Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 2002"
TL;DR: In the late 1860s, the colonial state received a petition signed by Keshub Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj to legislate for marriages amongst their members, such that they could freely marry according to their "rites of conscience".
Abstract: In the late 1860s, the colonial state received a petition signed by Keshub Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj to legislate for marriages amongst their members, such that they could freely marry according to their ‘rites of conscience’. Paying little attention to the specific demands and circumstances of the Keshubite petition, the Governor General's Legislative Council began to consider the introduction of a civil marriage law for all Indians, so that those choosing to dissent from the religious practices of their marriage rites could find state sanction for their acts even if they were disowned by their families, castes or ethno-religious communities. The debate that followed the publication of this intention, presented ‘native’ society in a state of anxious turmoil, eager to represent itself as both morally and culturally superior in matters of marriage and kinship relations as opposed to the degenerate ‘Europeans’. Using archival petitions from Indians appealing against the legislation of the first civil marriage law in the late nineteenth century (‘Act III of 1872’), in this paper I detail some of the ways in which love-marriage couples have historically come to inhabit a social space of extreme moral ambivalence. Despite the enormous significance of this nineteenth-century debate, as well as the importance of civil marriage legislation in a country with contradictory and conflicting ‘personal laws’, there has been virtually no academic work (historical or anthropological) that addresses the import of ‘Act III of 1872’ and its legacy to post-independence India. However, the law for civil marriage was nonetheless passed (albeit in a truncated form), thus opening up a theoretical space within which any two Indians could legitimately marry out of choice and love rather than by the dictates of ‘birth’.
76 citations
TL;DR: The Bhadralok of Calcutta, Theosophists of Madras and the peranakan (local born) Chinese reformers of Singapore shared similar concerns for reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: During the latter part of the nineteenth century and until after the First World War the imperial cities of the Indian Ocean became thriving centres for cultural exchange and intellectual debate. Entrepots like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state. Learned elites drawn from the ranks of civil servants, company clerks, doctors, teachers, public inspectors, communications workers, merchants, bankers and (above all) from the legal profession began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves in discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic. The Bhadralok of Calcutta, the Theosophists of Madras and the peranakan (local born) Chinese reformers of Singapore, to name but three of these groups, shared similar concerns for reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. Associational life and journalism flourished in this environment, both in the bureaucratic centres of the British Empire and beyond, in such places as the Dutch port of Batavia and French-administered Saigon, to such an extent that one can fairly speak of a transformation in the public sphere across the Indian Ocean region.
48 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take a fresh look at the massive report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895, which is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire and display the cultural tensions and conflicts negotiated between British colonizers and Indian colonized subjects.
Abstract: The primary aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the massive report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895. This document is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire. In it we see displayed the cultural tensions and conflicts negotiated between British colonizers and Indian colonized subjects.The author is indebted to Richard Newman for suggesting that the Royal Commission
on Opium deserves reappraisal.Opium, like colonialism, is a sensitive and charged issue. The question of mood-altering drugs—opium, alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, among others—is always fraught. Each society and culture is convinced that its own drugs of choice are normal and natural; and that those of other societies are depraved and unnatural. Generally each society and culture has drugs of choice that have been assimilated to its cultural practices. The pleasures of these familiar drugs are known; their dangers minimized by taboos and social rituals of consumption, and their damage contained and ignored. Similar adaptations in other cultures are invisible or, if seen, grotesque.
37 citations
TL;DR: In 1947, India's richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe as discussed by the authors, triggered by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland.
Abstract: EventDuring the spring, summer and autumn of 1947 India's richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe. The trigger for the catastrophe was Britain's parting gift to its Indian subjects of partition. Confronted by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland—Pakistan—a campaign which since 1946 had turned increasingly violent, the British government early in 1947 accepted viceroy Lord Mountbatten's advice that partition was necessary to arrest the country's descent into civil war. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi notably excepted, the leadership of the Congress party came gradually and reluctantly to the same conclusion. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru's deputy, likened it to the cutting off of a diseased limb. But in accepting the ‘logic’ of the League's ‘two-nation’ theory, the British applied it remorselessly. They insisted that partition would have to follow the lines of religious affiliation, not the boundaries of provinces. In 1947 League president Muhammad Ali Jinnah was forced to accept what he had contemptuously dismissed in 1944 as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, a Pakistan bereft of something like half of Bengal and the Punjab and most of Assam.
28 citations
TL;DR: The first Dutch East India Company (VOC) embassy to Taiwan was held in 1655-1657 as discussed by the authors, where the Dutch used a fortified settlement on the island of Taiwan as the next best thing to a mainland base.
Abstract: As early as 1613, the leadership of the Dutch East India Company [VOC] recognized the importance of direct trade with China. Attempts to gain a foothold on the Chinese coast by use of force in the early decades of the century were unsuccessful. Beginning in 1624, the Dutch used a fortified settlement on the island of Taiwan as the next best thing to a mainland base. When their position on Taiwan was threatened in the middle of the century, the VOC directors decided to try to get their mainland trading privileges through diplomacy. Although later embassies have received more extensive scholarly attention, relatively little research has been done into the expectations and strategies of the various parties involved in the first VOC embassy of 1655–1657.
25 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices.
Abstract: This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have emphasized the moral and sexual worries of the British and the aspiring indigenous middle classes, coupled with a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity. In UP too, endeavours were made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine literature, entertainment and the domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, and to forge a respectable, civilized and distinct Hindu cultural and political identity. Less, however, has been said on how a rich variety of literary practices and complexities of cultural imagination were at the same time placing limits upon projections of respectability and homogeneity. As a result, I will argue, there was no single code of Hindu middle-class morality and no final triumph of sexual conservatism in this period. The efficacy of disciplinary power was considerably diluted. Feminists have also pointed out that though women are often victims of violent crimes and aggressive patriarchal displays, the persistent fore-grounding of pain and political correctness marginalizes women's sexual pleasures and desires.
22 citations
TL;DR: The orientalist paradigm has been carried beyond literary analysis into multiple historical disciplines as mentioned in this paper and has attracted fierce historical and historiographical debate over both his theoretical framework and intellectual techniques, while supporters have hailed his work as an emancipatory prototype to transcend the politics of difference.
Abstract: Islam has commanded European attention ever since Muhammad first preached his message of submission to the will of God. Scholars, theologians, travellers, politicians and theorists have produced a multiplicity of judgements on Islam as religious, political, cultural, social, economic, military and historical phenomenon, and continue to do so in the present. In 1978, Edward Said proposed a new historical paradigm for understanding post-Enlightenment Western conceptions of Islam, whereby orientalist ideology provided 'a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience'. 'Orientalism', once simply the academic study of 'the East', was thus defined as a composite set of Western methods for dominating the Orient.' Said's challenge to the Western humanist tradition has provoked fierce historical and historiographical debate over both his theoretical framework and intellectual techniques. His opponents have condemned his binary discourse as ahistorical and monolithic, accused him of imprecise analysis and narrow literary focus, and pointed out theoretical inconsistencies, while supporters have hailed his work as an emancipatory prototype to transcend 'the politics of difference'.2 As a result, the orientalist paradigm has been carried beyond literary analysis into multiple historical disciplines.
22 citations
TL;DR: Benares College as discussed by the authors was built by Major Kittoe, who designed a high Gothic style with high vaulted ceilings and a large stained glass window in the wall opposite the main entrance doors.
Abstract: In January of 1853, the Lt Governor of the North-Western Provinces, James Thomason, inaugurated a new building in Banaras, situated perhaps halfway between the European cantonment and the ghats which line the sacred river Ganga. Designed in a high Gothic style by Major Kittoe, this was to be the new home of the Benares College, which incorporated one of the largest, and most symbolically important, Sanskrit departments of any British educational institution in north India. The building itself, which is now incorporated into Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, somewhat resembles a Christian church, for it is a long structure with high vaulted ceilings and a large stained glass window in the wall opposite the main entrance doors. Inscribed into the walls are verses in English and Hindi; one counsels that ‘the lips of truth shall be established forever, a lying tongue is but for a moment.’ Under this roof, it was intended that the knowledges of East and West would, in some sense, be united, for the College's Superintendent during the mid-nineteenth century, James Ballantyne, was pursuing a pedagogy which was intended to demonstrate to the learned Hindu elite that the truths of European philosophy and science, while constituting a significant advancement upon Hindu learning, might also be reached by way of the latter's sound, yet undeveloped, premises. As such, Thomason spoke to the audience present that day of the Benares College as a beacon in the midst of a waning brahmanical system, from which enlightenment would spread forth: ‘one instrument in the mighty change.’
21 citations
TL;DR: In the context of the 26th annual South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison held in October 1999 as mentioned in this paper, Sadkowski, Christine Fenech, Hew McLeod, Stella Sandahl, Harish Puri, Sabinderjit Singh Sagar, Himadri Singh, and Srinivasan Bannerjee presented a paper on the three-hundredth anniversary of the Khalsa.
Abstract: As many of us know, 1999 was a particularly important year for the Sikh community worldwide as it marked the three-hundredth anniversary of the Khalsa. The hype and fanfare which surrounded this milestone had of course drowned out reference to virtually all of that year's other Sikh events of note. These events may not have been as profound as Guru Gobind Singh's declaration of 1699, but they are still very important and denote landmarks in the history of the Sikh people.
Originally presented at the 26th annual South Asia Conference at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison held in October 1999 this paper has greatly benefited
from the suggestions and criticisms of a number of friends and colleagues. Most
significantly I appreciate the help and suggestions of Konrad Sadkowski, Christine
Fenech, Hew McLeod, Stella Sandahl, Harish Puri, Sabinderjit Singh Sagar, Himadri
Bannerjee, and the anonymous reviewer of this article selected by the editor of
Modern Asian Studies.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the imposition of 'alien' discourses on the Indian context is presented as the disruption of a communitarian social system that has been painted sometimes in pastel colours.
Abstract: Since the 199os, academic fashion has rediscovered and revamped theories of the 'clash of civilizations' (or rather, of the solipsism of cultures) that had already been popularized successfully in the early years of our 'age of extremes' by conservative ideologues like the German Oswald Spengler.' Indian 'indigenism' appears to be another subsidiary branch of that ideological current. Recent writings on India's colonial period thus often tend to disconnect its precolonial from its colonial past, in order to construct incompatible exogenous and indigenous 'principles' of social organization. The imposition of 'alien' discourses on the Indian context is presented as the disruption of a communitarian social system that has been painted sometimes in pastel colours.2 'Indigenism', as has been
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the British policy towards an area adjacent to the Gilgit Agency on the ‘northern frontier’ of British India during the years of 1914 and 1915 is discussed.
Abstract: This paper deals with the British policy towards an area adjacent to the Gilgit Agency on the ‘northern frontier’ of British India during the years of 1914 and 1915. It highlights some aspects of the relationships between the British and the inhabitants of this area which was called ‘Yaghestan’ at that time. But my purpose is not simply to offer a contribution to the regional history of a rather neglected part of the Western Himalaya in colonial times. More importantly, I intend to show how the British policy toward that country was entangled in rumours of local as well as almost global scale. Both local rumours, referring to revolts within the area, and global ones relating to the First World War, reporting that the German Kaiser together with his people had converted to Islam and joined the Turkish Caliph in jihad against the British, were perceived as highly threatening by the local British officers on the grounds of their construing the people of Yaghestan as most unreliable tribals, characterized especially by their ‘fanatical’ adherence to Islam. I will show that in spite of all intelligence efforts the British remained unable to subject these ‘fanatical others’ to the colonial regime of control and information. Rumour, as a multidirectional, uncontrolled form of communication, effectively intervened in the British strategies of power, rendering their colonial informational regime in that area almost impotent.
TL;DR: The authors place conceptions of romantic love in medieval India within their social and discursive contexts, and connect up the discourses on self-discipline and love with those of love in a more historically specific and illuminating way.
Abstract: The copious literature on love in early India has most recently been interpreted as a variant of the universal experience of human sexuality. Studies have rooted the uniqueness of Indian ideas either in theological conceptions of the immanent and transcendent, or in the particularity of the parent-child relation in India. Whatever the insights of such scholarship, two major problems relevant to this essay are its positioning of a ‘civilizational’ backdrop as its subject of analysis—either ‘India’ or ‘Hinduism’—and, particularly with the former approach, the subsequent application of what has been called the ‘repressive hypothesis’ to the Indian material, which poses the ‘transcendent’ principles of Indian civilization in a restraining role over those deemed life-affirming or immanent. This essay will offer an alternative to these interpretations by placing conceptions of romantic love in medieval India within their social and discursive contexts, and connect up the discourses on self-discipline in medieval India with those of love in a more historically specific and illuminating way.
TL;DR: In 1998, Pakistan carried out six nuclear explosions on 28 and 30 May 1998 at the Chagai test site in reaction to India's conduct of five nuclear tests about two weeks earlier as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Pakistan carried out six nuclear explosions on 28 and 30 May 1998 at the Chagai test site in reaction to India's conduct of five nuclear tests about two weeks earlier. Expectedly, the tests provoked strong international condemnation. On the eve of, and following the tests, Islamabad pointed out that its action was basically reactive to the Indian tests and necessary to ensure the survival of Pakistan. Indeed, since the 1960s, if not the 1950s, Islamabad has pursued an India-reactive nuclear policy. India's nuclear activities have basically shaped Pakistan's nuclear policy and postures. Hence, not surprisingly, when India decided to unveil its ’nuclear purdah‘, Pakistan immediately followed suit.
TL;DR: A gendered reading of the novel Kanthapura is proposed in this article, where Rao's representations of gender and sexuality within the discursive parameters of nationalist ideology in the 1930s are traced.
Abstract: At one point in the novel Kanthapura (1938) the eponymous village is literally emptied of men. Thereafter, the novel focuses, for the most part, on the remaining female inhabitants of the village and their resistance to male embodiments of colonial authority, namely the policemen. The moment dramatically foregrounds the whole question of gender in the novel which, though seldom noticed by critics, is one of the most fundamental issues in the text. Yet a gendered reading has been consistently overlooked in the critical discourse in favour of a reading which approaches the novel as an account of nationalist politics. In the effort to collapse the novel's politics into merely an instance of nationalist sentiment what is missed is the possibility of gendering a reading of nationalism itself. In other words, Kanthapura offers us the opportunity to locate Rao's representations of gender and sexuality within the discursive parameters of nationalist ideology in the 1930s and in so doing enable us to examine how these gender representations are in fact overdetermined by questions of identity, both communal and national. It is important, however, to recognize that Rao's gender representations—like those of many other Indian writers, thinkers, and ideologues—operated within the discursive framework of an ideology which had, over the years, elaborated a complex symbolism around signs of femininity. It is important, therefore, to trace the genealogy of gender representations within Indian nationalist discourse.
TL;DR: The evolution and history of the Jama'at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir is discussed in this paper, where it is shown that the movement has a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan.
Abstract: IntroductionThe Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.
TL;DR: The authors established a dialogue between the study of text and performance, not only to add to a well-established discussion of how text is used in performance but to incorporate into that existing discourse the relevance of the contextual dimension.
Abstract: Can we find different levels of meaning in the term ‘the female voice’? From a straightforwardly narratological perspective, a female voice indicates that the narrator in the art form under discussion is a woman. Could it also suggest a female perspective, and is a female perspective distinguishable from female narration: do we assume the former is built on language that is feminized, using a different vocabulary and a different expression? Does it matter whether a female voice is created by men or by women? When a woman creates art that has a female narrator, and yet through that narrator expresses woman's experience as constructed by an overarching patriarchal ideology, is the voice nevertheless female? Is the voice of a genre contingent upon its real-life audience, or upon the implied audience within the narrative itself? These are some of the issues that I want to tease out in the present paper. As is often the case in academic enquiry, more questions may be raised than answered. At this juncture it is my aim to establish a dialogue between the study of text and the study of performance, not only to add to a well-established discussion of how text is used in performance but to incorporate into that existing discourse the relevance of the contextual dimension.
TL;DR: In this paper, photographs of the Mru reveal a politics of nudity which is illustrated by exploring three themes: enforced authenticity, enforced decency, and folklorization, which can be seen to have underpinned deeply intrusive policies of development, oppression, expulsion and war.
Abstract: This article uses photographs to explore the meanings of nudity in a district of Bangladesh. Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool here in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker of specific, but contradictory, local characteristics. It stood variously for primitivity, underdevelopment, indecency and indigeneity. In the dominant discourses, one group in particular, the Mru, was singled out to represent these characteristics. Photographs of the Mru reveal a politics of nudity which is illustrated here by exploring three themes: enforced authenticity, enforced decency, and folklorization. The article links these photographs with wider discussions about romantic views of the exotic, about Orientalist representations—not just by Northerners but also by Southern nationalist elites and post-colonial intellectuals—, about development, and about minority rights. It is argued that the case of this district, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, is particularly instructive because here a politics of nudity can be seen to have underpinned deeply intrusive policies of development, oppression, expulsion and war.
TL;DR: For even now, over sixty years since his death, Kita Ikki (18831937) remains an enigma. Though one of Japan's most written-about figures, there is no agreement on what Kita actually stood for.
Abstract: For even now, over sixty years since his death, Kita Ikki (18831937) remains an enigma. Though one ofJapan's most written-about figures,' there is no agreement on what Kita actually stood for. Some condemn Kita as an ultra-nationalist, the symbol of Japanese fascism; others see in him the first authentic Japanese revolutionary. Though generally regarded as an extremist, he has legions of admirers, who come from both sides of the political spectrum.2 Lef-
TL;DR: A recent trend in the historiography of north India has involved analyses of "Hindutva" motifs and ideologies within both mainstream nationalist discourses and subaltern politics.
Abstract: A recent trend in the historiography of north India has involved analyses of ‘Hindu nationalist’ motifs and ideologies within both mainstream nationalist discourses and subaltern politics. A dense corpus of work has attempted to provide historical explanations for the rise of Hindutva in the subcontinent, and a great deal of debate has surrounded the implications of this development for the fate of secularism in India. Some of this research has examined the wider implications of Hindutva for the Indian state, democracy and civil society and in the process has highlighted, to some degree, the relationship between Hindu nationalism and ‘mainstream’ Indian nationalism. Necessarily, this has involved discussion of the ways in which the Congress, as the predominant vehicle of ‘secular nationalism’ in India, has attempted to contest or accommodate the forces of Hindu nationalist revival and Hindutva. By far the most interesting and illuminating aspect of this research has been the suggestion that Hindu nationalism, operating as an ideology, has manifested itself not only in the institutions of the right-wing Sangh Parivar but has been accommodated, often paradoxically, within political parties and civil institutions hitherto associated with the forces of secularism. An investigation of this phenomenon opens up new possibilities for research into the nature of Hindu nationalism itself, and presents new questions about the ambivalent place of religious politics in institutions such as the Indian National Congress.
TL;DR: For example, the authors argued that the reliance on politically secured economic privileges (i.e., nepotism) was a defect of networking and thus, one of the major underlying causes of the crisis.
Abstract: Prologue: Business Environment and Economic BehaviorFor more than two decades, sociologists, historians and economic geographers have produced many case studies on Chinese family businesses. A major consensus of these works suggests that ‘networking’, especially ethnic and familial, is extremely important to Chinese businesses. Various models and theories have been employed to explain this phenomenon. Notable among these explanations is the idea of Chinese entrepreneurship. According to this idea, such ethnicity-based groups as the Cantonese and the Fujianese (of the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian), are regarded to be culturally oriented towards business entrepreneurship and the cultivation of business networks. Before the outbreak of the Asian economic crisis in October 1997, many researchers believed that ‘Chinese entrepreneurship’ and the ‘business culture of networking’ contributed to the success of Chinese businesses in Asia (especially in the ‘Four Little Dragons’ of coastal Asia). For example, Confucian ethics and its emphasis on familial and ethnic networks is regarded as an asset for business expansion by Chinese international enterprises based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. After the outbreak of the crisis, more research on the nature of Chinese entrepreneurship and the culture of networking was carried out. This research started from a different angle. The reliance on politically secured economic privileges (i.e.; nepotism), was identified as a defect of networking and thus, one of the major underlying causes of the crisis. The claim that the culture of networking contributes to business success actually offers a readily available explanation for its failure as well (see for examples Redding, 1990; Yeung, 1997; Yeung, 1998).
TL;DR: In this article, the authors deal with the activities of one Scottish family (the Lennox family of Campsie in Stirlingshire) in Asian trade during the closing decades of the eighteenth century.
Abstract: Campsie : Presbytery of Glasgow, Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, County of Stirling. The Parish of Campsie measures eight English miles in length, and seven in breadth . . . . It is bounded on the North by the parish of Fintry; on the West by Strathblane and Baldernock; on the South by Calder and Kirkintilloch; and on the East by Kilsyth; forming a distinct commissariat along with Hamilton, stiled the commissariat of Hamilton and Campsie. Kedgeree : A village and police station on the low lands near the mouth of the Hoogly, on the west bank and 68 miles below Calcutta. It was formerly well known as a usual anchorage of the larger Indiamen. This article deals with the activities of one Scottish family—the Lennox family of Campsie in Stirlingshire—in Asian trade during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. The growth of private trade by Europeans in Asia in this period, and of the Agency Houses that managed much of their activity, is well-known. However, the classic studies of this subject have relied largely on official records and have used these to address issues in the history of imperial expansion. Thus standard accounts have tended to concentrate on the political relations between private traders and the East India Company, and to see private trade in the eighteenth century mainly as the by-product of the corruption of Company power. Viewed from inside the private business networks that made this possible, the perspective is rather different.
TL;DR: The developments in East Asia in the late nineteenth century became a matter of great interest to Britain this article, and the rise of Japan and the wrangles among the great powers over China and Korea were some of the issues that put East Asian in the spotlight.
Abstract: The developments in East Asia in the late nineteenth century became a matter of great interest to Britain. The rise of Japan and the wrangles among the great powers over China and Korea were some of the issues that put East Asia in the spotlight. In China, Western powers had been contending fiercely for economic and political hegemony since the Opium War. Japan, after abandoning its national policy of seclusion in 1854, carried out the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and was driving towards rapid Westernization. Here modernization took place in a relatively smooth manner and there was no need to fear external threats, but domestic tensions were inevitable. Finally Korea, after being forced to open its doors in 1876, suffered from acute dissensions between conservatives and progressives, and fierce competition between China, Japan and Russia over hegemony in Korea complicated the situation further.
TL;DR: Vāris Shashi is the lord of poetry: who can criticise him? I am not worthy enough to point a finger at his verses as mentioned in this paper. But even the wise don't understand what he described and thought.
Abstract: Vāris Shāh is the lord of poetry: who can criticise him? I am not worthy enough to point a finger at his verses. When anyone understands the Chūhṛeṭī he wrote completely It has fragrance in its every word, just like a basket of flowers. (Mīāil; Muhammad Bakhsh) Vāris Shāh is the lord of poetry and never stumbled or got stuck- Like an unroughened millstone, he crushed both big and small. A man filled with compassion and feeling, he everywhere expressed himself indirectly: But even the wise don't understand what he described and thought. (Ahmad Yār)
TL;DR: In this paper, a host of methodological, historical and generic questions about the relationship between concepts of love have to their own societies are explored, including: What happens when concepts live on in different socio-historical contexts? Do concepts overlap (śrngāra, ίshq, ‘love’), or do they occupy different areas of meaning? And when the gender of the author or performer changes, do, for example, female voices reproduce male discourse or introduce elements of heterogeneity?
Abstract: Love has many meanings. The papers published in this issue and first presented at an interdisciplinary workshop in Cambridge were based on this simple premiss; yet if one starts exploring it, one encounters a host of methodological, historical and generic questions that considerably complicate matters. What relationship do concepts of love have to their own societies? What happens when concepts live on in different socio-historical contexts? Do concepts overlap (śrngāra, ίshq, ‘love’), or do they occupy different areas of meaning? What happens when authors play with a voice of the opposite sex? And when the gender of the author or performer changes, do, for example, female voices reproduce male discourse or introduce elements of heterogeneity? What happens when contexts change, when commercial entertainment and print replace the court or an exclusive circle of connoisseurs? Have pre-modern concepts and tensions survived in modern society, or have new ones arisen? How do modern authors and individuals, female and male, react to and use traditional idioms? Has the modern state and its promise of individual rights made ‘love’ easier or more difficult? What are the actual possible spaces for love in contemporary South Asian society?
TL;DR: This is what Sir Charles N. E. Eliot (1862-1931), the British Ambassador to Japan from 1920 to 1926, wrote home regarding the Japanese representatives' stance at the International Opium Conference held in Geneva from November 1924 to February 1925 as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I do not understand very clearly what has happened at the Opium Conference except that Japan is taking sides with America against us. This no doubt means that Japan is glad to show America that in spite of the exclusion clause she has no objection to friendly cooperation on occasion. It is also a hint to us. . . . Japan also sometimes feels it prudent to defer to this same powerful country though in so doing she may to her great regret inconvenience her former ally.This is what Sir Charles N. E. Eliot (1862–1931), the British Ambassador to Japan from 1920 to 1926, wrote home regarding the Japanese representatives' stance at the International Opium Conference held in Geneva from November 1924 to February 1925. At the initial meetings of the conference, unexpected arguments between the representatives of Britain and Japan puzzled the British officials. This paper examines why the Japanese delegates took such a firm attitude on the occasion, and why Japan failed to adopt policies which might have altered the situation.
TL;DR: A large body of literature on the history of China's modern press, works of varying degrees of accuracy and analytical depth, has been produced, and yet, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of its development as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The newspaper has been a key element in China's modernization.' A large body of literature on the history of China's modern press, works of varying degrees of accuracy and analytical depth, has been produced, and yet, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of its development.2 Here, I will discuss one newspaper, the Zhongwai xinwen qiribao (hereafter, the Qiribao), published between March 1871 and April 1872, to show how, at a very crucial stage of the press's development, Chinese journalists emerged from under the appren-