On june 30, 1990, between twenty-five and thirty thousand people took to the streets of downtown Kathmandu to protest the possibility that a new constitution, then being drafted, might reassert Nepal's official legal identity as a Hindu kingdom. Carrying banners and chanting slogans, they demanded the country's redefinition as a secular state. The march was arguably the largest demonstration in modern Nepali history, with protestors representing a range of religious, ethnic, political, and cultural groups. Even more significant, the marchers explicitly rejected the longstanding alliance between religion and the state in Nepal by challenging the interpolation of Brahmanical Hinduism into the country's political and civil institutions, and its centrality to Nepali nationalism as a collective identity.

T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to “find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people” (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as the South Asian community of Parsi Zoroastrian interpreters has changed. Much about this story echoes the experience of other South Asian communities: as the Btitish rose to dominance and their missionaries strove to teach Parsis that theirs was an inferior, weaker faith, Parsis began to represent their religion as similar to that of the Protestant Christians, even while steadfastly refusing (for the most part) to convett.

As part of the 1996–97 Fiftieth Jubilee celebrations, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej published his version of the Mahajanaka Jataka, one of the many stories of the Buddha's former lives in the Theravada Buddhist tradition (Bhumibol 1996). The publication, in both English and Thai and complete with lavish illustrations, was heavily promoted by various agencies of the bureaucracy (especially in the media and the schools) and met with much public acclaim. Several editions of the book were published, including a cartoon version for younger readers (Bhumibol 1999). Tapes and CDs with readings of the story were released, and commemorative medallions were also available with purchases of the book. A musical version of the story was created and public performances held, with a number of the princesses involved in the production. The tale is of Prince Mahajanaka, who, though forced into exile, through his great perseverance (viriya parami) is able to return to his kingdom, claim his rightful throne, and bring prosperity to his subjects.

In recent analyses of nationalism in colonial South Asia, Partha Chatterjee and Tanika Sarkar, among others, have argued that as a result of colonial domination in the “public sphere”—the realm of the state and civil society—Indian male nationalists deployed the “private sphere”—the realm of the home—as the discursive site of anticolonial nationalist imaginaries. The internal space of the home was “the one sphere where improvement could be made through [Indian men's] own initiative, changes could be wrought, where education would bring forth concrete, manipulable, desired results” (Sarkar 1992, 224; Chatterjee 1989) and it therefore took on “compensatory significance” in the experience of modernity in India (Chakrabarty 2000, 215–18).

Actors were luxury goods traded among the elite in late Ming and early Qing China. Not only individual actors but entire troupes were sold, bestowed upon friends, and bequeathed upon relatives. Their circulation served to create and maintain networks of social exchange, in much the same manner as did gifts of fine ceramic ware, calligraphic scrolls, and ancient bronzes. The cultural prestige of the actor as a luxury good, in turn, was predicated on a highly refined discourse of connoisseurship. For example, the theater aficionado Pan Zhiheng's (1556–1622) disquisitions on the art of acting were collected in a volume entitled Chongding xinshang pian (Recompiled texts on connoisseurship), published between 1600 and 1640 (Clunas 1991, 36). In this essay, I discuss the social significance of the connoisseurship of the actor, examining the exchange of actors and poems among a rarefied stratum of the mid-seventeenth-century elite.