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SAR - Recent Issues (Sage)
SAR - Recent Issues (Sage)Book Reviews: The Hindus: An Alternative Historyview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book Review: Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diasporaview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Transnationality, Hope and 'Recombinant Locality': Knowledge as Capital and ResourceThis article searches for sustainable methods of handling the stresses of globalising existence and contrasts two strategies of using knowledge as a form of capital or resource in different forms of ‘packaging from above’ and ‘packaging from below’. Taking the examples of appropriation of Vastuvidya in Europe and of Hindu worship of the Hawaiian Healing Stones, it is argued that such methods of re-packaging and the concept of ‘recombinant locality’ are strategically useful tools and devices to understand better how people may preserve glocalised spaces while opposing uniformising globalisation and capitalist domination. The article suggests that, in this way, structurally disadvantaged but hopeful and enterprising transnational individuals and groups may empower themselves to improve their ‘lifeworld’ in diaspora. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book Review: An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial Indiaview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Cosmopolitan Tribals: Frontier Migrants In DelhiBased on fieldwork, this article examines various aspects of tribal migration from the Northeast frontier of India to Delhi, a phenomenon which increased rapidly in the last half decade or so. This offers insights into four important interlinked processes. First, such migration indicates significant changes taking place in the Northeast itself. While many migrants leave the region to escape conflict, many more simply seek to find work, pursue education and fulfil changing aspirations. Second, tribal migration to Delhi reveals the ways in which the city itself has been changing. While tribal migrants search out employment opportunities in neoliberal capitalist spaces, employers in such spaces have specific reasons to desire tribal labour, particularly in shopping malls and call centres. Third, tribal migrants encounter racism and discrimination in Delhi and their experiences reveal how racial issues function and are debated today within India. Fourth, tribal migrants themselves embody the dramatic discord between the ways tribals see themselves and the ways they are perceived in India. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book Review: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asiaview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Mystic Rites For Permanent Class Conflict: The Bauls Of Bengal, Revolutionary Ideology And Post-CapitalismLocating itself amidst current debates on post-modern analyses of mysticism, particularly academic debates on the Bauls of Bengal, this article discusses issues of cultural transformation as a result of gentrification and globalisation. It combines the author’s ethnographic research and a methodology mainly derived from Italian Marxist critique (Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto de Martino, Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). The article examines the reification of mysticism and the process of ‘rehab’, as imposed by Bengali bourgeoisie via the Tagorian archetype and the Western show business on the Bauls, to cleanse their image from inconvenient traits. Suggesting an interpretation of radical materialist mystics as ‘multitude’ and viewing professional Bauls as ‘people’, this research explores how the construction of a myth has ultimately penetrated contemporary society at all levels, including academic circles. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Although the Preamble of the Constitution proclaims that ‘We the People’ have solemnly adopted and enacted it, there is almost no further mention of ‘the people’ in the constitutional text itself. Asking who are ‘the people’ in whose name the Indian Constitution was drafted, this article re-examines the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) and highlights the fragmented image of ‘the people’ as a multivocal, multivalent reflection of imaginations and expectations attributed to people within and behind the Constituent Assembly. It becomes obvious that the aspirations of the actual Constitution makers find clearer expression in the constitutional text than the perceptions of ‘the people’ in whose name such law making takes place. Using the lens of the social revolution that the Constitution was to bring about, the article clarifies the implications of this multiplicity of visions, distinguishing ‘We the People’ seeking to claim such unfulfilled constitutional promises today, on the one hand, and the functionaries obligated to translate constitutional promises into reality and to enforce them, on the other. Asking why it is that the ambitions of the latter find clearer expression in the constitutional text than those of the former, the article also poses deeper questions about representativeness of political institutions and about the strength and depth of Indian social reform agenda. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Suttee Sainthood through Selflessness: Pain of Repression or Power of Devotion?The immolation of Hindu widows has generated much horror while remaining tenaciously mixed with clandestine admiration. Reported in many eyewitness accounts and literary works, the topic has given rise to highly contested sociocultural, legal and ideological debates, strongly linked to women’s rights. But the root question has not gone away: is suttee/sati just painful female victimisation or can it also reflect powerful female agency and the power of devotion? This article examines two literary works, Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which an Englishwoman unreservedly idolises a suttee, and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala, where an Indian woman expresses deep pride in sutteehood. Engaging in a search for deeper meanings, this article asks what makes these two women writers revere a suttee so totally. Can one really be a suttee-saint through selflessness, or are there some deeper meanings yet to be uncovered? A wider political interpretation is suggested to re/present the root meaning of suttee. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book review: Many-Sided Wisdom: A New Politics of the Spiritview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Changing Frontiers: Making Deeper Sense of India-Bangladesh RelationsThis article focuses on patterns of the peopling of East Bengal from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries and analyses the dynamics of this process in terms of the migrants’ religious, social and political values. In this process, a number of boundaries were crossed, which South Asian Area Studies experts are still struggling to understand. Exploring this phenomenon of changing frontiers from a comparative historical perspective, the westward expansion of America during almost the same phase is analysed, showing similarities between the two phenomena, but also distinct dissimilarities. In Bengal, unlike America, there was no major violence involved and the migrations into Bengal were not at the cost of the native inhabitants, as largely happened in America. Arguing that, in grappling with the present Bangladesh–India relations, such historical knowledge is necessary, the article calls for greater interactions between intellectuals from both sides, which may be called Track III dialogue. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Developmental Initiatives and Sericulture in a South Indian VillageThis article demonstrates that certain developmental initiatives have been playing an important role in the socio-economic progress of rural masses in South India and typically involve a number of focused projects. Development of sericulture is shown as a key strategy for supporting backward regions. With particular reference to Kotha Indlu village of Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, this article explains the increased returns from sericulture as a result of development programmes. The article concludes with some suggestions to improve the long-term feasibility of sericulture. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book review: Identities and Histories: Women's Writing and Politics in Bengalview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Bengali Masculinity and the National-Masculine: Some Conjectures for InterpretationThis article examines how Bengali masculinity has been negotiated between national and ethnic/local notions of identity and suggests a new way of understanding this issue. Within the specific historiography of Bengali masculinity, concerns regarding physical strength, courage and virility of the Bengali male have been central tropes, challenged by the colonially constructed stereotype of the effeminate Bengali. The present article maps mainly nineteenth century discourses regarding Bengali masculinity and focuses on one particular strategy of three, namely, construction of a mode of mythic-historical discourse to reclaim a supposedly more masculine past for Bengali men. This suggests the notion of national-masculine as a gendered materialisation of the compensatory agency of Bengali masculinity. Shown to occur through the articulation of buddhibal in contrast with bahubal that negotiates with the hegemonic national-masculine, this throws new light on the emerging prominence of the bhadralok concept of a sophisticated Bengali gentleman. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Muslim Modernism and Trans-regional Consciousness in Bengal, 1911-1925: The Wide World of SamyabadiHistories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth century, this article examines how Muslim activists imagined their identity outside of and beyond normative frameworks such as nation or religious community. This article specifically analyses Samyabadi, a left-oriented journal published in Calcutta from 1922 to 1925, in the larger context of communist developments in Bengal and throughout India. The findings offer exciting support for new research approaches to regional and religious identity in late colonial South Asia. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book review: Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seductionview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Book review: The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennaiview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Colonial Law in Early British Malabar: Transparent Colonial State and Formality of PracticesThis article examines the development of colonial law in Malabar between 1792 and 1810. Within the historical context of emerging colonialism as a pivotal factor, it shows that there was no simple unilinear process in the making of colonial law in this region of India, but rather a series of continuities and discontinuities of practices. A clear shift in the logic of governance is identified, however, as new technologies of power, particularly writing and documentation, resulted in several formalities of practices in the making of the colonial state and legal system in India. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Hanne-Ruth Thompson, Bengali: A Comprehensive Grammar (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 774 pp.view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Gender Representation in U.R. Anantha Murthy's SamskaraAnantha Murthy’s novel Samskara has achieved translated recognition nationally and internationally as a modern classic of Indian literature. Though it has generated much critical comment, insufficient attention has been given to its gender representation. Discussions of the novel’s gender politics have either focused on its positive representations of feminine beauty and initiative or have taken a bleak view of its sexist arrangements. Re-scrutinising the novel’s gender representation through culturally coloured lenses, this article uncovers other sites of gender discrimination and identifies a subtext that can offer a more positive inflection to Samskara’s gender politics. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Hilary Synnott, Transforming Pakistan: Ways Out of Instability (London: Routledge and the International Institute of Strategic Studies [IISS], 2009), 198 ppview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Shalini Shankar, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), xi + 263 pp.view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Rollie Lal, Understanding China and India: Security Implications for the United States and the World (Westport, CT and London: Praeger Security International, 2006), 178 pp.view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Working Women Households And Time-Saving Consumption: Empirical Evidence From KeralaThis article explores the impact of labour force participation of Indian women on the consumption expenditure of their households. Field survey data were collected from working-wife and non-working wife households in Kerala, the state in India with the highest labour market participation of women in the organised sector. Differences in time-saving consumption expenditures of working and non-working wife households and different variables influencing consumption expenditures were researched. The study shows that among the variables which positively affect the time-saving consumption expenditure of the households, non-economic factors influence the time-saving consumption expenditure of the working-wife households more prominently than in non-working wife households. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Democracy and Political Islam in BangladeshThis article examines the deeply contested approaches of ‘political Islam’ towards modern democracy in Bangladesh, the third largest Muslim country in the world, where sharia law is not the source of public law and where a democratic government is in place. Selecting the political manifestos and constitutions of three different influential Islamist parties, the Jamat e Islami Bangladesh, Hizbut Tahrir Bangladesh and Jamatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, the study examines through discourse analysis why Islamists take such a hostile approach towards democracy. At first sight, Islamists desire the establishment of an alternative governing system, such as the Caliphate, to replace the present parliamentary system of governance in Bangladesh. Islamists also advocate a change of state philosophy from ‘People’s Republic of Bangladesh’ to an ‘Islamic State’, arguing that sharia should be the legal framework of the country. The key finding of this research, however, is that Political Islam in Bangladesh is also perceived as a reaction to globalisation and that this global aspect, in theory and practice, may be more powerful as a reactive agent than local/national politics. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Property, Authority and Personal Law: Waqf In Colonial South AsiaBritish rule in South Asia transformed the economy and society of the subcontinent, in large part by revamping the status of landed property. Colonial law was founded on the notion that ostensibly religious personal law was outside state jurisdiction. The boundary between state law and personal law, however, was blurry and some elements of ‘religious’ law had major implications for matters at the core of colonial policy, such as property control. This ambivalence produced a scenario in which legal debates became authorised spaces for colonial subjects to pursue their agendas. Taking the Muslim charitable trust, or waqf, in late colonial British India, this article argues that advocacy of substantive and procedural changes in waqf laws by Muslim legal activists repre-sented a pointed critique of colonial policies. Through a brief history of the articulation between charitable trusts and colonial property policies, the article draws from the work of two late colo-nial Muslim judges, Syed Ameer Ali and Faiz Badrudin Tyabji, to demonstrate the role waqf debates played in refashioning colonial legal culture. It is suggested that claims about waqf were both instrumental attempts to advance claims to property, and instances for articulating broader ideological critiques of the interpretative authority of British judges. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (New York: Oxford University Press 2010), x + 314 pp.view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Schooling the Muslim Nation: Muhammad Iqbal and Debates over Muslim Education in Colonial IndiaThis article examines Muhammad Iqbal’s critique of contemporary approaches towards Muslim education. In his writings, poetic and prose, Iqbal took on both the traditional religious authorities who administered the Madrasas and the modernists associated with the Aligarh College for failing to provide an education that was true to the ‘national character’ and to develop a synthesis of Islamic and western knowledge. While the former were criticised for ignoring modern intellectual developments, the latter were attacked for being intellectually captive to the West. At a broader level, this article employs Iqbal as a foil to debates over the empowering potential of western education. Iqbal’s views are examined against the background of attempts by Muslim intel-lectuals to negotiate between the adoption of a universal modern education and the development of an educational system that kept Muslims grounded in Islam and their ‘national character’. These negotiations took on a number of shapes, pedagogical and polemical as well as theological. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Deepak K. Singh, Stateless in South Asia: The Chakmas between Bangladesh and India (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2010), 289 ppview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Editorial: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Muslims in Colonial North-West Indiaview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Aloys Sprenger: German Orientalism'S 'Gift' to Delhi CollegeAloys Sprenger (1813–1893) was an Austrian scholar with a medical degree who joined the British East India Company’s medical service in order to pursue in India his real passion, the study of oriental literatures. He became the Principal of Delhi College in 1845, and presided over an experiment in learning at Delhi College, an institution that taught both eastern and western literatures and sciences through the medium of Urdu. The college attempted to bring about a creative synthesis of the two curricula, via an active programme of translation and publication. Sprenger helped launch a series of scholarly journals published by the college, thus contributing to the dissemination of knowledge and the nurturing of a group of students and faculty with whom he maintained an active correspondence after leaving the college. This collection of letters has not been adequately evaluated earlier as an indication of the collaboration between western and Indian intellectuals in the period before the revolt of 1857. Most accounts of Sprenger’s contributions to Delhi College have been laudatory. There was, however, a darker side to Sprenger’s stewardship that deserves elucidation. Based on archival research, the present article seeks to evaluate Sprenger’s ambiguous intellectual legacy to Delhi College and to the evolution of education in British India.1 view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Minna Saavala, Middle Class Moralities. Everyday Struggle Over Belonging and Prestige in India (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010), x + 226 ppview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Justice Mahmood and English Education in IndiaThis article traces the motif of English education in Justice Syed Mahmood’s intellectual history and demonstrates the dialogical nature of knowledge formation in British India. While his own educational experience at Cambridge University had a profound and lasting impact on his own conception of the nature and purpose of education, Mahmood transformed and adapted that experiential knowledge to serve his predominant public concerns. He was increasingly committed to arresting the perceived decline in social standing, political influence and above all educational competence of the Muslim community in India. Seeing government service as the birthright of the ashraf Muslim classes, he encouraged the creation of institutions that would facilitate the training of young men from fine families to become effective bureaucrats in the government machinery of British India. In all these endeavours, Mahmood considered the promotion of English education to be the key to real progress for individuals and for the Muslim community. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] A. Whitney Sanford, Singing Krishna. Sound Become Sight in Paramanand's Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), x + 207 ppview article | [South Asia Research recent issues] The Orientalist-Literati Relationship in the Northwest: G.W. Leitner, Muhammad Hussain Azad and the Rhetoric of Neo-orientalism in Colonial LahoreLahore emerged as a new intellectual centre in northwest India for British Orientalists and Indian intellectuals after the destruction of Delhi during the Great Revolt of 1857. Two prominent individuals who moved to Lahore at this time were Gottlieb Leitner, a philologist and Orientalist scholar, and Maulana Muhammad Hussain Azad, an Urdu poet, literary critic and teacher. Leitner, a naturalised British citizen who studied in Istanbul and completed higher education in Arabic and Turkish in London, became principal of the new Government College in Lahore in 1864. In this position, he exercised a deep influence on education in the northwest by promoting the development and study of vernacular (Urdu language) education, founding and leading a major scientific and literary organisation, the Anjuman-e Punjab. Having aroused strong British opposition, both to his ideas and his combative personality, Leitner’s support and assistance from the local literati allowed him to develop and implement his ideas. Leitner’s most significant partner was Muhammad Hussain Azad, also a new arrival to Lahore after fleeing Delhi in 1857. Leitner and Azad worked together in the Anjuman-e Punjab to promote their literary and social concerns. They became advocates of neo-Orientalist educational reforms through their public speeches and writing, including works in Urdu intended for, among others, the education of Maulvis. The bracketing of these European and Indian partners is conceptualised in this article through their roles as members of their respective communities as well as outsiders to these very communities. The analysis shows how their complex identities helped them to become highly influential figures in the new cultural environment of post-1857 Lahore. view article | [South Asia Research recent issues] Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), xi + 372 pp |
