Boundaries, borderlines, limits on the one hand and rites of passage, contact zones, in-between spaces on the other have attracted renewed interest in a broad variety of cultural discourses after a long period of decenterings and delimitations in numerous fields of social, psychological, and intellectual life. Anthropological dimensions of the subject and its multifarious ways of world-making represent the central challenge among the concerns of the humanities. The role of literature and the arts in the formation of cultural and personal identities, theoretical and political approaches to the relation between self and other, the familiar and the foreign, have become key issues in literary and cultural studies; forms of expressivity and expression and question of mediation as well as new enquiries into ethics have characterized the intellectual energies of the past decade. The aim of Borderlands is to represent a variety of approaches to questions of border crossing and boundary transgression; approaches from different angles and different disciplines, but all converging in their own way on the post-colonial paradigm. Topics discussed include globalization, cartography and ontology, transitional identity, ecocritical sensibility, questions of the application of post-coloniality, gender and sexuality, and attitudes towards space and place. As well as studies of the cinema of the settler colonies, the films of Neil Jordan, and 'Othering' in Canadian sports journalism, there are treatments of the Nigerian novel, South African prison memoirs, and African women's writing. Authors examined include Elizabeth Bowen, Bruce Chatwin, Mohamed Choukri, Nuruddin Farah, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

This pioneering work traces migration of Indian traders to Russia, Iran, West Asia and South-East Asia in medieval times. Four essays throw light on the activities of the Indian business community in Russia. Generally Indians came to Russia via Iran. There they took a boat, crossed the Caspian Sea and reached the Russian port of Astrakhan. Indian visitors included Hindus (including Jains), Muslims, Christians, Parsis among others. Hindus constituted the largest segment of the migrants. They became an object of local curiosity because of their rituals and social practices. They also became an object of jealousy. Indians did not enjoy political and administrative support as the European East India Companies did. Occasionally local rulers consulted them and sought their advice. Three essays deal with Indian traders in Iran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One essay discusses trade between India and Iran in the fifteenth century. There are papers discussing activities of Indian traders in West Asia, Yemen and South East Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conclusion focuses on Indian merchants and the Indian Ocean in medieval times. The author concludes that Indian traders did not enjoy political and royal support, essential for success. He also affirms that crossing the seas did not lead to social boycott by their caste-men. This taboo came much later, probably with the advent of British rule in the nineteenth century.

Polycoloniality is a study of the activities of non-British European powers and players - primarily the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the 'Germans' (representatives of the Austrian and Prussian empires), the Swedish and the Greek - in Bengal from the late 13th to the early 19th century, and their role in shaping Bengal's brush with 'colonial modernity' prior to, and possibly more foundationally than, the English. Much of the traditional historiography of colonialism, in South Asia in general and Bengal in particular, and the resultant postcolonial commonsense, is woefully mononational, with the focus being almost exclusively on England and its colonial exploits. This is obviously factually incorrect and inadequate, with the multiple European nations named above having had simultaneous colonial contact with Bengal from the 16th century, and there having been a steady flow of Europeans, primarily Italians, to Bengal from at least the late 13th century. More importantly, it is these multiple European players, rather than the English, who can be credited with the setting up of the first cosmopolitan cities in Bengal, its first colleges and universities, the beginnings of print culture in Bengali, the foundations of the modern linguistic, literary and cultural registers of Bengal, the first instances of social and political reforms, etc. Apart from an elaboration of all the above, can Polycoloniality, or a re-look at Bengal's colonial history through the lens of plurality, also offer a template to understand the multinational forms of current new-imperialism more fittingly than postcolonial commonsense can?

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skilfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasising the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fuelled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.

The global operations of the East India Companies were profoundly shaped by European perceptions of foreign lands. Providing a cultural perspective absent from existing economic and institutional histories, Ethnography and Encounter is the first book to systematically explore how Company agents’ understandings of and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies informed institutional approaches to trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance. Its fine-grained comparisons of Dutch and English activities in seventeenth-century South Asia show how corporate ethnography was produced, how it underpinned given modes of conduct, and how it illuminates connections across space and time. Ethnography and Encounter identifies deep commonalities between Dutch and English discourses and practices, their indebtedness to pan-European ethnographic traditions, and their centrality to wider histories of European expansion.