This paper is about an Old Indian judicial institution called paṇa (“wager”). Within a court proceeding, a judicial wager is a certain sum of money that a conflicting party offers to pay if he ends up losing his case. This paper explains the rationale of judicial wagers by showing that they may signal truthfulness.

It is a privilege to be asked to contribute to this celebration of Francis's career and I am pleased to contribute a few comments beyond those concerned with his immense contributions to his field of study and to pay tribute to him as a major player in the intellectual and social life of Royal Holloway, University of London.

This article examines how an eighteenth-century woman, Mughlani Begum, is depicted in the most informative contemporary Persian auto/biography and how the descriptions, anecdotes, and analysis of her life contained therein, including the brief period she was Punjab's governor, changed as the primary source was translated into or summarised in English. The original Persian and colonial English translations and histories are read alongside an Urdu history of the Punjab, which begs the question: why was the life of a female governor reduced to that of an ‘immodest flirt’ in English sources, while her identity is incredibly nuanced in Persian and Urdu sources? Indeed, post-colonial historians writing in English rarely reference Persian originals: hence, they reproduce what colonial-period English writers before them said, and they completely ignore Urdu histories. While it is nearly impossible to understand the reasons why historians writing in English choose to depict Mughlani Begum in such a flattened way, we can be more critical of our readings of histories written in English, especially when original accounts are available. This article argues for consideration of how transmission of knowledge, language politics, and gender biases inflect historiography and misrepresent historical events and people of the Punjab—especially women.

Dogs have played a vital and varied role in the social history of early China. Whether used as a source of food, a hunting-aid, or a sacrificial victim, dogs were intimately connected with human life and death. The placement and significance of dismembered and slaughtered dogs in human tombs have been a source of scholarly interest across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, less attention has been paid to sources which present us with a spectrum of concerns surrounding the treatment of dogs after their death. Should they be consumed, discarded, or buried? Which dogs were deserving of burial, and how were such burials viewed by human commentators? By analysing textual, archaeological, and material sources, this article explores the changing conceptualisation of dogs in life and in death through the medium of the tomb, showing how the transition from tomb-keeper to tomb-occupant reflects an increasingly anthropomorphic view of canine potential and moral fibre by the early medieval period.

The aim of this article is to show that in Achaemenid Elamite the sign <MAN> had a secondary phonetic value /me/. The evidence collected in support of this claim consists mainly in Elamite transcriptions of Iranian words in the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions and in the Persepolis administrative texts, which are impossible or very difficult to account for only contemplating the usual value /man/.

Late colonial juridical practice in India was prone to bureaucratic errors and shared with the police a fundamental disinterest in the liberty of ordinary people. This article tells the politically marginal but highly revealing story of how a series of errors during the arrest and subsequent detention of an elderly man called Peter Budge—an innocent bystander in a situation of heightened communal tensions—led to a momentary scandal in the United Provinces administration in the year 1947–48. Peter's case disappeared between the cracks of bad record-keeping, leading to his lengthy and unlawful detention. It raises important questions about the complementary relation between law and violence, and the fictitious nature of public-order laws. In contrast to the scholarship that has discussed the spectacular violence of the state, this article looks at the ‘other’ acts of violence of the state and argues that the everyday reality of public-order enforcement is key to understanding the nature and operations of the late colonial and post-colonial state.

This article examines the question of whether the created human nature, or fiṭra, is portrayed as mutable in Shāh Walī Allāh's (d. 1762) Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bāligha. I argue that Walī Allāh uses the fiṭra — or the perfection of four qualities that make for human flourishing — to anchor a unified concept of human perfection that can fit different ages without essentially changing. Walī Allāh accomplishes this by affirming the particularity of divine laws and the efficacy of local customs in realising the eternal demands of the human form. More specifically, he posits that established practices can become second nature to a community, enter the divine system of requital, and thus help a people develop the necessary qualities through highly contingent means, all without violating the Qur'anic and traditional claim that the original nature itself never changes. With recourse to some of his other works and potential influences, I conclude that Walī Allāh's conception of the fiṭra accommodates traditional theological assertions regarding the singularity of human perfection, on the one hand, and the possibility of reformed norms, on the other.

Muslims’ education in British India is treated in the literature as something encompassing resistance, reaction, and hence emancipation from putatively exploitative British policies. This article focuses on the patterns of Muslims’ emergent knowledge traditions in British India in response to the British government's involvement in the educational matters of the Indian subcontinent. Data findings reveal that Indian Muslims’ responses to the growing trend towards ‘modern’ education in the Indian subcontinent evolved gradually through discursive interactions leading to divergent reformist tendencies in favour of or against adopting Western education. The British government's decision to make ‘special’ arrangements for Muslims’ educational uplift had left legacies of mutual admiration, fear, and sometimes resentment between Muslims and the British government in the subcontinent. Amid ambivalent relations between the British and Muslims, it was not difficult to find apt illustrations of what Francis Robinson calls a ‘cheek by jowl’ relationship.

The story of the Somnath temple, in the northwestern Saurashtra peninsula, has often been taken as an example of the contentious legacies of the penetration, settlement, and political establishment of Muslims in India. Its history testifies to the complex relationship between history, heritage, and the consolidation of collective memories of past events and processes.

This article focuses on two key moments in the temple's recent history: the retrieval of the Somnath gates by Lord Ellenborough in 1842 and the reconstruction of the temple between 1947 and 1951. At these two moments—one during colonial times and the other at the creation of the independent state—Somnath became the battlefield for questioning how the state should be positioned with regard to religious places, histories, symbols, and practices.

While the temple was apparently dealt with as a tangible place of heritage, both episodes show how the value endowed upon the temple had far more complex meanings. The analysis proposed in this article ends with the reconstruction of the temple. This shows the way in which architects of independent India addressed the country's history, directly or indirectly engaging with the construction of a heritage for the new state. Their efforts aimed to strengthen a shared memory of the past, which could in turn consolidate membership and a sense of belonging to the new nation. Advocates and promoters of the temple's reconstruction, among whom were Vallabhbhai Patel and K. M. Munshi, envisioned that the reconstruction would embody the long-awaited liberation of India from centuries of continuous domination by ‘foreign’ powers. In contrast, secular politicians, with Nehru at the helm, opposed the reconstruction, fearing that Somnath might become the symbol of a sectarian vision of the nation and, in the wake of partition, derail efforts to characterise independent India as an inclusive country. While the reconstruction did eventually take place, the entire episode invites us to question the relationship between the framing of Indian nationalism and the heritagisation of Indian history. Following a critical theoretical approach to Heritage studies, where heritage has less to do with the item that is preserved than with the value with which it is endowed, this article proposes to investigate the meanings that heritage preservation, conservation, and reconstruction acquired as part of the project of nation- and state-building.

The Qara Khitai or Western Liao dynasty (1124–1218) is one of the most fascinating polities in medieval Eurasia, but also one of the least documented in terms of both literary sources and material culture. Founded by Khitan refugees who escaped from North China when the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) vanquished the Khitan Liao dynasty (907–1125), the Qara Khitai soon established a multicultural empire in Central Asia, combining Khitan, Chinese, and Muslim elements. The Buddhist Qara Khitai ruled over their mostly Muslim population in rare harmony until the rise of Chinggis Khan (r. 1206–1227). Hitherto only a few objects—and not a single structure—have been associated with this powerful empire. We argue that the Kök-Tash mausoleum, excavated in 2017–2018 and originally interpreted as a unique subterranean Muslim mausoleum, is actually the first-ever identified Qara Khitai elite tomb.

This unique tomb, located in the Kochkor valley of north-eastern Kyrgyzstan, about a day's ride from the Qara Khitai capital of Balāsāghūn, shares many similarities with the Liao tombs in North China, notably the typical Khitan mesh-wire burial suit. Yet it also uses local Central Asian materials and techniques, thereby manifesting how the Qara Khitai managed to retain their cultural identity in their new Central Asian and mostly Muslim environment. Moreover, identifying the Kök Tash mausoleum as a Qara Khitai tomb allows us to reassess several other unusual tombs excavated in the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to suggest attributing them, too, to the Qara Khitai.

This article examines a collection of manuscripts of travel writings kept in the National Library of China. Many of the texts are copies of articles and travel accounts published in magazines, papers, or books during the first decade of the Republican period. Although the majority of texts are by Chinese authors, nine of them can be verified as translations from other languages, even though almost no information is available regarding their source texts and original authors. Identifying the sources of the translations permits a better understanding of how this group of writings ended up as a collection. More importantly, we can consider how their content and function changed when they became adopted into an entirely different environment.

Historical explanations of the rise and expansion of the first Saudi state have given Wahhabism pride of place. Principally, they have dwelt on religion and ideology, emphasising the role of the eighteenth-century theologian Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and arguing that his charisma, puritanical zeal, exclusivist approach to monotheistic worship, or neo-orthodox reform programme inspired a series of consequential political and military actions, beginning with the foundation of a theocratic emirate in Dirʿiyya and culminating in the conquest of much of Arabia. However much Wahhabi doctrines might have motivated warfare and state expansion, this article contends that the rise of the Saudi state depended on the spread of a new weapon—the matchlock gun. It considers the significance of firearms in regional warfare and, after making the case that they were likely to have been imported, builds up the revisionist argument that Najd had significant connections to world trade.

Across the early modern Islamicate world, the phenomenon of eunuch slavery constitutes a significant aspect of courtly contexts and royal households. Although Mughal historiography has focused on the eunuch primarily in relation to the harem, this article analyses the function of such figures in regulating elite male space, in order to explore how these practices shaped both the representation of courtly life as well as the dynamics animating the Mughal court and the inner palace. As is shown in both textual and visual materials, enslaved, castrated men appear as figures both marking and mediating the perimeters of such spaces. In the process they played an important part in the spatial formation of access, intimacy, and hierarchical relations. However, their formative role in mediating elite social interactions at times entangled eunuchs in political conflict. The article concludes with an examination of a particularly dense archive of evidence from the reign of Aurangzeb dealing with royal princes. This material underlines the sometimes-precarious situation of eunuchs in moments of intrafamilial struggle, a fact which suggests the complicated reality of these kinds of intimate roles not only in Mughal princely households but wherever they took on such proximate positions.

This article investigates the growth of cross-border movement and migration in the northern portion of the Yellow Sea during the sixteenth century, which generated ongoing interactions and tensions with the coastal governance of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China. The fluid flow of private seafarers reconnected the northern Yellow Sea and revitalised its maritime economy, making this space an integral part of wider trade networks. Meanwhile, the Chosŏn and Ming authorities also attempted to discern, categorise, and institutionalise this transmarine mobility in their discursive, administrative, and geographic spaces. Instead of considering the two polities as land based and inward looking, this article foregrounds the dynamics of their coastal control mechanisms, while at the same time paying close attention to their constraints on filtering and scrutinising maritime violence.

Three aspects of the historical memory of 1971 remain highly contentious. The first concerns the (il)legitimacy of the military operation and the description of Bengali resistance against it as ‘national liberation’. The second centres on the accusation of the Pakistani military's genocidal violence, the use of rape as a weapon, and the counter-allegation of a Bihari genocide. The third focuses on the way forward: whether this should be by forgetting the past or seeking an apology for war crimes.

This article will focus on all three aspects of the debate about the violent events of the 1971 war. Instead of writing a history of 1971 as such, I will propose a methodological framework for writing a history of the war: that of asking the right kind of questions. I invoke this method not for a correct answer, or even a different kind of history, but mainly for its interruptive power to sabotage the dominant discourse, force a moment of introspection, and open up a reflective space for the possibility of reparative justice through an intimate historical narrativisation.

Li Wenyu and Ma Xiangbo were two influential Catholic intellectuals in modern China who each undertook a translation of the Bible into Chinese. This article surveys their participation in contemporary ideological debates and investigates their thoughts on the inculturation of Catholicism, including ‘evangelisation by writing’ and ‘scholastic mission’, as well as their beliefs and practices regarding Bible translation. An in-depth comparison of their translations is also provided, illuminating the different approaches taken by Li and Ma in dealing with terminology, sentence structure, linguistic style, and theological implications. Li conformed to Chinese biblical terminology established by the Catholic missionaries who preceded him and adhered to the syntax of Classical Chinese; in contrast, Ma's linguistic style is approximate to Easy Wenli, and he adopted words and phrases from traditional Chinese culture to transmit the Catholic faith. The two translators demonstrated two choices of indigenising Catholicism and the Bible in China: ‘mirror-type’ and ‘bridge-type’.

A well-known series of miniature figures produced in India from unfired clay, appropriately clothed and in many instances represented carrying out their respective secular or ritual duties, enjoyed a period of particular popularity on the world stage in the nineteenth century when they were appropriated as illustrative devices in museum displays and international exhibitions. Over the previous half-century or more they had emerged as products of a dynamic industry that responded to changes in taste as well as religious and artistic practice within Indian society, before being taken up by the West to serve new colonial imperatives. There they received perhaps their most enthusiastic reception at the India Museum, established in the headquarters of the East India Company in London in the early 1800s, and surviving beyond the suppression of the Company itself until they were dispersed to a number of other institutions in 1879. From an early appearance at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the figures also became a regular feature of the international exhibitions of the latter part of the century. Initially they celebrated the traditional crafts and practices of India but gradually were recruited to communicate other messages of Western industrial dominance and perceived artistic and industrial superiority. Although comparatively few of these figures survive intact in Western collections, the history of their considerable impact on the European stage can be enlarged upon with the aid of the documentary record.

The discovery of overcounting in Orkhon Inscriptions has been an important contribution by historical comparative linguistics during the nineteenth century. However, the initial interpretation of overcounted numerals in Orkhon Inscriptions by Thomsen and Radloff was not correct, resulting in serious difficulties in reconstructing old Turkic history. It was Bang and Marquart who worked out the true semantics of overcounted numerals. This article aims to present a historical overview on the discovery and interpretation of overcounted numerals in Orkhon Inscriptions. Considering that Bang and Marquart did not explicitly spell out their evidence for reaching the true semantics of these numerals, this article presents a series of arguments proving the existence of overcounting in Old Turkic based on language per se, historical facts, logical reasoning, and bilingual translation.

Although Chinese was not an official language in early colonial Hong Kong, translation between English and Chinese played a crucial role in daily life and politics. The first part of this article discusses the making of some important translated terms for government units and departments as well as foreign consulates in Hong Kong. In doing so, it accounts for different approaches in translation and lexical innovation, and their historical significance behind the making of newly translated terms. The second part of this article investigates salient features of the translation experiment initiated by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1834–1891; term of office: 1877–1882). The experiment aimed at strengthening the political legitimacy and colonial governability in Hong Kong. In return, the social standing of Chinese community leaders was duly recognised through their association with translation projects between English and Chinese, and the presentation of translated messages at important occasions hosted by Government House.