The early twentieth century witnessed a diversity of social and religious reforms as well as nationalist efforts to ‘elevate’ segments of Indian society to a supposedly ‘higher’ stage of civilization. In ‘civilizing’ discourses of this time period, the degradation of women in Indian society featured central not only amongst colonial rulers and missionaries; it also inserted itself into the consciousness of indigenous elites and the emerging middle classes, including elite and middle-class women. This chapter explores the interventions of Hindi women's periodicals in colonial and nationalist ‘civilizing missions’ of the late 1910s. More precisely, it analyses how contributors to women's periodicals examined the arguments brought forth by agents of the British civilizing mission such as James Mill, James Tod and Herbert Spencer. It also addresses (male) social reformist and nationalist positions on the topic of the woman question. Most importantly, though, it presents examples of women writers and activists proffering their very own civilizing missions. The central question of such contributors revolved around the implications of ‘improvement’ and ‘development’ for Indian middle-class women. The contributors also assessed notions of ‘civilization’ both in theory and in practice, specifically considering what could be in the best interest of women (as defined by both women and men). Some contributors suggested that more attention be turned towards a presumed ideal Hindu past and women's revered status therein. Others called for a break with tradition and a redefinition of gender roles.

Prologue: On the Political Implications of Art and Architecture

In the long decade after the victorious Boer and Boxer Wars in Africa and China and before the outbreak of the First World War, the short period marking the heyday of British (as well as other European states') imperialism, it was the British Empire in India which became the focus of Great Britain's imperial grandeur and splendour. To commemorate the announcement of Edward VII as Emperor of India, the then Governor General and Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon (1898–1905), declared in 1901 his intention to organize a Coronation Darbar to be held at Delhi. The Delhi Darbar of 1902–03 was a massive demonstration of Britain's global military power, almost 40,000 soldiers including Indian regiments having just returned from the African and Asian theatres of war paraded in front of the Viceroy and the assembled dignitaries of Britain, Germany and India. The Delhi Darbar was also a lucid demonstration of colonial cultural patronage, collecting and displaying the best samples of contemporary Indian artefacts at the Delhi Arts Exhibition, which was part of the huge official programme accompanying this rather pompous imperial function.

The Delhi Arts Exhibition was part of a rather young tradition of industrial and art exhibitions, which began in 1851 with the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’ in London, to be followed by the Paris International Exhibition of 1855.

• – In your view, what are the main characteristics of democracy?

• – The vote. That we can eat at affordable prices. Schools and colleges. If there is to be a medical college, then it should be the government's.

• – Should ordinary people become MPs?

• – To become an MP you need a lot of money. Because [I am] an agricultural labourer, I can never become the Prime Minister. But I shall have my dignity. To be able to stand among everybody else, that is what is right.

This is an excerpt from an interview with an agricultural labourer in a small bazaar town south of Dhaka. The interview was conducted in connection with a survey carried out in his village, to ascertain people's understanding of democracy and of elected representatives. The agricultural labourer's answers contain interesting insight into what villagers such as him think about democracy and the role of elected politicians. First we see that ‘to vote’ (vot deya) is central to how democracy is understood, as the first thing that springs to mind. Secondly we see that ‘to vote’ is immediately followed by other expectations – of food at affordable prices, or perhaps more commonly of infrastructure, schools and other forms of ‘development’. This was characteristic of the answers we had. Democracy and development are notions that were closely connected. A third element has to do with ‘representation’. We found that ordinary people did not feel that ordinary people would make good political leaders.

Inside the Islamic Republic of Pakistan Muslim unity is riven by sectarian conflicts many of which may be traced to the denominational division between Sunnis and Shias. Among the Sunnis, the division between Barelwis and Deobandis has proved equally conflictual. In this article, I will present a short historical account of the emergence of different Islamic schools of thought and their main organisations. I concentrate particularly on the sharpening of the tensions between them from the 1980s onwards. That such tensions remain to this day and age is witnessed by the suicide attack on a Shia mourning procession in Lahore on 1 September 2010 killing 31 people, and by the attack by suicide bombers on the Data Darbar Sufishrine in Lahore on 1 July 2010, killing 42. In the end of the article, I will consider ‘neo-fundamentalist’ alternatives to Islamist and sectarian militancy that has taken on a warlike appearance in Pakistan. Possibly, the religious rationalities behind fundamentalist projects and radical movements may eventually turn into a new and less violent post- Islamist interpretation of Islam.

While the Sunni-Shia conflict is endemic to several countries of the Islamic world, South Asia has developed a specific tradition of conflict internal to the Sunnis. In the late nineteenth century, theological debates revolved around questions of the qualities of the prophet Muhammad.

Introduction

It is by now a well established fact that transnational interaction and communication on a global scale is by no means a recent phenomenon. According to prominent historians, such as C. A. Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel, the intensity of globalizing processes in modern times had reached a first peak by the end of the nineteenth century. As they persuasively demonstrate, this holds true not only for the economic, political, and cultural level, but also for the emerging religious and philanthropic organizations that could be seen as forerunners of today's INGOs. Some scholars have argued that this new type of internationalism carried by organizations and agents belonging to the realm of the civil society was important inasmuch as it was able to ‘challenge state power’, and emphasize its inherent aspirations ‘to a more peaceful and stable world order through transnational efforts’.

Building on Kathleen Wilson's important insight showing that the British Empire provides us with a particularly striking example of interdependent sites that ‘allow us to rethink the […] historiographies of national belonging and exclusion’, the present case study tries to question such an hypothesis by analyzing the ideology as well as the practical endeavors of one of the most successful global philanthropic movements in a transnational context: the Salvation Army.

Introduction

In the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), following the victory of the Congress Party in the Assembly elections of 2004, Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) led his government in an effort of irrigation development that was unusual compared to the activities in other states in India at the time. YSR and his government promoted a range of programs aimed at the agrarian sector, and the supply of water for agricultural production and for domestic use received particularly high priority. YSR's intention was to extend irrigation cover to ten million acres of land by 2014 (The Hindu 2009) and to that end the state had by 2009 spent Rs 75,000 crore (Anon. 2009, 5). One might argue that such an effort was only ‘natural’, since two of the three major areas in the state, Telangana and Rayalaseema, were semi-arid zones and had suffered from drought during the three years previous to the election. However, Telangana and Rayalaseema had long been vulnerable to scarcity of water and had experienced drought before (even if the incidence appeared to villagers to be increasing); and despite this vulnerability, no large-scale irrigation development such as that planned by the YSR government had been carried out in the state at any time since Independence. Why did this extraordinary focus on irrigation development start in 2004 under a Congress Party government?

Introduction: The History of British India as an Exercise in Futility

A deep ambivalence characterizes James Mill's The History of British India. Mill, the historian of India who never went to India, wrote ostensibly in the style of Scottish conjectural history, grafting this short-lived mode of historiography and onto a particularly rigid strand of utilitarian thinking. The result of this philosophical amalgam was a ponderous narrative now infamous for its disparaging comments about the ‘rude nations’ of the world, and a work of purportedly ‘standard’, ‘canonical’ or ‘hegemonic’ status, often being assigned the position as the single most important work in the historiography of South Asia. The ambivalence running through the History is a result of its ‘rude’ subject matter combined with the difficulty of aligning this rudeness with Mill's aim of providing the world with utilitarian knowledge, for it seems that Mill himself considered the work, along with its subject matter, regrettably inutile. The History was a book that need not have been written and a work of limited utility, for it could, in the eyes of its own author, only teach about the rude people of India. Mill offered the History as a ‘service’ to spare the utility of future generations, encompassing everything one could need to know about India ‘once and for all’. In carrying out this service, Mill established many of the ideological and textual underpinnings for the British civilizing mission, which was still inchoate when the History was first published in 1817.

This chapter portrays the Indian politician Chaudhary Ajit Singh. Three times a minister of cabinet rank, Ajit Singh is the founder of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), a party which won five seats in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections after receiving about 1.8 million votes. Ajit Singh is the son of – s/o – Chaudhary Charan Singh who in 1979 briefly rose to become the Prime Minister of India. The political base of both father and son lies in the irrigated farmlands in and around the Baghpat parliamentary constituency in Western Uttar Pradesh (UP), an area dominated by the Jat caste to which the family also belongs. The Jats (as well as some other castes in the area) nurture certain egalitarian values such as clan equality (Madsen 1991), which do not easily allow a headman to exercise uncontested ‘monarchical’ power over his castefellows. Power is typically hotly contested and villages are often divided into warring factions of roughly equal strength. The area is also known for the absence of landlordism. It was Charan Singh himself who was instrumental in abolishing the landlordism which concentrated economic and political power in a few families. Yet, Charan Singh and Ajit Singh have succeeded in mustering sufficient support from Jats and from others to be repeatedly elected. Charan Singh first stood for provincial elections in Baghpat in 1937. After he left provincial politics in the mid-1960, he won the Baghpat parliamentary seat in 1977, 1980, and 1984.

When discussing the attitude that the Government of India should take to the Hindu Child Marriage Restraint Bill, proposed by Rai Sahib Harbilas Sarda in February 1927, Home Member Sir James Crerar commented that they should regulate child marriage through a Government measure, rather than a Private Member's Bill, because ‘Governments are invariably held responsible in the end for all legislation, whether they have promoted it themselves or merely acquiesced in it. If any odium is incurred it will inevitably fall on the Government and we may as well have the merit’. Crerar's remarks epitomize the ambivalent relationship between colonial state and social reform in early twentieth century India, encapsulating both the desire to legitimize imperialism through ‘improvement’, and the need to reconcile, and even subordinate, reformist projects to political expediencies. Such tensions between justificatory discourses and pragmatic considerations shaped the colonial state's engagement with social reform in the nationalist era; Sarda's Bill existed at an ideological intersection between emergent discourses of Indian nationalism, colonialism as ‘civilizing mission’ and the survival strategies of a colonial state under growing social and political pressure. Its history reflects the ambivalent role of the colonial state as it attempted to mediate impulses for and against reform, from Indian society, the international community and its own regional representatives. The result was a more complex colonial engagement with social change than is usually allowed in the dichotomy of reform or reaction that epitomizes traditional and revisionist accounts respectively.

On the Legitimacy of the Civilizing Mission

More than 100,000 Indian soldiers, most of them hailing from the Panjab, fought in Great Britain's army on the battlefields of Belgium and northern France during the Great War of 1914–18, also known as World War I. Along the vast system of trenches criss-crossing Flanders and the Champagne region they were witness to how nations that understood and defined themselves as the most civilized ones of the world waged the most barbaric war that had hitherto been fought on the European continent if not worldwide. However, by far the largest numbers of Indian soldiers, namely more than 600,000, were sent to Mesopotamia to attack and ultimately invade the Ottoman Empire's eastern provinces, which later came to form Iraq. Furthermore, since the ‘Western powers’ regarded the Ottoman Empire to be an ‘Oriental’ state, which was by definition (again according to Western understanding) a despotic regime and for that reason not a part of the world of civilized nations, military campaigns in the ‘East’ did not receive the same attention as did the west-European theatres of war, even though warfare in the former was as gruesome as in the latter.

Despite the disastrous warfare in Mesopotamia killing tens of thousands of Indian soldiers, it was the gruesome war in Europe which deeply influenced the Indian soldiers' perception of European powers, their ‘culture of warfare’ and, more generally, their civilizations.