The Indian Economic and Social History Review

The success of the cryptographic technique during World War II in decoding enemy ciphers holds an enduring impact on archaeologists working on decoding ancient scripts. The conviction to break open any code, in theory, employing scientific methods, mathematical formulae and computers, gives rise to a cryptographic imagination. This epistemological articulation apprehends the ancient script as a military cryptogram that could be cracked through scientific intervention. I examine cryptographic imagination within the decipherment of the Indus Script—the unknown script of the third millennium BCE Indus civilisation in South Asia. I specifically examine the decipherment attempts of the Finnish and the Russian teams during 1960s and 70s. By analysing the Finnish and Russian decipherment attempts, I argue that cryptographic imagination involves an epistemological shift of conceptualising unknown archaeological script from an epigraphic representation to a cryptographic code.

Despite the centralised nature of the fiscal system in colonial India, public education expenditures varied dramatically across regions with the western and southern provinces spending three to four times as much as the eastern provinces. A significant portion of the inter-regional difference was due to historical differences in land taxes, an important source of provincial revenues in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The large differences in public spending, however, did not produce comparable differences in enrolment rates or literacy in the colonial period. Nonetheless, public investments influenced the direction of school development and perhaps the long run trajectory of rural literacy.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, multiple and contested interpretations of the practices and scriptures of Islam emerged in north India, as different groupings of faith be-came formalised. Fundamental questions, such as who a Muslim was, were answered differently by each group, based on the exclusion of all other Muslims who did not subscribe to their school of thought. Differences in practice, rituals, faith and even demeanour were emphasised through the vibrant Urdu press. The British, in their efforts to count and classify, used very different set of criteria, which were quite alien to how Muslims appropriated their own sense of authenticity.

During the decade of the 1950s, East Bengal, then a province of Pakistan, saw the emergence of a mass movement in support of the demand for national self–determination of the Bengali people. This movement was primarily led by the politician–preacher maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, who had emerged as the leader of marginalised Bengali peasants in Assam before the Partition of the subcontinent. Though Bhashani initially positioned himself as a Muslim League leader, he actually openly opposed the orientation of other Muslim League politicians. This article discusses the significance of Bhashani’s politics against the background of his training as a theologian and against the background of his ideology of Rabubiyat. It argues that although Bhashani’s was an Islamic world outlook, he vigorously advocated the need for a separation between state rule and people’s religious faiths. Moreover, Bhashani did not just take a stance in favor of secularism, the evidence collected by historians brings out that he personally led the transition to secular politics in the decades that preceded the formation of Bangladesh in 1971.