The years 1997–1998 witnessed Britain's return of Hong Kong to China; the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan; and the much less publicized 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese in Asia. So were marked the beginnings and end of European empire in the East, and so, too, a new global distribution of power was recognized. The appearance on 20 May 1498 of a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama at Calicut (Kerala, S. India), combined with the penetration of the Caribbean six years earlier by a Spanish flotilla under Christopher Columbus were, it has often and eloquently been urged, the prelude to a fearful saga. In next to no time Europe was enriched, non-European populations and ecologies destroyed, indigenous states and economies overthrown, a peculiarly European violence introduced into lands previously innocent of such ways, and the yoke of European colonial rule and hegemony eventually imposed. In short, as India's Independence Day Pledge (1930) pithily put it, subjection to empire meant economic, political, cultural and spiritual ruin.

‘Individual’ (cá nhân) came to the Vietnamese language in the first decades of the twentieth century, along with a host of other evocative neologisms, such as ‘society’ (xã hôi), ‘ethnic group/nation’ (dân tôc), ‘ideology’ (chu' nghĩa), ‘democracy’ (dân chu' chu' nghĩa), ‘science’ (khoa hoc), and ‘progress’ (tiêń hóa). Initially, ‘individual’ was very much the poor relation among these new concepts—merely an irreducible human unit belonging to something else more significant. Thus, each individual was urged to be a loyal citizen of the nation, an eager participant in some new political organization, or a responsible member of society. Individuals were often compared with cells in the body, each one having a legitimate role in sustaining and enhancing the vitality of the organism, but meaningless and incapable of surviving on their own. On the other hand, the danger also existed of individuals acting in a selfish, short-sighted manner, which could jeopardize the larger order of things. Such persons were said to be witting or unwitting perpetrators of ‘individualism’ (cá nhân chu' nghĩa).

It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

A valedictory lecture is usually an anodyne statement—at its best a summing up of one's life-work, rich in wisdom and scholarship. The present exercise does not belong to that category, not merely because the speaker lays no claim to wisdom or scholarship, but because the present moment is unsuited to anodyne statements on India. Besides, the concern of this lecture has only peripheral links with my areas of professional expertise. It is addressed to a political-cum-cultural phenomenon in contemporary India which, in the opinion of many, portends a grieveous threat to the cherished values on which Indian democracy is based. We also believe that this threat, if not neutralized in time, may yet destroy the structure of polity and society which the Indian nation-state has sought to nurture; and done so, despite its many failures, with at least a modicum of success. A struggle is on for the hearts and minds of the Indian people. The present exercise is meant to be a modest contribution to the debate which is at the very heart of that struggle.

Although the issue of citizenship has attracted the interest of some political scientists in relation to the problems of contemporary Indian democracy, historians have generally tended to shy away from exploring the concrete demands for civic rights that accompanied, but were by no means identical with, the struggle for national self-determination. Indeed, the dominance of nationalist and nation-oriented frameworks in Indian historical writing has tended to thwart interest in the materialities of local issues directly affecting the livelihoods of people. The astoundingly low profile accorded to what Manuel Castells described more than a quarter of a century ago as ‘the urban question’, is a revealing manifestation of the relative neglect of local and social histories.

Calcutta's failure to insulate itself from the communal hysteria that plagued the length and breadth of India in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 came as a rude shock to the city's intelligentsia. True, the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 had initiated a vicious circle of communal rioting in the subcontinent climaxing in the ‘truncated settlement’ of 15 August 1947. The events of 1946–47 were viewed by left-wing intellectuals as a defeat of radicalism in post-Second World War Bengal politics. But the structural disarticulation between class and politics experienced during these Partition days was rapidly bridged in the western half of British Bengal that came to form a part of the Indian union. While other regions of India continued to be struck by periodic bouts of Hindu–Muslim violence, West Bengal remained relatively free of the communal virus. Calcutta, its capital city, emerged as the crucible of the country's left and democratic politics.

Between the pacification of Tonkin in the late 1880s and the Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement of 1930–31, the Thai Nguyen Rebellion was the largest and most destructive anti-colonial uprising to occur in French Indochina. On August 31, 1917, an eclectic band of political prisoners, common criminals and mutinous prison guards seized the Thai Nguyen Penitentiary, the largest penal institution in northern Tonkin. From their base within the penitentiary, the rebels stormed the provincial arsenal and captured a large cache of weapons which they used to take control of the town. Anticipating a counterattack, the rebels fortified the perimeter of the town, executed French officials and Vietnamese collaborators and issued a proclamation calling for a general uprising against the colonial state. Although colonial forces retook the town following five days of intense fighting, mopping-up campaigns in the surrounding countryside stretched on for six months and led to hundreds of casualties on both sides.

British rule in India probably was in the reformist van of colonial regimes, but by Independence relatively few among the Indian populace had benefited notably from Western ‘modernization’. Although praised lavishly by a past generation of English historians for equipping India for ‘rapid progress’ under ‘the rule of law’, British policies hardly represented exemplary social engineering or ‘transformed’ the prosperity, health, well being, education or career opportunities of most Indians. Early in its sway the British raj conceived of implanting on the subcontinent modes of development responsible for England's rapid progress and prosperity and the advance of its peoples. Why, then, was the success not greater of Western programs, and why did policies of economic development leave at mid-twentieth century a majority of Indians living below poverty levels drawn close to subsistence? Was Western ‘reformism’ materially exploitative, or promising but checked by the regime's major political disturbance, the ‘Mutiny’ or Revolt of 1857, or were British policies culturally suppressive, or is more complex analysis needed to comprehend the Western impact?

The aim of this paper is to use both anthropological and historical approaches to explore the distinctive nature of colonialism in French-ruled Indochina. From this interdisciplinary perspective, it seeks to contextualize a rich but little known series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings on Indochina's peoples and cultures. It notes particularly their emphasis on concepts of the community and of the transforming revolutionary event. And it argues that these writings' distinctive understandings of race, culture and polity profoundly affected the thought and action of Asians as well as Europeans, with these effects being felt both within and beyond the French empire.

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that ‘modern’ India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was ‘traditional’. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little ‘orientalist’. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. ‘The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding’, Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written.

As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone to choose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70

The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of business associates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390

In the field of research and studies pertaining to Malaysian rural society, there has traditionally been a dominant emphasis, especially by local scholars, on the analysis of the indigenous Malay peasantry rather than on the equally indigenous ‘tribal’ minorities, i.e. the Orang Asli. This has also meant that the new theoretical directions and perspectives developed in the various interrelated fields (such as ‘the New Economic Anthropology’, ‘Peasant Studies’, and Political Economy, including the Neo-Marxist School of Development and Underdevelopment) have been applied with rigour only to those issues arising from ‘the peasant question’ in Malaysia. To date, no scholars have as yet seriously attempted to address ‘the agrarian question’ in the context of Malaysian society by also incorporating in their theoretical analysis the position of its ‘tribal’ minorities.

Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating) social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot 1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5; Bharucha 1994: 88–9).

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

The past two decades have witnessed a notable escalation in sectarian violence in Pakistan. Since 1979 doctrinal disputes between Sunnis (who constitute the majority of Pakistan's population) and Twelver Shi‘is (who number between 15% and 25% of the population, and are to be distinguished from Islami‘ili, Khoja and Bohri Shi‘is) has given place to full-fledged sectarian conflict. Militant Sunni and Shi‘i organizations have carried out assassinations and bombing campaigns that have killed political rivals as well as children and the innocent at prayer in mosques. In the first seven months of 1997 alone—the year when sectarian conflict reached its apogee—one hundred people died in such attacks in Punjab. The violence escalated further when in the first ten days of August 1997 (immediately preceding the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the country's independence) another seventy people were killed in incidents of sectarian violence.

‘Consulting literary sources is not as satisfactory as observation . . . If one wants to control the barbarian frontier area, one must judge the profitability of the land, and investigate the nature of its people.’

—Qian Shu

‘If one does not differentiate between their varieties, or know their customs, then one has not what it takes to appreciate their circumstances, and to govern them.’

—‘Miaoliao tushuo’

Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership of Dr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian National Congress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towards an assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end was enshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation of this sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945. Yet, within two years, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted into the first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of a recommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a general public meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled Castes Federation, he advised the dalits to co-operate with the Congress and to think of their country first, before considering their sectarian interests. But then within a few months again, this alliance broke down over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among other things, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned from the Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he was defeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity, whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar's chief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle as nothing but a ‘crisis’.

Studies concerned with the intimate areas of human experience suggest that the institutions and social mores structured around the instinctive drives of mankind—such as sex, love and fear, are not meant to serve the same purpose in every culture. Belief systems, world views and culturally-determined expectations from life determine the texture, causation and expression of even our very basic emotions. Nature's purpose for the sexual impulse may be the propagation of the species, but in controlling and harnessing this drive for the ends of social cohesion, different cultures have had very different objectives in view and used very different means. The emotive affects associated with its expression have also varied accordingly.

Few students of modern China would dispute that the Hundred Days Reform of 1898 ushered in a major nation-building effort that, despite false starts and setbacks, has continued to this day. Thus, history and policy converged when its centenary in 1998 was widely commemorated—20 years after reform was again proclaimed China's national agenda (1978). Beida, or Peking University, which traces its founding to the establishment of the Imperial College (Jingshi daxuetang) in 1898, celebrated not only the historical event but also its own evolution over the past century to become China's leading institution of higher learning. The Palace Museum, which stands on the grounds of the former Forbidden City, where much of the 1898 drama unfolded, commemorated with an exhibition of archival materials and historical artifacts. It lasted from June 11 to September 21, the original dates of the Hundred Days. Historians did not lag behind. In an outpour of publications, they explored the multifarious facets of the famous episode. China scholars elsewhere also took note of the centenary. Two panels at the 1998 meetings of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D.C., for example, presented papers that dealt with, if not exactly what transpired a century ago, issues somehow related to it.

On being awarded the Legion of Honor by President Corazon Aquino, Joaquin ‘Chino.’ Roces, publisher of The Manila Times, pleaded with the president:

Please allow me to remind you, first. That our people brought a new government to power because our people felt an urgent need for change. That change was nothing more and nothing less than that of moving quickly into a new moral order. The people believed, and many of them still do, that when we said we would be the exact opposite of Marcos, we would be just that. Because of that promise which the people believed, our triumph over Marcos was anchored on a principle of morality . . . . To our people, I dare propose that new moral order is best appreciated in terms of our response to graft and corruption in public service. We cannot afford a government of thieves unless we can tolerate a nation of highwaymen.