Suchergebnisse

Most of the papers presented at the conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, held at University of Western Sydney in July 2012

One of the most intriguing questions in the modern history of North India is why the Muslims of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, and referred to hereafter as U.P.; see Map 1) supported the demand for Pakistan when it was obvious that if they were successful they would have either to remain in a Hindu dominated India, or suffer the upheaval of migration. In recent years Paul Brass and Francis Robinson have debated the general question of Muslim separatism in U.P., taking positions which Brass has described, respectively, as 'instrumentalist' and 'primordialist'. Brass argues that the Muslims were modernizing at a faster rate than Hindus, that they had a larger share of government jobs than their fourteen percent of the population would warrant, that Muslim politicians erected a myth of 'the backward Muslim' to protect this privilege, and then selected communally divisive symbols to mobilize support for their own drive to power. In short, the 'instrumentalist' position argues the autonomy of the 'game of symbol selection' on the part of the politicians, and therefore of the significance of symbol response on the part of those who supported the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. Robinson, on the other hand, first disagrees that the backwardness of the Muslims was a myth, especially relative to the role they perceived they had played in U.P. society for many centuries, and secondly, he seeks to demonstrate that the religious and cultural assumptions of the Muslim political leaders shaped and directed their actions.

The last major bastions of dynastic rule exist among the Muslim states of the Middle East. In the last thirty years, as they have emerged from under the "protective" umbrella of European domination, the rulers of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States have attempted to maintain their personal control while coping with problems, on the one hand of unstable external conditions, and on the other of the pursuit of economic and administrative modernization. Their successes and, more recently, their failures, have held the attention of the world. In some ways their predicament represents a more acute aspect of the problem confronting some of the Indian princes in the 1930s when, as British dominance in the subcontinent was increasingly challenged by the Indian National Congress, they attempted to lead their states on the first halting steps towards modernity.

Stature can be a useful indicator of living standards, particularly when income and wage data are scarce or of poor quality, as is often the case for undeveloped rural economies with large self-employed sectors. This study shows that Indian height data provide some supporting evidence for widening inequality in the initial phase of the development process. This corresponds to the more contentious part of the "Inverted U" hypothesis, which asserts that income inequality initially increases, then declines, during the development process.

This paper investigates the statistical association between teenage births and the physical growth path of these mothers. It draws on data on the height of ever-married women aged 15–49 and their birth histories collected in India's National Family Health Survey in 1998–99, and shows that there was a negative relationship between final adult height of women and the number of births they had as teenagers. Using multiple regression analysis, it is shown that this negative relationship is robust to confounding factors such as standard of living, urban–rural residence, state of origin in India and age of the women.

In 1829, at the height of Lord William Bentinck's regime of reform, a keen
young civil servant in north India took on
one of the last of the Company's nabobs and won. It was a clash of a new
style of Haileybury civilian with an old
Company servant which remarkably prefigured the personal and philosophical
dynamics of the Anglicist-Orientalist
education debate a few years later. Sir Edward Colebrooke, Bt, was Resident
of Delhi, 67 years old and nearly 50
years in the East India Company's service. His youthful adversary was his
own first assistant, Charles Edward Trevelyan, aged 22 and, in Sir Edward's
words, 'a Boy just escaped from school'. In June 1829 Trevelyan charged
Colebrooke with corruption, and despite being cut by many of Delhi's
European residents, saw the prosecution through
to its conclusion some six months later when the Governor-General in Council
was pleased to order Colebrooke's
suspension from the service, a sentence ultimately confirmed by the Court of
Directors.