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The many swords of Shivaji: Searching for a weapon, finding a nation Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Andrew Halladay
Since at least the nineteenth century, the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji (r. 1674–80) has served as a central symbol in Indian politics. This article interrogates his legacy through the lens of his famous sword, the Bhavani Talvar. At least three swords have been identified as this weapon since the nineteenth century; by analysing each of these claims in turn, I consider how the discourse around Shivaji’s
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A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the making of naniwabushi as a mode of popular dissent in transwar Japan, 1902–1909 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Joel Littler
The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan. This article uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909) and used it to engage
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Find the river: Discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Thomas Simpson
Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information
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‘The Jews of Ceylon’: Antisemitism, prejudice, and the Moors of Ceylon Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Shamara Wettimuny
In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s
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Beyond conservation: Royal picnics at Elephanta and the legitimization of empire Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Deepti Mulgund
Histories of conservation suggest that from the nineteenth century onwards, the custodianship and conservation of colonial antiquities enabled European powers to legitimize imperial claims. This article complicates this view by focusing on a series of visits made by British royals to the Caves of Elephanta, near Bombay, as part of their tours of India. Of particular interest are the visits in 1870
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The point of death: Religious conversion and the self in South India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Nandagopal R. Menon
To explore the importance of death and the dead to the study of religious conversion, this article adopts an ethnographic and comparative approach to the lives and deaths of two male Muslim converts in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. Paying attention to the treatment of their dead bodies, which were donated and cremated, contrary to their wishes for an Islamic funeral, and the problematization
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Broadcasting the ‘(anti)colonial sublime’: Radio SEAC, Congress Radio, and the Second World War in South Asia Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Isabel Huacuja Alonso
This article considers the Second World War’s effects on radio infrastructures and listening cultures in India through a detailed analysis of two radio stations: Radio SEAC and Congress Radio. Radio SEAC was a military radio station based in Ceylon targeting British soldiers stationed in Asia. It housed what was then one of the most wide-reaching transmitters. Congress Radio was a makeshift station
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Media wars: Remaking the logics of propaganda in India’s wartime cine-ecologies Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Debashree Mukherjee
Recent Second World War historiography has rightly highlighted the forgotten contributions of South Asia in the Allied war effort, and the everyday meanings of the war in South Asia. The role of cinema here, however, remains largely overlooked. This article focuses on British efforts to produce war propaganda in India with the help of Indian filmmakers, through varying tactics of incentivization and
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Torn between the nation and the world: D. F. Karaka and Indian journalism in the Second World War Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Rotem Geva
Focusing on wartime journalism and nonfiction, this article analyses how nationalist Indians made sense of the war’s political and moral causes and goals, and how such understandings shaped the war’s longer historical resonance in India. The article centres on the wartime publications of the writer and journalist Dosabhai Framji Karaka, juxtaposing them with those of his colleagues in the nationalist
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A tale of a tyre: National space, infrastructure, and narration in S. H. Vatsyayan’s ‘Parśurām se tūrxam’ Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Gregory Goulding
The Second World War, although rarely an explicit topic in Hindi literature, was a crucial moment not only in articulating the politics of the nationalist movement, but in imagining new configurations of national and international space. This article considers a brief travelogue by the poet and novelist S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ that describes a journey from Assam to the borders of Afghanistan. Although
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From fascism to famine: Complicity, conscience, and the narrative of ‘peasant passivity’ in Bengal, 1941–1945 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Ahona Panda
Between 1941 and 1945, the Second World War changed the physical and moral geographies of Bengal, an important base for the British government. In 1943, a man-made famine resulted in the death of about four million peasants. The Bengal Famine has been the subject of intense scrutiny in terms of establishing the moral culpability of the colonial government and its provincial collaborators. This article
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The lure of land: Peasant politics, frontier colonization and the cunning state in Sri Lanka Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Thiruni Kelegama, Benedikt Korf
This paper studies the contradictions of peasant politics in Sri Lanka’s dry zone frontier in a highly militarized colonization scheme (‘System L’ of the Mahaweli Development Programme in Weli Oya in northern Sri Lanka). Through a detailed ethnographic study of the life histories of settlers who came in two waves to this scheme (1980s and post-2009), we show the workings of what we call the ‘lure of
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‘Elections can wait!’ The politics of constructing a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, South India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Dayal Paleri, R. Santhosh
The lack of electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the South Indian state of Kerala is often explained through the idea of Kerala ‘exceptionalism’, a broad term used to explain the unique historical, political, and developmental trajectory of the state. However, such explanations do not adequately address the systematic and concerted attempts by Hindu nationalist organizations to
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The secret of September: The 1949 oil agreements between the United States and South Korea Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Ohsoo Kwon
After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the
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Real abstractions: Markets, moralities, and social segmentation in modern India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Thomas Blom Hansen
This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a
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The fetish in the market Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Johan Mathew
This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.
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The entanglements of exchange in India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Muhammad Ali Jan
In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range
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Translating transactions: Markets as epistemic and moral spheres Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas E. Haynes, Sebastian Schwecke
In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life. They build on the 2020 Cambridge volume, Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke. This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional
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The decline of multilingualism in a divided public sphere: The Indian Press and cultural politics in colonial Allahabad (1890–1920) Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Sanjukta Poddar
This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably
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Facsimiles of yore: printing technology and the page image in the Japanese Government General of Korea’s reproduction of historical sources Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Graeme R. Reynolds
During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype,
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‘Trishul vs Cross’: Hindutva, Church, and the politics of secularism in Christian-majority states of North-east India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Sunila Datta, Rajnish Saryal, Sutapa Saryal
Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social
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Wormwood, nomads’ rights, and capitalism: the birth of a chemical industry in Russian Turkestan (1870s–1914) Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Beatrice Penati
A variety of wormwood, Artemisia cina, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian Turkestan. Santonin, a drug derived from it, was in high demand. Flowers harvested by Kazakhs were handed over to intermediaries to be processed in Europe, but from the 1880s entrepreneurs from different parts of the Russian empire established their own chemical plants in Chimkent and Tashkent. They pressured
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‘East Punjab must not lag behind’: Partition, museums, and identity in independent India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Mrinalini Venkateswaran
This article foregrounds the postcolonial museum as a new source, and site, from which to write South Asian histories of partition and its aftermath. It focuses on collecting practices in India within East Punjab, following the partition of the British-era Punjab province in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Tapping hitherto-unused archival sources, it reveals the considerable financial investment and
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City of lights, city of pylons: Infrastructures of illumination in colonial Hanoi, 1880s–1920s Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Kirsten W. Endres
This article traces the early stages of urban electrification in the French protectorate of Tonkin (in Vietnam’s north) from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. It focuses on Hanoi, where in 1895 the French entrepreneurs Hermenier and Planté secured a concession for lighting the streets of the soon-to-be capital of French Indochina. Before long, the city’s fast-paced development and the concomitant rise
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The paradox of authenticity: The Korean Product Showroom of Mitsukoshi department store in colonial Seoul Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Younjung Oh
Mitsukoshi, a famed Japanese department store, opened a Korean Product Showroom in its Keijō (Seoul) branch in 1930. The Korean Product Showroom was the only space decorated in ‘Korean style’ within the Keijō Mitsukoshi building, which was designed in Neo-Renaissance style, much like its flagship store in Tokyo. This showroom offered Korean artefacts as luxury souvenirs aimed at Japanese tourists.
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Life of a Dalit magistrate: Ideologies and politics in Dalit life in North India, 1920–1954 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Vijay Kumar
This article discusses Chaudhari Mulkiram (April 1910–August 1954) and the contesting ideologies, memories, histories, and socio-political conditions surrounding his career from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. Mulkiram belonged to the Dhangar, a sub-caste of the Khatik caste in Meerut. He was the first Dalit of the United Provinces (UP) who qualified for the Public Service Commission in 1939. This article
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The prison-handicraft complex: Convict labour in colonial India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Anand A. Yang
Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused
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Delinking ‘the two rupees’: The devaluation dilemma and economic divergence in the decolonized subcontinent, September 1949–February 1951 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Rakesh Ankit
By looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its
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The grey zones of antiquarian pursuits: The 1938 Barger expedition to the princely state of Swat Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Rafiullah Khan
This article discusses and analyses the Barger archaeological expedition of 1938 to the princely state of Swat. It argues that archaeology in princely, as well as in British, India did not originate and develop in a unilinear manner. This understanding is in line with the recent realization of variations in the historiography of native India. Given this, an attempt has been made to situate the Swat
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An Eastern hero: Biographies of Muhammad in imperial Japan Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Mikiya Koyagi
While participating in the discourse of world religions, Japanese biographers published accounts of Muhammad’s life in many genres of academic and popular books during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1868–1926). This article unravels how these biographical accounts played a crucial role in facilitating a geographical imaginary of Asia/the East which incorporated both Japan and West Asia. Situated in a radically
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‘Enjoying life’: Consumption, changing meanings, and social differentiation in Kerala, India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2023-01-24 Nissim Mannathukkaren
Kerala is a well-recognized ‘model’ of human development in the world. In this article, I look at a crucial aspect of this development, which is often approached in a positivist fashion of statistical aggregation alone: consumption. Instead, there is a need to study the meanings that surround it. I delineate the many forces, particularly the new material infrastructure, that have driven consumption
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‘Willing’ ethnic-nationalists, diffusion, and resentment in India: A micro-foundational account Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-12-26 Aseema Sinha, Manisha Priyam
Using evidence regarding the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India we put forward new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for a Hindutva project and a new framework that proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. We assert that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analysed
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Revisiting Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of nationalism Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Rinku Lamba
This article revisits Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of nationalism as well as his interventions on the theme of samaj. The claim is that contained within Tagore’s reflections on nationalism and samaj is a vision of political community that is stipulated as an alternative to the one espoused by the nation-state mode of politics. Tagore’s formulations of the possibilities within samaj suggest his commitment
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A region in dispute: Racialized anticommunism and Manila’s role in the origins of Konfrontasi, 1961–63 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Joseph Scalice
Prior scholarship has treated the Philippines as an outside party to the conflict over the formation of Malaysia, known as Konfrontasi, which has been dealt with as a dispute between Malaysia and Indonesia. This article demonstrates the centrality of the Macapagal administration to the origins of Konfrontasi. Treating Manila as a core actor gives new insight into Konfrontasi, which can be best understood
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Crafting literary Urdu: Mirza Hatim’s engagement with Vali Dakhani Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Purnima Dhavan, Heidi Pauwels
The emergence in eighteenth-century India of literary compositions that used the elite registers of what was, at the time, called ‘Rekhtah’, and later defined as Urdu, is poorly understood. Conventionally, after an initial infatuation in Delhi with the works of Vali Dakhani,1 a mid-century break is assumed, exemplified by the revision of Zuhur ud-Din Hatim’s Divan as Divanzadah in the 1750s. Scholars
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Imperial inheritance: The transnational lives of Gurkha families in Asian contexts, 1948–1971 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Hema Kiruppalini
While there is burgeoning scholarship on the transnational lives of Nepali Gurkhas and their families, research on their migration history and lived experiences in Asian contexts is few and far between. Building upon Vron Ware’s concept of Gurkha families as ‘military migrants’ and using an inter-Asia approach as a framework, this article foregrounds the interconnections between military service and
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‘It all comes from me’: Bahu Begam and the making of the Awadh nawabi, circa 1765–1815 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Nicholas J. Abbott
This article examines the durable, yet largely overlooked, claims of Bahu Begam (1727–1815) to dynastic wealth and authority in the Awadh nawabi (1722–1856), a North Indian Mughal ‘successor state’ and an important client of the East India Company. Chief consort (khass mahal) to Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula (r. 1754–75) and mother to his successor Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), Bahu Begam played a well-documented
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Religion, political parties, and Thailand’s 2019 election: Cosmopolitan royalism and its rivals Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Tomas Larsson
The political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist
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Representations of disaster victimhood: Framing suffering and loss after the 1934 Bihar-Nepal earthquake Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Eleonor Marcussen
This article seeks to address a thematic thread that remains relatively unexplored in historical disaster research—victimhood—through an analysis of publications by disaster relief funds and their supporters in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar in northern India. By examining the representations of victimhood, I aim to explore the historical significance of perceptions and constructions
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Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Mikhail Pelevin
The article explores the ethnocultural aspects and ideological implications of a hagiographical collection from the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī (1613), a book on the general history of the Pashtuns compiled in the Indo-Afghan diaspora. This article primarily focuses on the stories that either presumably originate from or directly relate in content to Pashtun tribal areas to the west of
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An anti-secularist pan-Asianist from Europe: Paul Richard in Japan, 1916–1920 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-27 Hans Martin Krämer
The modern Japanese nation-state that was established from 1868 onwards was marked by a strong tendency towards the separation of state and religion: religions were protected as a private matter, but the public sphere was resolutely kept free of them. This was mainly done so that competing religions would not get in the way of state-sanctioned emperor worship. The latter, although imbued with elements
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From ‘mystic synthesis’ to ‘Jesuit plot’: The Society of Jesus and the making of religious policy in Indonesia Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Rémy Madinier
Since the 1990s, Indonesia has been confronted with the growing influence of a radical Islamist movement that challenges the state doctrine (Pancasila), which was adopted in 1945, and demands a greater place for Islam, which is the religion of nearly 90 per cent of the population. The hardline groups wish to call into question the Indonesian state’s pluralistic and inclusive religious identity, which
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Reshaping the figure of the Shudra: Tukaram Padwal’s Jatibhed Viveksar (Reflections on the Institution of Caste) Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Ketaki Jaywant
This article argues that the genealogy of modern anti-caste critique is incomplete without a contextualized and close reading of Jatibhed Viveksar, a nineteenth-century Marathi-language text written under the pseudonym Ek Hindu (‘One Hindu’ or ‘A Hindu’). One of the first lower-caste commentaries in the Marathi print-world, the treatise clearly departed from the earlier iterations of non-Brahman caste
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Rewriting the hills: Youth sociality as a mode of navigating unemployment in a context of outmigration in North India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Andrew Deuchar
This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration’, but in other moments they are ridiculed for not
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Special issue: Multiple worlds of the Adivasi. An introduction Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Vinita Damodaran, Sangeeta Dasgupta
On 6 December 1959, the image of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Damodar Valley Corporation dam project in Bihar with a 15-year-old Adivasi girl called Budhini Manjhiyan was flashed across the national newspapers. This was an iconic moment in the national debate around development and change which was to dominate modern India on whether lands, predominately rural and tribal
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The Oraons of Chhotanagpur: A journey through colonial ethnography Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Sangeeta Dasgupta
This article explores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha and dhangar, or as part of a ‘village community’ of Coles/Kols, these Oraons, by the late nineteenth century, were referred to as a ‘tribe’. To trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across colonial
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Adivasi images, Adivasi voices. The resonance of the Eickstedt collection Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Katja Müller
This article analyses how past and contemporary Adivasi voices are expressed in colonial photographs, and how they have—and continue to—both enable and restrict speaking through visual representation. It examines the collection of the German anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt, who in the 1920s took about 12,000 photographic images and 2,000 objects from Adivasi communities in India, Ceylon, and Burma
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Santal indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and the politics of representation Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Marine Carrin
Using different archives, I show how indigeneity was constructed by the Santal themselves during the second half of the nineteenth century, through various figures such as rebels and prophets. This has produced a Santal indigenous knowledge at the interface of orality and writing, revolving around two dimensions—an emergent historical consciousness and a feeling of shared identity, which still informs
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Cohabiting a textualized world: Elbow room and Adivasi resurgence Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Ruby Hembrom
Stories matter—writing them down matters. For indigenous (Adivasi) peoples from oral traditions, literature has become a way to maintain culture and keep it alive. This article too is a story—an investigative one—questioning and vocalizing the challenges we encounter in trying to articulate our realities and histories in a form that is new to us, one that we've been denied as a practice and one we
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Can migrants be indigenous? Affirmative action, space, and belonging in the Andaman Islands Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Philipp Zehmisch
In India, the contested category of Scheduled Tribes (STs) is enacted in order to socially uplift certain indigenous communities. This article concentrates on analysing the intersection between modes of indigenous self-definition, political assertion, and localized conceptualizations of space and belonging. My ethnographic example from the Andaman Islands focuses on the Ranchis, aboriginal labour migrants
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Insurgent law: Bengal Regulation III and the Chin-Lushai expeditions (1872–1898) Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Anandaroop Sen
This article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others,
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Glorious pasts of forest dwellers: Memories of land in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, Central Provinces, 1861–1905 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Sohini Sengupta
This article discusses the shifts in rights over land of Binjhal Adivasi people in the wake of colonial rule in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, located in the British Central Provinces in the eventful period from 1860–1926. Oral narratives and documents preserved by Binjhal villagers juxtaposed with archived records of military expeditions, village surveys, administrative letters, and land settlement
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And red flows the Koina river: Adivasi resistance to the ‘loot’ of their land and resources in eastern India, 1980–2020 Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Gladson Dungdung, Felix Padel, Vinita Damodaran
This article documents Adivasi resistance to the ‘loot’ of their land and resources since 1980, especially during the Kalinganagar movement in Odisha, roughly between 2004 and 2010, and the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, between 2016 and 2018. Using the lens of trauma and testimony, the article represents a combined effort by Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi activist, journalist, and writer who has
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Tribal land alienation and Adivasis’ struggle for autonomy: The case of Bhadrachalam Scheduled Area, Telangana, India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Dalel Benbabaali
Based on a case study of the Bhadrachalam Scheduled Area of Telangana, this article argues that the Adivasis of Central India seek autonomy as a response to their dispossession and to the accumulation of capital taking place in their resource-rich territories. The two main factors that have curtailed Adivasi autonomy through land alienation are analysed. The first is a process of agricultural colonization
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Struggles about class and Adivasi-ness in an eastern Indian steel plant Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Christian Strümpell
In the eastern Indian steel town of Rourkela, Adivasis are widely stereotyped as uneducated, jangli (‘wild’), and drinkers, and they are therefore held to make for a special type of worker. Their Adivasi ‘nature’ makes them an ideal fit for facing the heat, dust, and fumes in the so-called ‘hot shops’ of the local public-sector steel plant. It is also said that Adivasis are, in fact, not well suited
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The privilege of the Indian passport (1947–1967): Caste, class, and the afterlives of indenture in Indian diplomacy Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-07-11 Kalathmika Natarajan
This article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian
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Doing ‘coolie’ work in a ‘gentlemanly’ way: Gender and caste on the famine public works in colonial North India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Madhavi Jha
The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by regular famines and scarcities in India, and famine public works were one of the chief ways for the colonial state to provide relief. Famine public works involved labourers, including a large number of women, working in the construction of railways, roads, canals, and tanks in return for a subsistence wage. The present article contextualizes the
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Product, equipment, uniform: Material environment and the consumption of work in New Delhi, India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Garima Jaju
The article focuses on how low and lower-middle class youth employed in new private sector jobs in the booming service economy in Indian cities engage with the material environment of their workplace, and how, through their ‘aesthetic scrutiny’ of its materiality, come to ‘consume’ work. The setting is the store floor of a fast-expanding organized retail company, called Spexy, that sells budget eyewear
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Everyday rehearsal of death and the dilemmas of dying in super-ageing Japan Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-05-30 Heekyoung Kim
In recent years, a new trend of performing a ‘good death’ has swept Japanese society. Popular, especially among the elderly, shūkatsu (終活) refers to the phenomenon of preparing for one's own demise through various practices, in particular, the writing of an ‘ending note (エンディングノート)’. A will designates the beneficiaries of one's estate or property after one's passing, whereas an ending note not only
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Brahman wives and pedagogies of conscience in mid-nineteenth century British India Modern Asian Studies (IF 1.075) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Seth Koven
This article argues that from circa 1845–1857, British colonial officials and administrators, abetted by Protestant missionaries and some so-called ‘native Christians’, attempted to replace Brahmanical regulation of everyday life with what I am calling ‘governance by conscience’ in British India. It uses the 1851 legal ruling in Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae, hailed by some for bringing ‘liberty