Showing papers in "The Journal of Asian Studies in 2006"

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract: Anthropology; Archeology; Social life; Customs; History; Asia; Madagascar; Islands of the pacific

1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?

Abstract: On July 10, 1898, the reformist leader Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) memorialized the throne proposing that all academies and temples in China, with the exception of those included in registers of state sacrifices (sidian 祀典), be turned into schools. The Guangxu emperor was so pleased with the proposal that he promulgated an edict (shangyu 上諭) the same day taking over Kang’s phrasing. On three occasions in the following weeks, the editorial in the famous Shanghai daily Shenbao 申報 discussed the edict not as a piece of legislation aiming at facilitating the creation ex nihilo of a nationwide network of public schools, but as the declaration of a religious reform, that is, a change in religious policy that would rid China of temple cults and their specialists, Buddhists, Taoists, and spirit-mediums. This it was, indeed, although both Chinese and Western historiography have so far usually neglected to appreciate the importance of the religious element in the so-called Wuxu reforms (June 11–September 21, 1898) and later modernist policies. This importance, as we will see, can be gauged both in the writings of some of the reformist leaders, and among the populations concerned by the practical consequences.

The politics of a reviving buddhist temple : State, association, and religion in Southeast China

Abstract: NANPUTUO IS A MAJOR TEMPLE on China’s southeast coast that was shut down during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) but has since rapidly revived. The temple’s academy for training clergy reopened, an abbot was appointed, a Buddhist philanthropy foundation was established, and the number of clergy grew to 600 persons by 2001. The temple, located in Xiamen city, Fujian province, has also reemerged as a center of religious activity with streams of worshippers and tourists, frequent rituals and ceremonies, and huge crowds on Guanyin’s birthday and other major festivals. It is one of the liveliest, wealthiest, and best-managed Buddhist temples in Han China today (Birnbaum 2003; Luo 1991, 170–182; MacInnis 1989, 135). The temple’s revival is occurring in the context of an increasingly elaborated state system to administer religions. This system reflects the modern idea of “religion” (zongjiao) that entered China in the late nineteenth century as individual belief and the scientific distinction between religion and superstition. The concept started to be reflected in state rules and regulations from the late Qing Dynasty. In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) new religion policy recognized five religions— Buddhism, Catholicism, Taoism, Islam, and Protestantism—while actively suppressing other beliefs and rituals that it classified as superstition. During the Cultural

Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across “Area Studies”

Abstract: Recent endorsements of maritime history as an integral part of world history should be central in any attempt to transverse the academic divides separating the study of “South”, “East” and “Southeast” Asia (AHA Forum. 2006; Buschmann 2005). Nonetheless, envisaging an interconnected maritime Asia that is not subservient to the boundaries of area studies and modern nations, and yet does not descent to the simplistic and overly general, is a formidable challenge. A number of studies have tracked trading diasporas and economic linkages, but the place of the oceans in the cultures of Asia’s littoral societies has received much less attention. It may not be difficult to locate the reasons. Although in simple terms, “maritime history” is the history of human interaction with the sea in all its facets (Finamore 2004, p. 1), most Asianists have reached adulthood located within a nation-state with identifiable territorial borders and carry inherent intellectual biases that privilege a land-based perspective.

“A Symbol of Freedom”: The Indian Flag and the Transformations of Nationalism, 1906–2002

Abstract: IN JANUARY 2002, THROUGH A UNION cabinet-sponsored revision of the fifty-yearold Flag Code of India, the Indian state eased its restrictions on civilian displays of the national flag and allowed its citizens to fly the flag every day of the year. The cabinet decision responded to a seven-year legal battle between the Indian state and Navin Jindal, the owner of a steel manufacturing family conglomerate. Jindal’s personal quest to return the flag to the Indian people began when he was an MBA student at the University of Texas in Houston in the early 1990s and was struck by the ubiquitous presence of the U.S. flag. Upon becoming president of the student government at the university, Jindal was gifted a large nylon tricolor flag (the Indian national flag), which he proudly flew alongside the Stars and Stripes in his office throughout his four-year stay in the U.S. As Jindal recalled a decade later, “It was the first time I had held my country’s flag. It felt great” (Menon 2002). Jindal’s first communion with a nationalist symbol thus occurred outside his homeland. This dislocation became especially significant to him when he was prohibited by the Indian state from replicating that experience upon his return to India in 1994. Later that year, Jindal filed a writ of petition in the Delhi High Court to protest this decision, deploying legal arguments about the fundamental right of all Indian citizens to their national symbols. The case eventually reached the Indian Supreme Court, which issued a favorable verdict in January 2002. Shortly before this apex judicial decision, the union government accepted the recommendations of its

Rethinking Governmentality: Training, Cultivation, and Cultural Citizenship in Nationalist China

Abstract: In sum, the significance of military training does not just reside in teaching and learning military regulations and skills. Its main point is to temper the bodies and minds of the trainees and to mold their moral characters, show the proper path of modern life, teach common knowledge for modern citizens, improve the thought and habits of the trainees at the root, and establish complete and flawless characters so that they are able to adhere to discipline, take responsibility, be clear about etiquette and righteousness, know integrity and a sense of shame, and become Chinese citizens who are suited to modern existence. (Jiang Zhongzheng 1935, p. 2)

'Asia's' Transwar Lineage: Nationalism, Marxism, and 'Greater Asia' in an Indonesian Inflection

Abstract: In Europe traditional political and economic forms come crashing down, new ideas and ideals arise and collide against one another with a great noise and are in turn mercilessly ground to dust. There is an intense and bitter struggle over principles, a restless search for new life values; there is a hellish racket, mistrust, and envy between peoples, classes, and groups; a desperate and chaotic situation reigns in nearly all areas of life. With a stentorian voice, Russia preaches new thoughts and principles and incites all proletarians to a bloody revolution against the hated capitalism, with the aim of establishing a “dictatorship of the masses” upon the rubble of the old society. America lays the foundations for a new civilization with materialist-mystical tendencies and ethical and aesthetic norms that deviate from the old. It exports the products of the Hollywood Olympus in heaps, superficial “talkies” and sentimental “songs,” threatening the Asian and European arts with ruin. . . . In this chaotic, shaken-up, forward-driving world, amid nations and classes laying siege to one another, in this time of declining and rising worldviews, of the triumph of science and technology, the Indonesian Volk must find its way toward political freedom and national happiness. Will we, ignoring the lessons of European history and closing our eyes to the political, economic, and social failures of the West, steer our cultural course toward the Occidental model, thereby taking the risk, upon arrival, of finding that we have been left behind and in the meantime, Europe, having abandoned its previous position, has moved on? Must we forever be satisfied with what has been left behind by others and found worthless, trudging behind in the wake of other nations? (Pané 1931, p. 1)

Rule and representation: transformations in the governance of the water commons in British south India

Abstract: IN HIS RULE OF EXPERTS: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (2002), Timothy Mitchell offers fresh insight into the nature of colonial and postcolonial state power by clarifying the complex relationship between rule and representation. He demonstrates how policy universals, which appear as rational abstractions separate from the social order they govern (as the rule of law, private property, or the economy), can be shown to be historically grounded in particular interests and events, contingencies, violence, and exclusions. The apparent logic, universality, and coherence of these ideas, as well as the expertise and rational design that they call forth, are not inherent, but are produced through the messiness of contingent actions which succeed in concealing social practice by effecting the separation of ideas and their objects: a bifurcation of representation and reality that is characteristic of the modern world. Mitchell addresses a key dilemma in the study of colonialism: the dramatic social and environmental changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be made sense of in terms of the rationalizing principles of colonial rule, yet imperial systems of knowledge have had a lasting impact on social and physical systems. Drawing on these ideas, this article will illustrate how colonial rule in India did not involve the assertion of the rule of law, administrative code, or science over kingship, community, or nature. The principles of property, revenue, or law did not constitute a preformed conceptual structure of rule imposed from the outside, but were worked out through compromise and contingent action in a variety of areas such as altered revenue demands, property disputes, engineered technology, and court decisions—not as the application of policy principle, but as selective, arbitrary, local actions and exceptions which wrought change not by their own logic, but through the rupture and contradiction that they effected in the existing social and political systems (Mitchell 2002, 77).

Things That Should Not Be Said: Censorship and Self-Censorship in the Nepali Press Media, 2001-02

Abstract: Scholars and researchers across a range of disciplines increasingly “read” South Asia only in English. After all, the subcontinent produces English-medium scholarship, journalism, and creative literature in copious measure, and the Indian novel in English occupies a dominant position on the world literature stage. That culture is rapidly globalizing is one of the truisms of our day. That the principal language of globalized culture is English is almost axiomatic throughout the Euro-American world and beyond, and the belief that mass media, the entertainment industry, and the Internet will entrench its position even further is rarely challenged. These assumptions about globalization, however, ignore the explosion of locallanguage media that has taken place all across South Asia over the past three decades. In India, the number of daily newspapers grew from 875 in 1976 to 4,453 in 1995, with sales of Hindi dailies surpassing those of English for the first time in 1979. Similarly, in Nepal, where until 1990 only a few dozen newspapers were published on a regular basis, there are now said to be more than sixteen hundred newspapers, of which 230 are dailies. In India in 1976, 9.3 million newspapers were produced each day for a population of 617 million: fifteen dailies for every one thousand people. By 1996, this rate had nearly trebled, reaching forty-three dailies per one thousand people (all figures from Jeffrey 2000, 39, 48, 47; Press Council Nepal 2001). According to Robin Jeffrey:

The Yearning for “Friendship”: Revisiting “the Political” in Minority Revolutionary History in China

Abstract: There is absolutely no such thing in the world as love or hatred without reason or cause. As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes. All the ruling classes of the past were fond of advocating it, and so were many so-called sages and wise men, but nobody has ever really practiced it, because it is impossible in class society. . . . We cannot love enemies, we cannot love social evils, our aim is to destroy them. This is common sense; can it be that some of our writers and artists still do not understand this? (Mao 1967c, 90–91)

Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory: Making an Ancient and Recent Tai-Ahom Identity in Assam and Thailand

Abstract: “THERE IS NO DOUBT A FEELING that Assam [is] more a land of rakshas [demons], hobgoblins, and various terrors” (Curzon Collection, Mss. Eur F 111/247a). This statement more or less encapsulates the early British impressions of the area and people east of Bengal, also known as Assam or the North-East Frontier in colonial parlance (see map). In colonial literature, the people of Assam are documented as having “ferocious manners, and brutal tempers” and are “fond of war, vindictive, treacherous and deceitful” (Butler 1855, 223, 228). Furthermore, colonial literature declared them to be unlike any other group, “a base and unprincipled nation,” without a “fixed religion,” since they did not “adopt any mode of worship practiced by the heathens or Mohammedans” (Vansittart 1785, 106–8). On the one hand, placed outside the lineage of Indic culture and Aryan history, within which the British codified the highcaste Hindus, the place was zoned off as a frontier and the people of Assam were reduced into a group living without history. The frontierization of Assam and the unthinkability of a history of the people of Assam survived and are reinforced in postcolonial narratives of India. These perceptions, we should note, are the views of

Marco della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Indian Scholars

Abstract: ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES FROM EUROPE established a permanent presence in India in the year 1500, when eight Franciscans arrived in Cochin with the Portuguese expedition of Pedro Cabral. Sir William Jones (1746–94), the famous English Orientalist, arrived in Calcutta in 1783, almost three hundred years later. Within a few decades, Jones and his small band of British and Indian colleagues had transformed the content and style of European knowledge of Indian culture and history in such a way that they set the basic model for most scholarship subsequently written on these subjects by both Indians and non-Indians, whatever their political or religious views. How did the Orientalists do this in such a short span of time, while the missionaries, over a much longer period, did not? To answer this question, I will begin with an example of a missionary-scholar who lived in north India in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Italian Capuchin missionary Marco della Tomba (1726–1803) arrived in Bengal in 1757 at age thirty-one. He lived mostly in the Bihar cities of Bettiah and Patna and in Chandernagore in Bengal until he returned to Italy in 1773. After about nine years in Italy, he returned to India in 1783 and died in Bhagalpur in 1803 at age seventy-seven. In about 1771, Marco wrote an essay entitled “A Short Description of East India or Hindustan” (“Piccola descrizione dell’India orientale, o Industan,” ca. 1771c) in which he describes his Indian experiences for the benefit of future missionaries. In it he particularly emphasizes the importance of learning to speak the local

Writing Same-Sex Love: Sexology and Literary Representation in Yoshiya Nobuko's Early Fiction

Abstract: X OSHIYA NOBUKO (1896-1973), novelist, poet, and essayist, was one of the most successful and prolific Japanese writers of the twentieth century. As a popular author, Yoshiya enjoyed a broad readership; by the mid 1920s, she was a celebrity whose face was easily recognized on the street, and by the late 1930s, she had become one of the wealthiest people in Japan, earning an income several times that of ministers of state (Tanabe 1999, vol. 2, p. 111). The recent growth of interest in popular culture has contributed to the rediscovery of Yoshiya as an author who developed the genre of girls' fiction (sh?jo sh?setsu) and brought a feminist perspective to the family romance in the genre of popular fiction (ts?zoku sh?setsu). She has received most attention, however, as writer of female same-sex love (d?seiai). Much of Yoshiya's fiction features girls and women who are strongly attached to each other, valuing above all else their love and sisterhood.1 Although Yoshiya herself was never "out" in the current sense, for 47 years she lived openly with her lifelong partner (and legal heir), Monma Chiyo. As a result, Yoshiya's stories of same-sex love are often simply considered an extension of her own life or just a non-Western example in the genre of lesbian literature. To fully appre ciate the depth and complexity of Yoshiya's texts, however, it is crucial to recognize that they are constructed through an intricate negotiation with contemporary ideas about female same-sex love. Of particular significance is the way Yoshiya engages with ideas found in sexology, a field of scientific inquiry into the "truth about sex" (Friihs

Inscribing Colonial Monumentality: A Case Study of the 1763 Patna Massacre Memorial

Abstract: through a series of military actions. In 1763 the nawab, or governor, of the region, Mir Qasim?acting with the support of agents of the Mughal court and local leaders? fought a war for economic and political control of Bengal and Bihar. As part of this larger conflict, agents of the nawab captured a group of British military officers and imprisoned them at Patna, an important provincial city on the Ganges River. In October 1763, after several months in captivity, the officers were killed by the nawab's agents in what became known as the Patna Massacre. The British quickly retook Patna; after the establishment of relative peace in the region, a large pillar was built to commemorate the deaths, ostensibly at the site of the massacre, over the well into which the parts of the dead officers' bodies had been thrown (Firminger 1910; Ta bataba'i 1789/1975, 2:418-19; Chatterjee 1996, 107-10). This article examines the development of this history as articulated in the com memorative pillar built by the British in the 1760s. Through inscriptions, modifi cations to the structure, and amendments to the same inscriptions, the monument serves as a site of successive reinterpretations of the story briefly outlined above. To tell the story of the monument is therefore to show how colonialism refigures history; it is to show what colonial monuments do?how a monument operates with and for colonialism. Indeed, rather than remaining static, the colonial monument changes according to the needs of the negotiations of colonial discourse. These shifts happen not only in terms of the written and historical texts surrounding the monument but also on the physical monument itself, in its inscriptional text and its physical form. I argue that colonial monumentality resides not in the traditional forms associated with

First-Person Narration and Citizen-Subject: The Modernity of Ōgai's “The Dancing Girl”

Abstract: A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT SCHOLARLY WORKS on modern Japanese literature in English have questioned the reduction of post-Meiji literary history to the process of Westernization—the incorporation of the norms of the modern European realist novel (Miyoshi 1991; Fowler 1988; Fujii 1993). These studies have cautioned us against the uncritical application of modern literary categories to Japanese novels, drawing our attention to the complex relations between modern novels and premodern narrative forms in Japanese literary history. While building on some of the inquiries launched by these studies, in this essay I hope to readdress the problem of how to deploy the term modernity as a framework through which to understand the development of late nineteenth-century Japanese literature. I believe that profound transformations that took place in mid-Meiji literary discourses must be studied in relation to the spread of modern social institutions, practices, and ideas in Japan. At the same time, I insist that the question of modernity in Japanese literary history cannot be fully investigated through the received schema of modernization—that is, the tendencies to naturalize the dualistic (and hierarchical) relations between the West versus Rest, modernity versus tradition, and the linear model of history implied by these binaries. I will approach these issues by examining the construction of the modern subject in literary discourses. Mori Ōgai’s novella “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime), first published in 1890 and reputed to be one of the earliest examples of the full-fledged modern novel in Japanese, serves as a focal point in my analysis. I identify the text’s self-conscious experimentation with modern novelistic form in its tightly crafted firstperson narration. Through the analysis of the text, I examine a peculiarly modern modality of subject that the convention of first-person narration points to. This subject inscribes itself self-referentially—a first-person narration tells a story, but it also posits the narrating subject (the subject of enunciation) that is putatively prior to and transcendent of the story-world represented. The first-person I, which is at the center of

Strange games and enchanted science : The mystery of kokkuri

Abstract: Scenes similar to this were enacted throughout Japan as the game spread rapidly across the country; Kokkuri was an explosively popular fashion, a mass culture phenomenon that entered the homes of people throughout the nation. From the end of 1886 to autumn of the following year, this divination game was so popular that, according to journalist and scholar Miyatake Gaikotsu (1867–1955), it was played in “almost every household” (Miyatake 1997, 53) (see figs. 1 and 2).

Thoughts on Hermaphroditism : Miyatake Gaikotsu and the Convergence of the Sexes in Taishō Japan

Abstract: When thirty-year-old Kazutoshi was arrested in Dalian, Manchuria, he turned out to be far more riveting than the common thief he appeared to be at first glance. It soon became apparent that Kazutoshi was a "cripple" (fugusha) who was part male and part female. Calling him a "strange double-sexed person" (kikai naru ry?sei no hito), government officials probed into his past, only to discover that Kazutoshi had been born with the name Fuji?and as a woman. During her youth in Nagasaki, Fuji was a renowned beauty and the recipient of many amorous advances. Despite these affirmations of her femininity and her desir ability as a woman, Fuji sought medical advice because she did not "feel like a woman." The examining physicians found it impossible to declare her either male or female and eventually resorted to surgery to solve the puzzle that Fuji presented. When the examination revealed the existence of testicles, it was decided that she was male, and Fuji took the name Kazutoshi. Now a twenty-one-year-old man, Kazutoshi cut his hair, discarded his skirts, and married. He began drinking and being physically active. "A previously gentle woman, he completely transformed into a man of sturdy physique." Despite his marriage and successful transformation, Kazutoshi left his birth town, driven by the gossip sur rounding his metamorphosis. After a decade of wandering, Kazutoshi arrived in Man churia and?destitute and desperate?turned to thievery. After the arrest in Dalian,

Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms . By Inderpal Grewal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 280 pp. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Abstract: Shāh Kalı̄m Allāh and his chief disciple, Niz. ām al-Dı̄n Awrangābādı̄, “leaders of a Chishtı̄ ‘renaissance’ that restored the ethical principles of the early Indian leaders of the order”(p. 28). While I compliment the authors for their sensitivity to “textual exegesis” and to scriptural and hierarchical genealogies in the preservation of the history of a given Sufi order (p. 47), these factors do not seem to have been given due consideration in the citation of texts written by Niz. ām al-Dı̄n Awrangābādı̄ and Najı̄b Qādirı̄ Nāgawrı̄ Ajmēri. Niz. ām al-Dı̄n Awrangābādı̄ might have left a legacy in the South, but in the North, he remained virtually unknown. His writings were not recommended even by his son and successor, Shāh Fakhr al-Dı̄n (d. 1784), who had moved to Delhi in 1751. For core practices and prayers, instead of suggesting his father’s Niz. ām al-Qulūb, he recommended Kalı̄m-Allāh’s works, Kashkōl-i Kalı̄mı̄, Sawā’ al-Sabı̄l, and MuraqqaÛ, to his major khalı̄fa, Nūr Muhammad Mahārvı̄ (d. 1790) (Ghāzı̄ al-Dı̄n Khan Niz. ām [grandson of Niz. ām al-Mulk Ās.if Jāh] Manāqib-i Fakhariyya, Urdu translation by Mı̄r Nazar Kākōrawı̄, Karachi: Salmān Academy, 1961, 313). These works are still in circulation, some available in Urdu translation. Other notable features of the Sufi Martyrs include biographical profiles of major Sufi masters in the appendix excerpts taken from Akhbar al-Akhyar (noted above), translated into English for the first time, and comprehensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. Some minor points regarding the bibliography are noted here for consideration when this valuable work goes into its second printing. Many foundational sources written in Arabic and Persian, listed as manuscripts, have been edited and published and are translated into Urdu. In some entries taken from Ahmad Monzavi’s multivolume catalogue, A Comprehensive Catalogue of Persian Manuscript in Pakistan, a few catalogue inaccuracies have found their way into Sufi Martyrs. In two of several examples, Fakhr al-Dı̄n Dihlawı̄’s date of death is given 1199/1725 but should be 1784. In sum, the authors have skillfully navigated the reader through the history of the Chishtı̄ order from the thirteenth century to the present. They have ably demonstrated that this order is not confined to one region or one period but had various sets of heroes at different times and places and is now being transformed into a global phenomenon by technology and cyberspace (chapter 7). The volume epitomizes the serious academic engagement and scholarly contributions of Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence over almost a quarter of a century to the study of Islam and Sufism in general and the Chishtı̄ order in particular. It is a must-read for those engaged in the spiritual dimension of Islam, Indo-Islamic civilization, and the crucial role of the Sufis therein. SAJIDA SULTANA ALVI McGill University