Following the end of the Great War, the basis of British power in India changed significantly. In an attempt to appease what it considered to be new political interest groups, the British and Indian governments reformed the basis of representative politics as a result of promises of ‘gradual realisation of responsible government’ during the war. Crucially, some Indian subjects were given more powers at the provincial level. The financial and fiscal basis of the Raj shifted in tandem, with more focus on the flexible revenues of income tax, rather than land revenues, which brought different middle-class publicists into negotiation in the reformed legislatures. The 1920s was also a time of dramatic change for ‘communal’ politics, particularly from the point of view of public discussions about the prevalence of riots and more minor clashes across north India. Historians have tended to chart the occurrence of communal violence in waves. Whereas, following non-cooperation from 1922, there were more ‘riots’ in absolute terms (particularly in north India), following the end of Civil Disobedience in 1934, this violence appeared to decline until the 1940s. Again, by the early 1950s, for three decades, mobilisation around religious community declined dramatically again, it seems, at least in terms of the occurrence of conflicts and riots. However, charting the ebb and flow of the politics of ‘communalism’ according to the prevalence of riots is problematic. First of all, there were, and continue to be, often very local and contingent reasons for such conflicts. Moreover, the reason for such violence is rarely as straightforward as government reports and the media set out. What is significant, however, is how the notion and discussion of ‘communalism’ changed in the interwar period. And here, riots and conflicts were important in informing a public sense of religious antagonism.

This chapter will look at how this process was linked to specific changes in the relationship between the state at all levels and power brokers in Indian society who sometimes worked through civic institutions, and it will be followed in the by a consideration of the deeper social bases of religious mobilisation. One of its main arguments will be that the 1920s was a period in which the legitimacy of the colonial state was questioned in new and more radical ways than ever before by a range of institutions, leaders and publicists. This led to the setting up of a range of parallel quasi-state organisations and bodies. These revolved around local structures of mobilisation and power, generated by heightened competition and new claims to political recognition by community and caste organisations. The changing significance of class and other ethnic identities, as the state attempted to redefine minority and special interests, was also important, and these themes will be taken up in .

Chinese martial arts is a living tradition with a very long history. As something alive it continues to change, in both meaning and practice, making simple conclusions about what it is, was, or even should be, impossible. In that respect it is no different from other Chinese practices, where centuries or even millennia of tradition bear strongly on current practitioners. As a physical practice, martial arts keeps the historian at arm’s length by the limitations of the textual and archaeological sources. It is usually impossible to prove the continuity of any skill performed over the centuries. At the same time, the legitimacy of tradition, however understood, must compete with the needs or desires to innovate and absorb new techniques. If martial arts was a dead tradition this would not be difficult; the lines would be clear between the past and the present. The struggle to balance out tradition, innovation, and meaning is therefore a positive sign of vitality.

This vitality, however, is a great challenge for the researcher. Throughout this book I have struggled to construct a narrative of martial arts in Chinese culture and society that places specific practices in a broader context. The constraints of space and clarity (not to mention time) frequently forced significant aspects of the history of the martial arts – most obviously religion, theater, and literature – off to the side in favor of more general historical themes. In order to argue for the consistent importance of martial arts, I have spread my coverage more evenly over time at the expense of the availability of sources. Far more can be written about martial arts in more recent periods than in the distant past, but it seemed that apportioning coverage in direct reflection of the source materials might prejudice the reader into seeing martial arts as more important in the modern period than in ancient times. Martial arts has always been important in every society, not only in China, though the specific arts and the categories of practice understood to be “martial” are contested.

Chinese martial arts has a written history and is part of the society in which it developed. One of the greatest myths about Chinese martial arts as a whole is that it has no written record. Many people assume or assert that the only source of knowledge about its origins and development is the tradition orally transmitted from martial arts teachers. Adding to the misunderstanding of the past, this imagined oral tradition seldom places the martial arts in the broader context of Chinese history or, when it does, uses a simplistic, static, and inaccurate description of that past. In fact, the amount of available written material on martial arts in Chinese history is enormous. As a first step in confronting such a vast body of information, this book will describe the origins and development of the Chinese martial arts across Chinese history. I will argue that these arts are the developed physical practices of armed and unarmed combat, which must be understood primarily as military skills, not methods of self-cultivation or religious activity.

That said, although the martial arts stemmed from military requirements and related activities like hunting, these skills took on added meaning as markers of status and of certain mental or spiritual qualities. Warfare and hunting were important in the identity of early Chinese aristocrats, for example, and their class was closely associated with chariot-borne archery. Aristocrats not only fought with certain weapons but they also fought under specific rules of combat that reinforced their shared sense of class. As time went on, changes in society and technology undermined the military, economic, and political basis for these chariot-riding aristocrats. Armies grew in size and improved in armament, thus spreading the skills of warfare further out among the common people. Government officials were expected to lead in wartime, and farmers were expected to become soldiers when needed. In unstable and war-ridden times the martial arts were thus widely practiced throughout Chinese society.

The Six Dynasties period, running from the fall of the Han dynasty to rise of the Sui (589–618) and Tang dynasties (618–907), was marked by political division within the territory of the former Han empire. It has also been called the “Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties period,” in recognition of the separate governments in northern and southern China, or even simply the “Period of Disunion” or “Period of Division.” Both traditional and contemporary Chinese historians portray this period of division as an anomalous and unnatural detour from China’s fundamental geopolitical unity rather than a centuries-long struggle to establish the Qin-Han political unity as a Chinese cultural norm. The Six Dynasties was particularly colored by the extensive involvement of non-Chinese forces from the northern steppes in the military, politics, and culture of the formerly Han empire’s territories, mostly in north China. At various times during this period, non-Chinese ruled and immigrated into north China. Society and culture were the product of centuries of cultural intermixing between Chinese and various steppe practices. This was true of martial arts as well.

Steppe influence grew markedly in China in the later part of the Han dynasty. Tribal leaders and their cohorts of cavalrymen were regularly recruited as a group into Han armies to fight other steppe groups. Over time, steppe leaders and their forces were drawn into regional power struggles within the Han dynasty as well. Tribal leaders then shifted from working as mercenary commanders to having direct participation in the struggle for power. Steppe martial arts and fighting techniques responded to the preexisting Chinese martial arts, and Chinese martial arts responded to steppe martial arts as the respective sides interacted. This was not a simple matter of Chinese armies learning how to fight steppe armies, or steppe armies learning how to fight Chinese armies. In many battles, armies combined steppe cavalrymen with Chinese infantry, and they might fight similarly mixed opponents.

In 1890, an eleven-year-old Bengali girl by the name of Phulmonee became the subject of intense public debate across India. She had died as the result of rape by her twenty-nine-year-old husband, Hari Maiti, who had acted on the basis of a traditional life-cyle rite – garbhadan – which permitted a husband to have sexual intercourse with his wife within sixteen days of her first period. A year later in 1891, an Age of Consent Bill was passed that raised the minimum age of consent for married girls to twelve years. The Bill was passed despite the reluctance of representatives of the colonial state itself, and under pressure from Indian reformers. The debate surrounding the Age of Consent Bill created new and urgent discussions about the nature of domestic ‘Hindu’ life. The existence of authoritative religious codes on the rights of husbands to control the lives of girl brides had hindered any suggestion of colonial reform. Indeed, some of the key communities, on which the colonial system depended, backed a vociferous campaign in opposition to the Bill and, most importantly, in opposition to the colonial state. This intrusion into the religious customs of the Hindu family was depicted by journals in Bengal, such as the Bangabasi, as an attack on the sovereignty of the ‘Hindu people’ to control the bodies of women. Some lower-caste communities in north India too in this period aspired to higher ritual status by practicing infant marriage of girls.

The very definition of the Hindu family and ‘community’, the legal rights (or non-rights) of women within it, was therefore, in this debate, played out in relation to a colonial state that sought to recognise and protect vital sources of ‘community’ identity. But, as this chapter will explore, it did so on the basis of fundamental tensions in the relationship between the state and Indian society, which constantly threatened to delegitimise state agencies. In this debate too, new discussions emerged about the relationship between the individual, family and community; about the importance of religion to Indian society; and about the legal and civic rights of women in relation to men. It exposed the means whereby the colonial state sought to ‘discover’ religious custom and the means of communication and publicity that promoted certain selected ideas about religious custom. Throughout the debates on the Age of Consent Bill, as this chapter will explore around broader themes, traditional notions of community rights were being challenged not only in a broad ideological defence against Western modernity, but also from other, non-Brahmanical visions of what constituted a religious community in India.

Between 1948 and 1950, Mridula Sarabhai, a Gujarati Congress leader, sent a series of reports to Jawaharlal Nehru on the violence following India’s partition in the summer of 1947, the fate of refugees in camps, the problem of housing in Muslim areas of Delhi and, most importantly, the problem of female abduction. Her letters and reports illustrated, often in graphic detail, the involvement of not only civilians but also of specific government servants, policemen, army personnel and local politicians in the perpetuation and encouragement of violence. In late October 1948, she conducted a fact-finding tour of the Agra area in western UP and Dholepur State (in present-day eastern Rajasthan) – an area close to some of the worst instances of violence and with a considerable urban Muslim population – with Inspector Hans Raj of the Intelligence Bureau. Sarabhai and Hans Raj met the Principal of the Holman Institute in Agra, who passed on some information about the alleged location of women abducted from across the border. According to Sarabhai’s informant, at Deeg, twenty-five miles from Bharatpur, it was rumoured that there were two or three abducted Muslim women in every house. In Dholepur, in Bari, abducted women were also allegedly being kept in a big forest called Dang. A headman of fifty villages in Bari, said to be ‘working against the Congress’, also allegedly knew about them. Sarabhai’s information was that a gang of people, including policemen – thanedars and a city kotwal – were reportedly abducting Muslim women who had taken refuge from violence or who had been previously kidnapped from villages all over Dholepur state. These women were brought to Delhi and sold. Sarabhai’s informant went on to suggest that ‘Delhi people should be used’ to conduct an enquiry because the state people and police would be of no use.

This episode illustrated how, around India’s partition, reporting on Hindu–Muslim conflict was highly dependent on local context, but also that state acquiescence or the involvement of government servants and policemen often formed a part of the rumour surrounding such events. Sarabhai had her doubts about the veracity of the reports in this case and many others, and suggested herself that speculation about the actions of individuals in positions of authority was also part of the continuing ‘atmosphere of violence’. Also significant were the national and parliamentary debates underpinning Sarabhai’s fact-finding tours. The issue of ‘abducted’ women and their recovery was highly emotive and, as we will see, entered national debates about religion, Indian secularism and the role of state institutions in legislating for the Indian family. The image of the abducted Hindu woman took on a heightened symbolic significance around partition, which simplified and homogenised much more complex realities. In other reports, Sarabhai expressed surprise that women ‘reclaimed’ from abduction often had no intention of returning to their families and sought instead to start a new life on their own. These episodes also illustrated, crucially, that the implications of the partition violence stretched well beyond the moments of independence and the political concerns of the main political parties involved: the displacement or division of families or the loss of relatives caused long-term damage, with extremely complex implications for the social lives of those involved. And the violence of partition, particularly in its effects on those whose new national identity or sense of belonging was in doubt, extended into the early 1950s and beyond.

To explain the dynamics and strategic orientation of popular protests since the 1990s, we naturally look for factors of social and political change in the Reform Era. What have often been overlooked are some enduring elements of the regime that have also profoundly shaped popular collective action. This chapter will show how inherent contradictions of the PRC have played such an important role.

Such contradictions have been most clearly manifest in the xinfang system, one of the primary institutions for the CCP to handle popular claim-making activities. The design of this system is based on the mass line, which simultaneously emphasizes the concentration of political power to Party leaders and nonbinding consultation with the masses. As a consultative apparatus it has been designed to facilitate “managed participation,” which means that both the forms and effects of participation are under tight control by the Party-state. Ordinary people can signal their preferences to the state but are not supposed to exert pressure on it. It is up to state officials to decide how such preferences will influence policy making and implementation.

How do we account for the upsurge of collective protest in China since the early 1990s? It is impossible to understand this trend without analyzing the changing political structure surrounding claim making, especially the way in which state agents cope with claim-making activities. Patterns of state strategies – for example, the state’s propensity and capacity for repression – have long been regarded as a key aspect of the political opportunity structure that influences popular contention. In the Reform Era, the Chinese state has developed a particular repertoire of strategies for coping with popular contention: generally restrained repression with a goal of containment rather than deterrence, expedient concessions, practical persuasion, and prevalent procrastination. Such a pattern of state strategies make collective petitioning with “troublemaking” tactics a rational and even attractive choice: Such forms of social protests are not overly risky, often somewhat effective, and usually indispensable for their success.

Of course, this pattern of state strategies is itself a product of economic reforms and the sociopolitical transformations they have triggered. Thus this chapter will examine how two important processes in the Reform Era – the changes in state-society linkages and those in the state structure – have transformed the strategic repertoire that state agents use when responding to social protest.

On the morning of 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi set out from her prime-ministerial residence at 1 Safdarjung Road, New Delhi, to attend an interview with Peter Ustinov. As she passed through the gardens of the house, two of her Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, opened fire, spinning the Prime Minister of India around and leaving her prone and bleeding on the ground, after which multiple rounds of ammunition were fired at her immobile body. Although there was an ambulance on site, nobody could find the driver. Sonia Gandhi and Indira Gandhi’s aides lifted her into a Hindustani Ambassador and she was rushed to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which held a special supply of her ‘O’ blood group Rh. negative. Meanwhile, the two arrested Sikhs were shot by their guards. Although attempts were made to remove some of the bullets, Indira Gandhi was pronounced dead by the early afternoon of the same day.

The killing of Indira Gandhi illustrated in a brutal and dramatic way the interconnection between the violence of the locality – the indignation of Delhi’s Sikh community – and decision making at the highest levels of the Indian state. Satwant and Beant Singh (who were shot at the scene of the incident) carried out the assassination in revenge for the government’s operation against Sikh militants taking refuge in the grounds of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Operation Blue Star was the final act in a disastrous policy of central interference in the complex factional divisions within Punjabi Sikh politics, as Indira Gandhi’s regime attempted to subdue the separatist ambitions of a section of its leadership. The assassination of Indira Gandhi had much more disturbing consequences. Over the first week of November 1984, thousands of Sikhs were killed in a pogrom that spread across the main cities of north India and was most pronounced in Delhi and Kanpur. Much of this violence appeared to be spontaneous, but over the following years, a series of official investigations and independent enquiries suggested that it may have been planned. As with the violence around India’s partition, the quotidian was interlaced with the highest levels of state, and the formalities of political rivalry. And the apparent ferocity of popular indignation was not easily unravelled from a sense of political conspiracy.

Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), the man who founded the Ming Dynasty, began his life in abject poverty and spent much of his youth as a Buddhist disciple. He began his rise to power as a rebel leader, joining a Buddhist-inspired group known as the Red Turbans. He eventually gained control over a part of this group and built a military and political force able to conquer China as the Yuan Dynasty broke down. This connection to Buddhism did nothing to mitigate the violence necessary to defeat the other contenders for power in the fourteenth century, and Zhu would prove to be one of the most violent, paranoid, and murderous rulers in Chinese history. He did not learn his martial arts in the temple to which he was apprenticed (he did learn to read and write there) but in the chaotic and highly militarized world of mid-fourteenth-century China. As Yuan authority crumbled, groups rose all over China fighting for local power, with some going on to struggle for regional and eventually empire-wide control.

These struggles also took place within military and political groups, as individual warriors and advisors sought to improve their own fortunes at the expense of their putative comrades. The challenge was to reach the top of a winning group without undermining its success through infighting. Successful warriors were highly valued in this environment; those who could also lead and possessed organizational and strategic ability could aspire to reach the highest ranks of power. Zhu Yuanzhang, like all founding emperors, was a successful warrior and general, and he attracted and surrounded himself with other successful warriors and generals. At the same time, he needed bureaucrats and advisors who were neither fighters nor generals to build and run the institutional structures of his government. He sought to fix permanently the correct balance between the martial and civil in his dynasty, at least as he conceived it.