots on the ground.

This essay advances the argument for James C. Scott as a preeminent political ecologist, despite the fact that he has not claimed such a title for himself. While he is variously described as an (errant) political scientist, an (adopted) anthropologist, and a (most of the time) Southeast Asianist, he has not usually been called a card-carrying political ecologist. But in fact, his many works have foreshadowed a number of the topical concerns of political ecologists of Asia, such as his attention to subsistence strategies of peasants, to hegemony and resistance, to state power and simplifications, to anarchism and self-organization, and to ecological transitions and human-nonhuman interactions. The fact that Scott is one of the most-cited theorists in the field of political ecology is further proof of his influence, with authors using Scottian themes to launch critical investigations of how power shapes environmental relations and how politics plays a role in the co-constitution of nature and society.

In the present renaissance of India's traditional arts, a great deal of attention is being focused upon dance and dance-drama. Much has been done for their revival, and several attempts have been made to relate the present survivals of traditional dance and dance-drama to the Sastric literature of antiquity, principally to the Bharata Nāṭyaśāstra. In the West, the study of Sanskrit plays and Sanskrit dramaturgy has been limited mostly to the literature per se and to those aspects of it that could yield historical or philological material. Only in the last thirty years or so has the general social stigma attached to the traditional profession of dance in India been substantially removed, bringing about a new resurgence in practice and scholarship. We are indebted to a number of recent Indian scholars who have done valuable work in tracing the theoretical, and in some cases practical, relationships of the current forms of dance and dance-drama to the precedents and usages of dramaturgy as described in the Bharata Nātyaśāstra and allied works.

Lala Lajpat Rai is increasingly viewed in historiography as a “Hindu nationalist” with a strong affinity with Savarkarite Hindutva. This article demonstrates that during the Khilafat movement, Lajpat Rai articulated a secular Indian nationalism that was sensitive to Muslim religiosity and Indian Muslims’ extraterritorial sympathies toward the caliphate and the Muslim world. Pigeonholing the entire thought of Lajpat Rai as “Hindu nationalism” obscures a historical-intellectual juncture when a Hindu political figure like him enthusiastically supported pan-Islamism as necessary for Indian nationalism. This article complicates scholarship that portrays Hindu responses to the Khilafat movement as consisting solely of fear and counter-consolidation. More importantly, by unveiling Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism, it uncovers the intellectual and political possibility of firmly holding a Hindu identity and articulating conceptions of Indian nationhood that are at ease with Islam and the wider Muslim world.

My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am reminded instantly of my father. He was sitting, reading a newspaper, on the lawn of our Lahore house. It was near to 6:00 p.m.—late evening to dusk. I had recently conquered the art of biking and I was eager to show him how well I rode. I kept going past him on the bike, but he was engrossed in the paper. Finally I decided that to really get his attention, I would need to go really, really fast. I went a ways, and began to pedal furiously. Right as I gathered full speed and came up to him, I looked at him to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. That split second, however, was enough for me to lose control of the bike, which swerved radically to the left, and I went face-first into a column of bricks. He looked up as I stumbled up, my eye covered in blood. I have no memory of this, except for when I “see” my scar.

Representative Government was an institution dear to the hearts of nineteenth-century Englishmen. It was their pride and, they affirmed, the source of their national strength that they lived under this form of constitution. They were eager that others, especially their colonies, should enjoy its benefits. There were few obstacles in the way of the establishment of representative institutions in the white colonies: the land was different but the people were the same. But in India neither the land nor the people resembled those of England. Nonetheless, the British determined to train an educated, Westernized elite which would make possible the establishment of representative institutions there.

In the latter half of the first century A.D. a Chinese scholar picked up his brush and began to compile historical records. A political indiscretion prematurely terminated his labors, but he gave twenty years of his life to the task. The result of his work is one of a group of compilations that constitute part of the world's most remarkable historical literature. The scholar was Pan Ku (32–92 A.D.), and the work that consumed much of his life is known as the Han shu, i.e., Han documents, or Documents of the [former] Han dynasty.

The penal colony that the british established in the Andaman Islands at the end of the 1850s was originally intended as a place of permanent exile for a particular class of Indian criminals. These offenders had, for the most part, been convicted by special tribunals in connection with the Indian rebellions of 1857–58. As the British vision of rehabilitation in the Andamans evolved, the former rebels were joined in the islands by men and women convicted under the Indian Penal Code. In the islands, transported criminals were subjected to various techniques of physical, spatial, occupational, and political discipline (Sen 1998). The slow transition from a convicted criminal to a prisoner in a chain gang, to employment as a Self-Supporter or a convict officer in the service of the prison regime, to life as a free settler in a penal colony was in effect a process by which the state sought to transform the criminal classes of colonial India—the disloyal, the idle, the elusive and the disorderly—into loyal, orderly, and governable subjects.

Turbulent years before and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 have been one of the most extensively written pages of Japanese history. Much work has been carried out on the revolutionary samurai and the aspiring merchants who implemented the upheaval. Curiously, however, revolts and rebellions which erupted at more popular levels, such as peasant uprisings and urban mass disturbances during this period, have drawn little scholarly attention. According to the literature survey of Irwin Scheiner, no work on Japanese peasant uprisings has been published English since Hugh Borton's study in 1938.

Few concepts in modern times are as full of paradoxes as nationalism. Widely agreed to be a general phenomenon of modern politics, it is known also to vary drastically in character in every country. It is presumed to make politics rational and purposeful, yet it is conceptually irrational, more akin to a “religion,” as Carleton Hayes once noted, than to a definable conceptual construct. Lacking precise definition, it is subject to manipulation and to being used as justification for a bewildering variety of often contradictory forms of political and social action. Despite this imprecision, it is thoroughly enmeshed in modern historiography, and the historian has little recourse than to seek greater precision in the use of this concept by providing it with explicit historical content. Of the many tasks that might be undertaken in this area, certainly one of the more serious is the reconstruction of patterns of political thought formulated in the traditional setting that exercised powerful influences on the specific character of nationalism in the modern history of a country. Especially important from the standpoint of this essay are those modes of thought that conceptualized subjective action against existing politics as being in the real or purported interest of the wider polity. For nationalism in modern Jajan, the key in this regard is, without question, the concept of “restorationism.”