Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 2001"

Masyarakat adat, difference, and the limits of recognition in Indonesia's forest zone

Abstract: This statement was made by AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara), the Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago, at their inaugural congress in Jakarta, March 1999. The congress was organized by a consortium of Jakarta-based NGOs, and funded by international donors (USAID, CUSO, and OXFAM among others). Building upon a process of mobilization that began with the International Year of Indigenous People in 1993, the Congress marked the formal entry of masyarakat adat (literally, people who adhere to customary ways) as one of several groups staking claims and seeking to redefine its place in the Indonesian nation as the political scene opened up after Suharto's long and repressive rule. AMAN and its supporters assert cultural distinctiveness as the grounds for securing rights to territories and resources threatened by forestry, plantation and mining interests backed by police and military intimidation. Their attempt to place the problems of masyarakat adat on the political agenda has been remarkably successful. While seven years ago the head of the national land agency declared that the category masyarakat adat, which had some significance in colonial law, was defunct or withering away (Kisbandono 18/o02/93), the term now appears ever more frequently in the discourse of activists, parliamentarians, media, and government officials dealing with forest and land issues. The official view in Indonesia, at least until recently, was that the international legal category 'indigenous people' did not fit Indo

Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia

Abstract: A system should be formed, which shall preserve as much as possible can be done, their institutions and laws to the natives of Hindoostan, and attemper them with the mild spirit of British government.—John BruceJurisprudence is the nexus where authoritative texts, cultural assumptions, and political expediency come together during a crisis. It is therefore not so much a thing or a system as it is an experience, an interpretative experience. Yet the practice of jurisprudence is very different from other types of interpretation because it is also an exertion of power. A legal interpretation is a decision which mobilizes coercive forces to immediately solidify the interpretation into a social reality. The administrative structure of courts and the legal rhetoric that flows through them disguise jurisprudence as ‘a system’ rather than revealing its nature as an interpretative experience; this disguise serves to heighten the authority of these exercises of power and to limit the ability to contest them to specialists.

Ankalu's Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh

Abstract: The Man with the Brief-case I once met a man with a brief case on a train . . . I forget between where and where. If you have travelled by train in India you may have met him too. He is conscious of cultural difference and wishes you to understand that Indians have family values - on account of which they don't go in for divorce or extra-marital sex. It was possibly he who first told me (though I have read it somewhere since) that actuarial calculations reveal that one in three marriages in Britain, and one in two in the United States, is destined to end in divorce. I find his contrast confirmed in a scholarly study of the subject. By comparison with its ‘alarming rate’ in the West, ‘divorce was unknown to the Hindu institution of marriage. Husband and wife were bound to each other not only in this life, but even in the lives to follow’ (Pothen 1986: ix).

Courting Legitimacy or Delegitimizing Custom? Sexuality, Sambandham, and Marriage Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Malabar

Abstract: At an interview which Della Vella [seventeenth century] had with the Zamorin, [the Samudiri or the ruler of Calicut] there were present two little princesses of the Royal house aged 12 years each; and of them he says, ‘they were all naked (as I said above the women generally go) saving that they had a very small blue cloth wrapped about their immodesties. One of them being more forward could not contain, but approaching gently towards me, almost touched the sleeve of my coat with her hand, made a sign of wonder to her sister, how could we go so wrapped up and entangled in clothes. Such is the power of custom that their going naked seemed no more strange to us, than our being clothed appeared extravagant to them.’K. P. Padmanabha Menon

The technology of sanitation in colonial Delhi.

Abstract: I. Sewage Under CapitalismThe preservation of the wealth and welfare of nations, and advances in culture and civilisation depend on how the sewage question is resolved.(von Liebig, 1850s).Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’, merchandised it, revenue it, and spoiled it all. (Emily Eden, 1838).Veena Oldenburg argues that after the Rebellion of 1857 British colonial officials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following three imperatives: safety, sanitation and loyalty. To make the cities of India safe, clean and loyal, the colonial regime exerted a measure of ‘social control . . . In an era when tinkering with the structure of society had been officially and unambiguously forsworn.’. If the highest offices of the colonial regime proclaimed its remove from society, she argues, the ‘lowest levels of decision making and action’, intruded effectively to reconstruct the social fabric of urban life. In this essay, we will examine this lowest level of the colonial regime in the local government of Delhi (the Delhi Municipal Corporation [DMC], the commissioner's office, the army, the Public Works Department [PWD], the railway officials) and its relations with the local nobility (the rais and amirs), the merchants, and working people.

The Effect of Government Policy and Institutions on Chinese Overseas Acculturation: The Case of Malaysia

Abstract: This work looks at how Malaysia's political institutions and policies have constrained Chinese acculturation with the dominant Malay population. Particular attention is paid to the nature of electoral institutions; such as the ethnic party structure, the apportionment of electoral districts, and the debate over Malaysia's education system. These political institutions, and not just the coercive apparatus of the state, coupled with the way the Constitution defines a person as 'Malay', effectively maintain a distinct boundary between who is Malay and who is Chinese or Indian. Ethnic categorization in Malaysia has, in the past, masked equally wide divisions between classes. More recent efforts at creating a 'Malaysian' national identity may clash with a political structure still largely organized by ethnicity, and may bring these other fissures to the forefront. Chinese in Malaysia have long been a dynamic economic force, and since they make up close to 30% of the population, they have long been perceived as a political threat to the indigenous Malays. The Malay peninsula has always been ethnically mixed, with indigenous and Malay inhabitants. Chinese and Indian immigrants began coming to the area in large numbers in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and after the Second World War strong identities emerged as people begin to think of themselves not just in relation to the colonial rulers but as Malay, Chinese, or Indian. Ethnic fea

Who was Mr Democracy? The May Fourth Discourse of Populist Democracy and the Radicalization of Chinese Intellectuals (1915-1922)

Abstract: Democracy is a symbol of the May Fourth era, and one of the two cores of the so-called ‘May Fourth spirit’ that generations of Chinese liberal intellectuals energetically want to carry forward in order to promote the liberal develop ment of democratization in China. In an essay published in January 1919 to celebrate the third anniversary of the publication of Xin Qingnian (New Youth), Chen Duxiu, one of the intellectual leaders of the New Culture Movement, respectfully gave democracy and science the nicknames ‘Mr Democracy’ (de xiansheng) and ‘Mr Science’ (sai xiansheng), and proclaimed that ‘only these two gentlemen can save China from the political, moral, academic, and intellectual darkness in which it finds itself’.Chen Duxiu, ‘Xin qingnian zuian zhi dabianshu’ (New Youth's reply to charges against the magazine), Xin Qingnian (New Youth): (hereafter cited as XQN), Vol. 6, No. 1 (15 Jan. 1919), pp. 10-11. Seven decades later, on the eve of the People's Movement on the Tiananmen square in spring 1989, many Chinese intellectuals published enormous essays or articles on the legacies of the ‘May Fourth spirit’, challenging the official monopoly over the power of historical interpretation.For more details about the ideological struggle for the historical interpretation of the May Fourth spirit between official historians and liberal intellectuals, see Gu Xin, Zhongguo Qimeng de Lishi Tujing (Historical Image of the Chinese Enlightenment) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1992). One of the major themes in these essays or articles was the appeal to the young generation of Chinese intellectuals to strive for liberty, democracy, and science by inheriting the ‘May Fourth spirit’.

Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India

Abstract: This paper investigates the late colonial origins of Home Science in British India. It deals most intensively with the institutionalization of Home Science in Madras Presidency and attends to the roles played by both the colonial state and Indian women's organizations in its establishment. Though the focus is on Madras because the efforts of those based there influenced the later course of Home Science education, the activities of Madras educators, policy makers and reformers are also situated within a wider frame of transregional and imperial relations forged through reform projects, missionization, travel and education. Consideration of Home Science education in this wider context reveals the socio-political constraints an opportunities of, as well as the ideological interests at work in, its establishment. The paper finds that, at its inception, Home Science was the product of strategic alliances among colonial authorities, Indian social reformers, and Indian nationalists — all of whom, despite other differences, considered the home a site of and symbol for nationalist modernity. Home Science is shown to have relied on and helped shape a set of discourses that can be deemed ‘feminist nationalist’ in that they were engaged dialectically with anti-colonial nationalisms and with internationalist feminisms. Using Home Science as a lens, this paper provides a window on a set of late colonial debates that, informed by nationalist struggles and goals, sought to reshape the meaning and scope of both female agency and domesticity.

Overseas Chinese Merchants and Multiple Nationality: A Means for Reducing Commercial Risk (1895-1935)

Abstract: The existing literature has examined the Chinese nationalism of Chinese overseas merchants, detailing their financial contributions to the anti-Japanese war and their participation in boycott movements ofJapanese goods.' This paper uses Japanese consular reports, prewarJapanese publications, as well as Chinese andJapanese newspapers from Taiwan, Fujian,Japan, Singapore, and the United States to study the adoption of multiple nationalities, including Japanese nationality, by overseas Chinese merchants to reduce commercial risk and seek out economic opportunity. The phenomenon suggests that overseas Chinese merchants were not simply agents of Chinese nationalism. This paper first examines the Indonesian overseas Chinese merchant, Guo Chunyang (1859 to 1935). It then turns to the widespread adoption of multiple nationalities by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and in their chief native province, Fujian, in the early twentieth century. The paper will then proceed to elaborate the use of multiple nationality to diminish commercial risk and seek economic opportunity. The conclusion will draw out implications for our

Contesting State and Civil Society: Southeast Asian Trajectories

Abstract: The spectre of civil society is haunting South East Asia. Witness Manila's ‘People Power’ in 1986, Bangkok's ’No-More-Dictatorship‘ demonstrations in 1992, and, most recently, the Reformasi movements centered on Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 1998. Indeed, these recent waves of popular mobilization have underscored the significance of civil society—as political discourse and social terrain—for the successful launching of challenges against the non-democratic state in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of the political discourse of ‘civil society’, a common claim to spontaneous voluntarism and cross-class universalism was articulated and celebrated in some form by each of the four mobilizational campaigns identified above.

Colonialism, Indigenous Elites and the Transformation of Cities in the Non-Western World: Ahmedabad (Western India), 1890-1947

Abstract: Processes of transformation in cities in the non-western world during the colonial period have often been described as one-way processes through which European colonial regimes restructured the physical and social environments of the cities and established their domination there.Thus, for Anthony King, the transformation in Delhi between the early 19th and the mid 20th centuries was a process whereby the British colonial government installed, apparently at will, particular spatial and physical arrangements in the old city of Delhi and in the region immediately beyond it. For Narayani Gupta, this process had the additional impact of damaging the finely balanced social relationships and social structure of the city which had done so much to enhance the quality of social life there in earlier times. For Veena Oldenburg, the changes in late 19th century Lucknow represented a process by which the government, ‘guided by a ruthless concern for the security and well-being of its own members and agents’, drastically reorganized the physical space in the city. For Mariam Dossal, again, the changes in late 19th century Bombay were constituted by the drastic restructuring of the landscape, topography and everyday life of the people in the city through the active intervention by the colonial state. The ordinary residents of the city had hardly any voice in those developments. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976); Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires 1803-1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi, 1981); Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (Princeton, 1984); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Bombay, 1991). Rarely have scholars explored the possibility that these processes could have been contested and negotiated and that the indigenous elites of the cities could have appropriated some of the policies of the colonial governments to their advantage, thereby imparting a somewhat different nature to the changes in the cities.Though some works on South Asian cities examined the question of contestation and the attempts at political dominance in the cities by the indigenous elites, they kept the description of these contestations limited mostly to the sphere of electoral and representational politics. None of them took up the question of contestation by the indigenous elites (or, for that matter, by other social groups) in the field of spatial reorganization in the cities or dealt with the cities as lived and build environments. Examples of such works are, Kenneth Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, 1968); C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1975); Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (New Delhi, 1979); A.D.D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Mod ernising Economy in Bombay, 1918-1933 (New Delhi, 1978); Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: the shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 (Berkeley, 1991). This article seeks to correct this deficiency by showing that the process of change in at least one non-western city, namely, Ahmedabad, a large industrial city in western India, in the first half of the twentieth century, was not a one-way process of the establishment of domination by the colonial government but was instead one where a section of the Indian elites contested the restructuring that the government was carrying out in the city and appropri ated it to bring about their own reorganization of the urban centre. In carrying out the reorganization, the elites also established their political and social hegemony in the urban centre. The article analyses how the Indian elite group brought about the transformation, the nature of the changes fostered and the way in which the process of transformation helped the elite leaders to establish their hegemony in the city.

Courts of law and styles of self in eighteenth-century Madras: from hybrid to colonial self.

Abstract: My concern is public representations of individuals and how these were affected by British East India Company courts, judicial proceedings, and the law in Madras city during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that this was a period of dramatic transformation in self-representation, just as it also was in Company rule. My purpose is to trace the transformation of the manner in which individuals represented themselves and others and what this process reveals about the constitution of Madras society and Company rule before and after the establishment of an independent judiciary at the end of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this paper I seek to demonstrate how the transformation of East India Company courts of judicature from interested courts, strictly controlled by the Company, to independent courts is associated with changes that greatly affected the manner in which individuals-both British and Indian-thought of themselves and others in Madras city public life. This transformation was of a piece with the establishment of independent judiciaries in England and North America at the time and indicates how Madras too was influenced by these political developments.

Trouble on the Frontier: Dutch-Brooke Relations and Iban Rebellion in the West Borneo Borderlands (1841-86)

Abstract: As European influence expanded in insular Southeast Asia throughout the early modern era, colonial interests shifted from maintaining favorable trade zones along the coasts and rivers to an increasing control of territory and its human populations. The island of Borneo entered the colonial ambit relatively late in this process,Graham Irwin, Nineteenth-Century Borneo: A Study in Diplomatic Rivalry (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). but its eventual division between British and Dutch spheres of influence and control has had profound consequences for the peoples that fell under either. There and elsewhere, territorial boundaries sliced across well-established networks of communication, trade, common traditions, and strong ties of kinship. These boundaries came to impose different symbols of formal status on people from the same ethnic groups. From the colonial perspective, boundaries were designed to function negatively, to restrict what was deemed illegal such as smuggling and migration, and positively, to promote legitimate activities like taxation and road construction. The usual colonial attitude was that borders should be precisely defined, clearly demarcated, jealously guarded, and exclusive. A. I. Asiwaju, ‘The Conceptual Framework’, in A. I. Asiwaju (ed.), Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa's International Boundaries, 1884-1984 (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1985), pp. 1-18 at pp. 2-3; A. I. Asiwaju, Borderlands Research: A Comparative Perspective. Border Perspectives Paper No. 6 (El Paso: University of Texas, Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, 1983), pp. 2-3; S. Whittemore Boggs, International Boundaries: A Study of Boundary Functions and Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 10-11. Yet the people so partitioned routinely defied the border divisions, causing no small amount of worry to the colonial states.

Orality, Literacy and Memorization: Priestly Education in Contemporary South India

Abstract: For the debate on orality, literacy and memorization, India provides some striking evidence. In his comparative analysis of ‘oral aspects of scripture’, Graham gives the Hindu tradition a special place, for the ‘ancient Vedic tradition represents the paradigmatic instance of scripture as spoken, recited word’ (Graham 1987:68). The Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism, have been transmitted orally for three thousand years or more, despite the very early implementation of writing, and it is the Vedas as recited from memory by Brahmans that are alone authoritative. A corollary of the spoken word's primacy is that in teaching the Vedas and other texts, although ‘written texts have been used’, ‘a text without a teacher to teach it directly and orally to a pupil is only so many useless leaves or pages’ (ibid.: 74).

Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive’: Resistance through Mimicked Modernity in Princely Baroda, 1900-1913

Abstract: Current scholarship is replete with the praises of princely Baroda, the ‘ideal and progressive’ state which emerged and prospered under the enlightened rule of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III in the early twentieth century. For example, V. B. Kulkarni notes in his Princely India and Lapse of British Paramountcy that ‘It is . . . enough to end this heart-warming story of wise princely governments by recalling the achievements of Sayajirao of Baroda . . . [in part] because he gave an enlightened government to a chronically-misgoverned state . . .’.

Marriage by Abduction in Twentieth Century China

Abstract: An orthodox marriage in the Chinese traditional system was marked by a complex negotiation between the two families concerning the dowry the bride took with her on marriage and the bride price paid by the groom to the bride's natal family. This protracted form of gift-giving posed a considerable economic burden on both families. For this reason, throughout the imperial period, considerable flexibility was exercised in interpreting what constituted an orthodox marriage in order to allow impecunious families to marry off a daughter or obtain a bride for a son. This study will focus on one such form of marriage, one so ‘deviant’ and ‘primitive’ that it is usually relegated to the dawn of the history of the Han Chinese race or placed in the category of ‘objectionable customs’ (lousu) of the imperial past. I am referring to a form of marriage by abduction, commonly known as qiangqin (seizing the bride), which was prevalent in many areas of China until the 1940s. It is argued here that marriage by abduction should be considered less a ‘primitive’ remnant from China's ancient past than a socially acceptable response to the irrationalities of the dowry/bride-price system, in other words, a local ‘institution’.

Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan: Inoue Nissho and the ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, 1932

Abstract: Less than fifteen months after Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was fatally wounded by the right-wing fanatic Sagoya Tomeo on 14 November 1930, the ‘mysterious priest’ Inoue Nissho orchestrated the Ketsumeidan jiken, or ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, in which the former Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and the Director-General of Mitsui Dan Takuma, were shot and killed, on 9 February and 5 March 1932, respectively. What made the Ketsumeidan Incident all the more shocking in the troubled context of the Depression and the Manchurian Incident was the fact that at one point the terrorists had planned to kill twenty of Japan's political and financial leaders, not just Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma. The grim implications of this bold conspiracy were soon driven home when Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was also gunned down in the 15 May Incident that year.

The Second ‘Women's War’ and the Emergence of Democratic Government in Manipur

Abstract: The night has passed, The whole day has gone, Lady, tie up your hair, The hair so dishevelled: One December 12th has passed, Another December 12th has come. Have you forgotten? Did you believe that your hair could be tied? Did you believe that this day would ever return? (poem by Hijam Irabot) The story of what V. P. Menon euphemistically termed the ‘integration’ of the Indian States has still not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.

Enlightenment and Unity: Language Reformism in Late Qing China

Abstract: modern China. While generations of Chinese intellectuals tirelessly applied themselves to sorting out the linguistic technicalities in devising a Chinese phonetic system, what made language reformor, depending on the perspective taken, revolution'-historically so intriguing was that it had been a fiercely contested domain where a fascinating array of ideological positions was staked and contended. As John de Francis has observed, there had always been 'a significant correlation between attitudes toward social change and attitudes toward linguistic reform in China'.2 Indeed, Qian Xuantong insisted at the height of the May Fourth New Culture Movement that to destroy Confucianism, one must 'first dispose of the Chinese language',3 whereas the Communist-led latinization movement of the 1930s, for its part, was meant to create a medium for the emergence of a true proletarian culture.4 Thus, this article concerns not the technical aspects of transcribing the Chinese language, but specificIt can be argued that any attempt to phonetize Chinese writing, either to supplement or replace the ideograph more than two thousand years old, was revolutionary in and of itself. In this article I use the term 'language reform' in a generic sense, without any specific reference to its radical or conservative nature.

Opposition to the Entry of the Foreign Press in India, 1991-1995: The Hidden Agenda

Abstract: Since 1991, India's courting of foreign investment has been accompanied by protectionist posturing in sensitive sectors like insurance and the media. The tensions in making the shift from a mixed economy to a relatively open and market-oriented economy were evident when the government considered reviewing a ban imposed by Jawaharlal Nehru's government in 1955, and allowing foreign press companies to operate in the country's ‘mind-market’ in 1991. This led to a welter of protest, forcing the government to drop the move. Since foreign media proposals periodically engage government attention and provoke reactions, this is an attempt to take a closer look at the issues involved. This paper will examine the posturing of the Indian elites, the state of the Indian press, the notion of media-cultural imperialism and the legal question of media ownership by foreign nationals. It will conclude with the suggestion that nationalist, cultural and mercantile interests were conflated to run one of the most effective campaigns by the press against the government in recent years. Large sections were animated by genuine concerns, but mercantile interests rode high, and manipulated them to telling effect.

The Way of Efficiency: Ueno Yoichi and Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan

Abstract: The profound influence of American management thought on Japanese industrial practice has generally been considered a postwar phenomenon. Stressing the contributions of Deming, Drucker and other American experts, both popular wisdom and scholarly opinion have embraced the notion that ‘the managerial revolution that occurred in Japan after World War II was made in the United States’. Prewar Japanese management, however, has seldom been figured in terms of American inspiration. Historians have commonly conceived prewar Japanese practice as somehow impervious to American theories and techniques, emphasizing instead the importance of indigenous patterns of familialism, German influences, or a capital-labor dynamic largely detached from external stimuli. Thus, in industrial management—as in so many facets of modern Japanese history—the prewar narrative and the postwar narrative have remained separate and unreconciled. Despite recent interest in establishing a fuller genealogy of Japanese management, the question of how American models could thrive in postwar Japan without a prewar legacy of integration has yet to be answered or even seriously addressed.

Bad Language: The Role of English, Persian and other Esoteric Tongues in the Dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrooke as Resident of Delhi in 1829

Abstract: 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.

American-British Aircraft Competition in South China, 1926-1936

Abstract: In the 1920s and 1930s China was racked by civil strife. Although the Nationalist government was established in Nanking in 1928, it exerted its power only in a small part of China, mainly in the lower Yangtze valley. When the Nanking government endeavored to unify China by force, the local warlords, who strove to maintain their own armies and bases, directed against this central government. Political divisions and tensions persisted between Nanking and the local governments until 1936.

Die for the Boycott and Nation: Martyrdom and the 1905 Anti-American Movement in China

Abstract: On July 16, 1905, an overseas Chinese, Feng Xiawei, committed suicide in front of the American consulate in Shanghai. The impetus for Feng's sacrifice was a labor treaty being negotiated with the United States, which had placed obstacles to the Chinese who would like to go to the United States to make a living. Two months before Feng's suicide, merchants in Shanghai had asked Americans to revise their immigration policy or face a boycott in two months. The Americans showed no sign of yielding. Four days before the deadline, Feng killed himself. This previously unknown individual became a hero in the 1905 boycott movement. For an overview of the boycott movement see Zhang Cunwu, Guangxu sayinian Zhong Mei gongyue fengchao [The Chinese Boycott of American Goods, 1905-1906] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1966); Margaret Field, “The Chinese Boycott of 1905”, Papers on China 11 (1957): 63-98; Edward J. M. Rhoads, ‘Nationalism and Xenophobia in Kwangtung (1905-1906): The Canton Anti-American Boycott and the Lienchow Anti-Missionary Uprising’, Papers on China 16 (1962): 154-97; Delber L. McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900-1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), especially chapter 7; Sin-Kiong Wong, ‘The Genesis of Popular Movements in Modern China: A Study of the Anti-American Boycott of 1905-06’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1995.

A Picture of Health: The Dilemma of Gender and Status in the Iconography of Empire, India c. 1805

Abstract: This article provides a commentary on a painting entitled Dancing Girls, Madras, c. 1805, by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey shown in an exhibition of privately owned works from East Anglia at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 18 May-1 August 1999, entitled, ‘In the Public Eye’ (Catalogue No. 95) fig. 1.

Opponents of Appeasement: Western-educated Chinese Diplomats and Intellectuals and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1932-37

Abstract: Many years ago, the eminent historian Gordon A. Craig wrote: ‘One of the recurring themes in those books on the diplomatic pre-history of the Second World War which have come to us from the former enemy countries is the plight of the professional diplomat, whose training and knowledge convinced him that the policy of his government was leading straight to disaster but whose advice was seldom solicited and never followed.’ Craig went on to show that this pattern of ‘the neglect and abuse of the resources of expert diplomacy’ occurred in the democratic countries of the time. Professional Chinese diplomats (and intellectuals) fared little better than their counterparts, democratic or totalitarian, in the 1930s when their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, pursued a policy of appeasement toward Japan. Chiang's appeasement policy, or what some have referred to as a policy of accommodation or gradualism, has received much treatment from historians.

The Erotics of Moonlight and other Connotations in Modern Hindi Literature

Abstract: As explained by Abrams (1971:32-3), a connotation is ‘the range of secondary or accompanying meanings’ which a word ‘commonly suggests or implies’. The word ‘home’, for example, connotes ‘privacy, intimacy, and coziness’. Which exact secondary meaning from among the range is evoked ‘depends on the particular context in which (the word) is used’. Connotations play an important role in interpreting different types of texts, as shown by Abrams and others.For example, Fowler (1989:80-3); Schulte-Sasse and Werner (1977:90-109). For example, when in fiction events or their setting or atmosphere are presented the way they are perceived by a character, the connotations involved in such observations may well inform the reader about the feelings and values fostered by the character concerned, and thus contribute to an interpretation of the text.

Mamul and modernity in a South Indian temple

Abstract: In the first week of January 1951, the Raja of Ettaiyapuram was combating the forces of modernity on three fronts. In Madras High Court, he was filing a writ petition questioning the legality of the Madras Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act of 1948, which came into force on 3 January and authorized the government to take over his zamindari estate. Zamindar of Ettayapuram v. The State of Madras , Civil Miscellaneous Petition no. 13388 of 1950. Simultaneously, Tirunelveli District Court was hearing a case brought in his capacity as hereditary Trustee of Kalugumalai Devastanam, seeking to prevent the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Board from assuming administrative control of the temple and appointing one of its employees as Executive Officer. Zamindar of Ettayaparum vs. Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Board , Original Suit 22 of 1949, later Appeal Suit No. 462 of 1951 in Madras High Court. The ‘Devastanam’ is the administrative organization of the temple. Meanwhile, he had two further law-suits pending in Kovilpatti Munsif's Court, questioning the authority of the newly-formed Kalugumalai Panchayat Board on the grounds that the entire town was temple property. O.S. No. 252 and O.S. 253 of 1950.