With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe thewest has been confronted with the existence ofseveral, little-understood Muslim ethnic groups inthis region whose contested histories can be tracedback to the Ottoman period and beyond. Previouslyoverlooked Muslim ethnies, such as the BulgarianTurks, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Kosovars, Chechens, andCrimean Tatars, have begun to receive considerableattention from both western scholars and the generalpublic. Much of the interest revolves around thequestion of the identity of these Muslim communitiesand the history of their formation as distinctethnic groups. The history of the formation of thesegroups has in many cases been contested terrain asBulgarian authorities, for example, attempted in the1980s to prove that the Bulgarian Turks wereactually “Turkified Bulgarians”, as the Greekgovernment sought to demonstrate that the Pomaks(Slavic Muslims) were actually Islamicized Greeks,and as Bosniaks were labelled “Turks” by theirSerbian nationalist foes in spite of their Slavicbackground.

The revised text of the Charles Beckingham MemorialLecture, Ibn Battūta and the Mongols, delivered tothe Royal Asiatic Society on 13th January 2000 by D.O. Morgan.

This article provides, for the first time, a detailedand authentic account of the genesis and planning ofthe Somali Expedition, derived from previouslyunresearched documents in the Oriental and IndiaOffice Collections of the British Library, andsupplemented by material from the archives of theRoyal Geographical Society. The author has sought togive the subject a wider historical perspective thanthat provided by Burton, by including details fromthe works of earlier travellers in the north-eastregion of Africa such as James Bruce, Lord Valentia,and Henry Salt, which, to a greater or lesserdegree, have a bearing on Somalia. He has alsotouched on the ‘Eastern Question’, especially withregard to Muhammed Ali's territorial ambitions inArabia, which was an important factor in the Britishdecision to annex Aden in 1839, leading inevitablyto the development of an important relationship,both commercial and strategic, with the Somali coastacross the Gulf.

The article examines the material relating to the earlyreception of the eighteenth century Hindi poetĀnandghan (Ghanānand). Ānandghan's poetic ideas werenot far from those expressed in Persian literature,popular at that time in India. Apart from anabundance of idiomatic usage and paradoxes hisapproach to love reflects his taste for Persianpoetry: the beloved can be either a woman or anundefined God, or even Krishna. Ānandghan's‘openness’ towards Persian poetry earned himdisrepute. In this article three early schools ofcriticism of his quatrains are distinguished: thoseof his opponents, of his fellow-devotees and ofBrajnāth, the secular connoisseur. All three partiesexpressed their views on Ānandghan through poetrysometimes employing bitter or pungent language.

The article offers a survey of religious contactsmaintained between Tibet and Russian Buddhists, theethnic Buryats and Kalmyks, from the late 19th C. tothe 1930s. Chronologically, the story falls into twoparts, the dividing point being the Bolshevikrevolution of 1917. The focus in the first portionis on the Russian Buddhist colony in Lhasa centredaround the Gomang Datsang (school) of the Drepungmonastery, its emergence and growth in the early20th C., in the wake of Russo-Tibetanrapprochement brought about by aBuryat scholar-monk and adviser of the 13th DalaiLama, Agvan Dorjiev. The tsarist government tried touse their Buddhist connection with Lhasa topolitical ends – in January 1904, shortly after thebeginning of the British military invasion of Tibet,they sent a secret Kalmyk reconnaissance mission toLhasa under a Cossack subaltern, Naran Ulanov,assisted by a cleric (bakshi) DamboUlianov. The latter part of the article concentrateson the dramatic post-revolutionary period. It beginswith the story of the Kalmyk refugees in Turkey andtheir abortive attempt to emigrate to Tibet. There'salso a detailed discussion of the endeavours bySoviet leaders to win the Dalai Lama over, byemploying the loyal Buryats and Kalmyks for theirsecret missions to the Potala. The key figuresbehind this scheme were the Soviet foreign minister,G. V. Chicherin, and the same Agvan Dorjiev, posingas the Dalai Lama's representative in the USSR. As aresult of the Bolshevik propaganda, many of theBuryat and Kalmyk residents in Lhasa began to returnto their homeland in the 1920s. The crackdown onBuddhism in Soviet Russia put an end to theMoscow–Lhasa political dialogue. Hence allconnections between the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhistsand their religious “Mecca” were deliberately cut bythe Soviet authorities by 1930.

The article details the events and themes surrounding astrike and riot that transpired in colonial Bombayin 1832, led by a segment of the Parsi community andjoined by other Indians, in reaction to the Britishcull of stray pariah dogs in the streets. The strikeand riot demonstrated the commercial power of theParsis to disrupt the daily routine of Bombay andexert their influence in hostility to colonialinterference and incursions against Parsi (Indian)religious sensibilities. The Bombay dog riots of1832 exposed the vulnerability of earlyBritish-Indian socio-political relations in Bombayand Western India in the face of populardisturbances against British authority and was inmarked contrast to the state of Parsi-Britishrelations that developed in the nineteenth century,as the Parsis led the process of Indianaccommodation to British rule, tempered only byovert threats to their religious identity.

The campaign against thuggee in 1830s India produced aset of widely-circulated accounts of the origins andpractices of thugs. In these works (both popular andscholarly), a very small amount of primaryinformation was continually recycled throughout thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. The changesvisible in the manner of deployment of thisinformation are indicative of progressivere-formulations of the narrative of the history ofthuggee, and the larger history of British India.This process is examined through a study of theincorporation of an extract from The Travelsof M de Thévenot into the Levant into thehistorical archive, which concludes that anyre-appraisal of history must incorporate aconsideration of the narrative underlying theproduction of the records, as well as the recordsthemselves.

The Pudu Mandapa (‘New Hall’) in Madurai is one of thebest-known monuments from the Nayaka period ofTamilnadu (c. 1550–1700). It was built around 1630under the patronage of Tirumala Nayaka as a majoraddition to the Minaksi-Sundaresvara temple complexthat dominates the centre of this major Tamil townand Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Pudu Mandapa iswell known in the West from the aquatint produced byThomas and William Daniell, but this is only one ofnumerous other illustrations by Western and Indianartists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury of this single Tamil temple structure. Adiscussion of the Pudu Mandapa as an example of amajor architectural type, the festivalmandapa, is followed by anexamination of the structure's architecturalsculpture. The final section discusses the RoyalAsiatic Society's collection of drawings of thismandapa and the Europeandocumentation of the south Indian temple moregenerally.

Hugh Clifford has been described as “one of the mostunusual colonial governors in British history”.Widely regarded as the “doyen of the colonialservice”, Clifford held successive governorships inthe Gold Coast, Nigeria, Ceylon, and the StraitsSettlements. As a writer of novels, short stories,and reminiscences, moreover, he enjoyed a successfulliterary career; he moved in literary circles andcounted Joseph Conrad among his particular friends.Clifford's inspiration was drawn almost exclusivelyfrom his experiences in Malaya, the territory wherehe not only started his career in the early 1880s,but also ended it in tragic circumstances nearlyfifty years later. Throughout his Malayan careerClifford came into frequent contact with Malaya'sruling families. “To act the part of officer inattendance upon Malayan royalties is a task withwhich circumstances have familiarised me”, hedeclared in “Piloting Princes”, a 1902 contributionto Blackwood's Magazine. Hisattitude towards them ranged from disgust andcondemnation, to admiration and a paternalisticconcern for their dignity and survival. UnravellingClifford's complex, and apparently contradictory,relationship with Malay royalty will be the subjectof this article.

The Buddhist saints, that are the subject of thisarticle, are known from a series of inscribedreliquaries collected by Alexander Cunningham and F.C. Maisey at Sanchi and neighbouring sites incentral India. The inscriptions, dating to thecirca early first century BC,have been known since readings of them were firstpublished the mid-nineteenth century. The detailedre-examination of the records presented in thisarticle shows that the reliquary inscriptions givespecial prominence to five Buddhist saints. Thenames given correspond to the five missionaries who,according to Pali sources, were sent to theHimalayan region at the time of the Third Council inthe mid-third century BC. This indicates that (a)the Hemavata school was responsible for there-vitalization of Sanchi in the post-Mauryan periodand (b) that there was a well-established traditionabout the nature of the Third Council in the firstcentury BC.

The previously unpublished text of a letter written byJohn Osterwick in Hirado to Richard Fursland,President of the Council of Defence, around the endof September 1621. Its value lies in the detailwhich it provides of the state of the English EastIndia Company's factory in Japan, eight years afterit was established and two years before itclosed.