This article is an attempt to explore the role of Tai Ahom proverbs as a marker of cultural identity in the realm of postmodern society. Using or choosing culturally driven speech in communication is a linguistic behaviour which reflects the character of the people, their worldview, and thus their uniqueness or difference from the ‘other’. In another way, this might be a conscious way of projecting self. This qualitative study on proverbs of Tai Ahom language and culture adopts the methods of ethnography and textual analysis. A cultural hermeneutic model, along with the participant observation method, was used to collect the data. Finally, the Tai Ahom community of Sivasagar district of Assam, India was chosen as the locus for the research. The findings show that the proverbs are deeply woven by the Ahom community's cultural heritage, history, pride, advice, and satire. Hence, this article provides an insight into Tai Ahoms’ way of living and their worldview. In locating the Tai Ahom's cultural identity within the homogenised bigger community of ‘Assamese’ or akhomiya, this study could help in understanding the differences or uniqueness of the Tai Ahom and thereby the Assamese identity in the present context.

In 1856–7 the French diplomat Charles de Montigny visited the three countries of Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, hoping to establish some form of formal relations with all three. While he was able to sign a full diplomatic and commercial treaty in Bangkok, his negotiations with the Cambodian and Vietnamese rulers were largely fruitless. Even so, Montigny's visit prepared the ground for future French intervention and can be considered as the beginning of French implantation in Southeast Asia. Yet this article argues that his mission must be understood not as an episode of “gunboat diplomacy” resulting in “unequal treaties”, but rather as an example of largely non-coercive diplomacy occurring within an imperial framework.

The article is concerned primarily with Maulana Azad's early political and theological writings with a view to understanding his positions on Islam and the non-Islamic religions. It opens with a brief description of his discussion of Mughal history and religious culture, and then notes his portrayal of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624) as an exemplary political figure, who raised his voice against Akbar's heresy. This portrayal has had a significant historiographical afterlife. Several modern scholars followed Azad's reading. The article asks whether Azad was truly the first to have such a view of the saint, and thereby influenced the modern writings on Mughal India. We will notice that Sirhindi was already portrayed as a political figure in the Mughal-era historical accounts devoted to him. Azad only chose to work within a certain memory of Sirhindi—but why did he choose to use an earlier tradition and not a purely religious interpretive framework of his own for analysing and presenting the saint's position? The article examines Azad's rationale for such a portrayal in light of his political concerns. It then discusses in some depth the theological discourses in his Tazkira and the early issues of Al-Hilāl.

This article revisits a series of articles published in the early 1980s on Punjab politics in the pre-partition decade that grew out of my thesis ‘The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab’ which was supervised by Francis Robinson. It initially locates the publications in the existing literature, before assessing the extent to which subsequent research has enriched academic understanding. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the conceptualisation of the Unionist Party's power-sharing as a form of consociationalism.

This article considers the evidence for the business practices, goods traded, and accounts of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) upper merchant, Wilhelm Buschman, on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf during the 1760s. Previous scholarship indicates that his widow, Anna Maria Pack, had a large inheritance, acquired on her death by her second husband, the VOC surgeon Ferdinand Dejean, who commissioned most of Mozart's flute works. A historical audit of Buschman's reports in this article reveals that the existence and source of most of that wealth was hidden from the official diaries which Buschman sent to the VOC headquarters in Batavia, on Java. The dwindling profits of the VOC, at a time of military turbulence involving Mir Mohanna, do not support Buschman's money originating from bribes even factoring in rake-offs. There is, however, evidence for a private, ring-fenced pearl trade on Kharg, which provides a good explanation. Pearls were not just jewels, but an ideal cryptocurrency for concealing, storing, selling, or shifting private wealth. The findings substantiate that it was possible for the VOC to lose out hugely to private enterprise, which was part of the culture among senior merchants. That wealth could do intercontinental economic damage. Occasionally, it was put to lasting good use.

The elephant at Dhauli, site of Aśoka Maurya's inscriptions, is the earliest Indian monumental sculpture. Aśoka reigned between 270–235 BC and the Dhauli elephant is dated c. 257 BC. Only the elephant's forefront is sculpted; about half of the animal's bulk remains within the rock (Figure 1). One art historian claims that Emperor Aśoka is in the vanguard presenting himself to the people of Kaliṅga. Usually, however, the Dhauli elephant is considered symbolic of the Buddha. The well-known story that Māyā dreamt that Siddhārtha entered her womb as a white elephant motivates this view; to wit śeto (i.e. śveta), ʻthe white one’, is inscribed at the end of the 6th Rock Edict.

The tazkira, a long-established genre of life-history writing in South Asian literature, was increasingly used over the course of the twentieth century to document the lives and achievements of ‘ulamā (‘learned men’, or scholars of religion). This article explores a foundational work within this genre: ‘Ashīq Ilahī Mīrutī's Tazkira't al-Rashīd (first published in 1908–1910), a life-history of the Dēōbandī scholar and Sūfī shāykh Rashīd Ahmad Gangōhī. It argues that such life-histories of ‘ulamā were written not merely as historical records but as ‘lessons’ to their readers. This article illustrates how the tazkira appropriated Gangōhī's life and teachings to provide an indispensable repository of Dēōbandī understanding on issues such as tarīqah (the Sūfī path), sharī‘ah (religious law), pīrī-murīdī (the master-disciple relationship), religious and social conduct, and relations with the state. The article thus makes a case for understanding the tazkira as an important vehicle for informing and shaping the religious behaviour of a Muslim public, which was employed ultimately by both the Dēōbandī and other Islamic revivalist movements.

This article interrogates the early reception history of the late Qing Chinese novel The Travels of Lao Can authored by Liu E (1857–1909). It argues that for decades this novel was widely read as a book of prophecy that revealed the future of China based on traditional Chinese occult wisdom. It was this alleged mystique, instead of its literary merits, that accounted for the high popularity of the text in the late Qing and Republican book market. This argument is predicated upon the discovery and reappraisal of a 1916 “fake edition” of the book until now unremarked in Chinese literary historiography. Investigating this forgery reveals that it was arguably the most widely circulated edition of The Travels of Lao Can in the Republican period. Bound with a newly fabricated sequel that explicitly manifested its “divinatory efficacy”, this edition greatly shaped the popular reception of the text as a book of prophecy. Revisiting this “fake edition” and the forgotten stories behind it not only enables the rereading of The Travels of Lao Can in its full complexity, but also points to deeper questions about the relationship between print culture, literary consumption, and the production of occult knowledge in China's modern transition.

This article analyses long-term population dynamics—growth, decline, sex- and age-composition—in Chaghadaid-era Central Asia in the context of the ‘Late-medieval Crisis’. It is based on a unique dataset of 630 epitaphs from two East Syriac (‘Nestorian') graveyards in the Semirech'ye region (Northwest Tian Shan, North Kyrgyzstan), boosted by archaeological and osteological evidence from the same graveyards. This epigraphic corpus is truly unique in the sense that this is the only surviving data that allow the undertaking of such a quantitative reconstruction of pre-modern Central Asian demography. A close analysis of the corpus, based on the ‘excess mortality’ method, reveals rapid demographic growth between circa 1270 and 1330, despite frequent short-term mortality crises, caused, most likely, by a combination of environmental and political factors. The population growth came to a sudden halt because of a major plague outbreak in 1338–1339, killing about three-quarters of the local population, and initiating what was known as the Black Death of 1347–1353 in West Eurasia and North Africa. The analysis of sex and age ratios indicates that the local population regime was heavily male-dominated. The plague of 1338–1339 targeted primarily younger women, most likely due to pregnancy-related hazards; conversely, in other crisis years, adult males were more susceptible. The findings of the article are wrapped into the wider context of the ‘Late-medieval Crisis’.

This article analyses the construction of religious origin myths for Islam within ‘universal religion’ and esoteric frameworks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia and beyond, and sheds light on the role of ‘Western’ and Anglo-Indian converts in this process. At its core is a case study of the elusive Hamid Snow, founder of the so-called ‘Church of Islam’ in 1891 in Sikanderabad, Deccan. On the following pages, I reconstruct Snow's biography from little-known Urdu and English sources, analyse his writings, and place him within a context of religious modernist, esoteric, and convert networks encompassing South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Philippines, and other parts of the world. By focusing on the nature of the scholarship of religion at the time, and the reconstruction of religious pasts under the influence of esotericism and religious modernism, the article traces the influence of Orientalist and Eurocentric views on perceptions of the Islamic tradition and contributes to larger debates about the role of laypeople, especially those with an interracial background, in interpreting religious history and acting as cultural mediators between different communities during a time of ‘hybrid transnational occultism’.1

The writings of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan well exemplify the argument of Francis Robinson's influential article on vernacular print publications that furthered a Protestant Reformation-like democratising of sacred knowledge. Both the number of his publications, and the personal empowerment enjoined by his Ahl-i Hadith jurisprudence, make him, in fact, an ideal exemplar of this kind of publication. He also, however, stands apart. First, his ‘vernacular’ included not only Urdu, but also Arabic and Persian. Second, beyond democratisation, print simultaneously enhanced scholarly authority, and it did so to an unusual extent for Siddiq Hasan because of his pioneering reach beyond India to the Ottoman lands, with Arabic works published and distributed from cities like Istanbul and Cairo. Third, Siddiq Hasan's publications served a diversity of purposes, like Persian publications that enhanced his princely status, and Arabic publications that not only forged transnational networks of like-minded scholars but also, in other hands, served modernist theologians and innovative literary scholars. Finally, in the end, the potential of print turned on him as officials used his publications to allege seditious intent. That denouement aside, the life of Siddiq Hasan's print publication points to a moment of rich intellectual life in the context of colonial rule, taking Robinson's insights on the potential of publication in unexpected directions.

Three centuries after the Mongol-era historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) wrote his influential account of China, an émigré Christian convert from Islam translated Matteo Ricci's book on China into Persian in Mughal Delhi. In doing so, he provided a remarkably detailed depiction of the rulers, religions, and regulations of the Ming empire that greatly updated, and superseded, Rashid al-Din's celebrated account. Nonetheless, by the very virtue of its triangulated origins—between China, Europe, and India; between Chinese, Latin, and Persian—this was a fraught endeavour. For Chinese cultural traditions had to be rendered into Islamicate Persian terms that were approximate equivalents for Latin Christian terms which themselves inevitably misrepresented Confucian terms that in turn provided biased depictions of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. By looking at two moments of the transmission of Ricci into Persian—in the early modern era of manuscripts and amid the colonial ascent of Indian print—this article uses translation as a lens through which to observe both the reach and limits of the cross-cultural connections that have captivated global historians in recent decades.