The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 can be explained in pt by a failure of understanding on the part of the West Pakistani leadership of Pakistan, a seeming inability to recognize what the meaning of Pakistan was for Bengalis, and thus the cause of the demand for Bengali as a state language equal to Urdu. Exploration of the language issue in the period before and afterndependence helps to illuminate the divergence of belief about the form of the new state and the meaning of parity in representation between east and west wings of the country. The final tragedy of the attempted crushing of the movement for an autonomous Bangladesh is also in part an outcome of this pattern of belief, in particular the belief about the role of Hindus in the expression of Bengali identity.

We argue that the 2007 state elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest state, were the first “mass mobile phone” elections in India. The paper charts the spectacular growth of the cheap cell phone in India and in Uttar Pradesh, documents the organizational strengths of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and explains how a party once based on Dalit (ex-Untouchable, or Scheduled Caste) support was able to cooperate with Brahmins. In these processes the mobile phone acted as a remarkable “force multiplier” to the existing BSP organization and helped party workers to circumvent the general hostility of mainstream media. The paper does not contend that the mobile phone won the 2007 elections; rather, it argues that the BSP was able to exploit a potent new tool, ideally suited to poor people who often were limited in their ability to travel. The paper points to similarities with the Obama campaigns of 2008 and notes that though other political groups in India attempt to imitate the methods, they may lack the essential organization and dedicated workers.

This paper argues that Dalit consciousness in Punjab emerged against the backdrop of the teachings of Ravidass, an untouchable saint-poet of the North Indian Bhakti movement who presented a middle path between assimilation and radical separatism for the construction of a separate Dalit identity. Dera Sach Khand Ballan, one of the most popular Ravidass Deras in Punjab, played an important role in concretizing this path by chiseling the markers of a separate Dalit identity in the state. The author assesses the long-term implications of the newly emerged Dalit consciousness in Punjab for the deepening of democracy in India.

The pacific rim's record of impressive economic growth over the past twenty years is now well known. While most obvious in Japan, this expansion has been striking in the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs): Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. But it has also occurred to varying degrees in four of the original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. In addition to increases in overall output, each of these four economies has achieved a considerable degree of restructuring in favor of manufacturing and away from commodity production since the 1970s (e.g., Lee and Naya 1988:S134).

Accounts of the Indonesian nationalist movement customarily begin with the cultural and educational endeavors of westernized Javanese aristocrats in the first decades of this century. The enormous popular response generated by the first interinsular political movement, Sarekat Islam, in 1912–1920 is explained by a series of generalities about the social conditions of the Indonesian people. The importance of religion is acknowledged as a focus for opposition to colonial rule during the phase between the self-defense of traditional, relatively isolated, societies and modern nationalist movements. But information is lacking. As Berg regretted in 1932: “lack of data makes it almost impossible to define how deep this pan-Islamic current went in Indonesia.”

Reports from india's northeastern states—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura—rarely deal with the positive aspects of their institutional development processes. The national media mainly concentrates on the disquieting stories of unrest, insurgence, and violence. The negative portrait of this region offered by both the press and scholarly studies in India and abroad must be distressing for the people of the Northeastern region.

This paper suggests that an excessive preoccupation with violence and a narrow reading of the implications of insurgent violence on the part of the observers are responsible for a substantial misunderstanding of the Northeastern political processes. As a result, the positive aspects of community formation, the linkage of communities in wider political institutions as parts of the Northeastern administration and representative systems, and the contribution of these processes to the national systems remain largely unexplored. The history of insurgence is rarely narrated in the context of an equally long history of peace, social collaboration, political reconciliation, democratic participation, and innovations in institution-building and sustenance. Even the received narrative of violence is deeply flawed due to its frequent inability to attend to the possible rationality of forced desperation, and its insensitivity to the long-term constructive implications of many anti-authority struggles.

This paper offers an alternative paradigm to dynastic history and state formation with which to understand the formation of Chinese civilization: cultural hegemony. It argues that an elite culture first crystallized in the early second millennium BCE at Yanshi Erlitou in Henan Province in which bronze was associated with a set of religious practices centered on ancestral offerings. It established a cultural hegemony over the Chinese continental region by the middle of the millennium (early Shang Dynasty). Archaeologically, its primary markers are bronze vessels with a common set of motifs and ritual forms. Although cultural diversity and local political authority remained, it was unlike the previous Neolithic cultures because it had no challenger in range or influence. Moreover, it anticipated the later common elite culture, which in Confucius's time was defined in terms of shared rites. Thus, we may legitimately call it an early stage of “Chinese civilization.”

In our current moment, authoritarian figures loom large. One of them is Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. He seems to embody two notions of sovereignty. One is related to law, the other to norms: on the one hand, the power of taking exception to the former, deciding who will live and who will die; on the other hand, the freedom from the limits of the latter by way of dissipation, irresponsibility, and excess. This article explores the double sources of his power with reference to the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. While most of Foucault's work has focused on Europe, Mbembe has written about postcolonial conditions in ways that make critical use of Foucault. Drawing from their writings, this article situates Duterte as a “sovereign trickster” who seeks to dominate death while monopolizing laughter. Finally, this article speculates on the comparative usefulness of this figure of the sovereign trickster with regard to President Donald Trump, whose form of tricksterism derives, the author argues, from the tradition of blackface minstrelsy.

Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–1, Fuheng et al. QL 35/1/19). Shi, however, emerged from obscurity in 1765 when he and his father-in-law, a petty local leader, sided with Burma during the frontier wars of 1765–70 and attacked Qing territory. Shi, the Han ally of the Burmese, was later captured by Cao Xiu, the son of an indigenous “native official” (tusi) whose militia was patrolling the frontier at the behest of the Qing state.

How are we to understand the history of a nonmodern civilization without refracting and distorting what we see through the prism of the ostensibly individualistic and egalitarian modern culture in which most of us live and which we tend to take as normative? In this article I invite other modern-minded readers to turn our worldview upside down and look at Chinese society over the long term from the perspective of its official ideology and not from the perspective of a universalized modern worldview in which economic relations are privileged above all others.

When the philippines returned to democratic rule in 1986, two images emerged of the new democracy that were vastly different and often hard to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, many observers commented on the great extent to which the new democracy appeared merely to restore the country's previous democratic regime from between 1946 and the establishment of martial law in 1972 (Anderson 1988; McCoy 1994, 19; Wurfel 1988, 323). In this earlier democratic period, traditional political clans dominated the country's policy-making institutions and successfully blocked equity-enhancing reforms. Over the course of these decades, elite-dominated parties mastered the politics of clientelism, in which local power brokers delivered vote blocs to national politicians in exchange for the granting of particularistic favors and the blocking of progressive legislation. Fears of a restoration in the mid-1980s appeared well founded, both in the significant presence in the reopened legislature of the country's most powerful economic elites and in the resistance to agrarian and other reforms by the new president, Corazon Aquino, herself a member of a prominent land-owning family. In many respects, democratization in the 1980s marked the return to power of traditional politicians, or trapos, as they are popularly called, a word that also means “dishrag” in the Tagalog language.

On August 20th, 1917, Edwin Montagu declared in the House of Commons that: “the policy of His Majesty's Government … is that of the … gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” This announcement, more than any other single event, may properly be described as signalling the creation of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and the breakup of the third British Empire. It affirmed that a nonwhite portion of the empire could aspire to the same goal of self-government as the white colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had successively achieved.

The conflict between the theory of art for art's sake and the theory of purposive art is not of recent origin. In modern times however the Soviet Union has made a comprehensive experiment with the theory of purposive art, subordinating all artistic endeavors to socialist realism and partiinost—the party spirit. This experiment began when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party passed a resolution on April 23, 1932 creating a single Union of Soviet Writers (actually organized in 1934) and inviting the authors to join this Union while adhering to the doctrine of socialist realism in literature. Western literary critics have maintained that while the appreciable part of literature produced during the last thirty-five years “possesses artistic qualities of high worth” in its postwar development Soviet literature in general has simply become a “perfect propaganda instrument.”

The dictionary says that a prolegomenon is “a learned preface or preamble, … introductory or preliminary observations on the subject of a book.” And indeed, the remarks I am about to make are preliminary to a volume on state formation that Lloyd Rudolph and I hope to produce one of these years. Such a prolegomenon is also a commitment to a path of action, a justification, a polemic in favor of what one proposes to do. Today, I want to speak for the domain of comparison.

The suicide rate in Sri Lanka tripled between 1955 and 1974, soaring from 6.9 to 22.1 per 100,000 population. Sharp increases were recorded for both sexes, most age groups, and all of the nation's twenty-two districts. The incidence of suicide was greatest in the age range of 15 to 29 years. High rates consistently appeared in the districts of the northeast that either contained local majorities of the Sri Lanka Tamil ethnic minority or experienced rapid population growth due to heavy in-migration. The rising suicide rate may be related to the growing competition for education and careers, high unemployment, internal migration, and the increasing age at marriage, all of which contribute to the fundamental dislocation of a once more stable and predictable society.

In studying the ideas of Sung Neo-Confucians, scholars have made much use of the so-called yü-lu texts, or “records of conversations.” Disciples, sitting in the presence of their master, would record his exchanges with them; less frequently they would jot them down later from memory. The ideas of many of the foremost thinkers of the Sung dynasty (960–1279) are better known to us as a result of the stenographic efforts of their disciples: the teachings of Chang Tsai (1020–1077), Cheng I (1032–1107), Cheng Hao (1032–1085), Hsieh Liang-tso (1050–1103), Yang Shih (1053–1135), Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–1193), and Chu Hsi (1130–1200), to name but a few, were transmitted to later generations in yü-lu, recorded and edited by devoted followers.

This article explores Robert Bellah's engagement with Japan in formulating his communitarian critique of American individualism. Bellah's early contribution to post–World War II modernization studies, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, embraced the Weberian framework of social development, but it also described a system that departed from Weber's narrative of liberalization and rationalization in important ways. Bellah argued that in early modern Japan, the profit motive was contained by social obligations and ethical rules. Through his explorations of Japan, Bellah articulated a critique of liberal individualism, drawing on Japanese cultural nationalism in his search for a modern, capitalist system that could be contained by overarching cultural and moral values. One finds a surprising resonance between Bellah's ideal of American “civil religion” and the ideas of interwar philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and Watsuji's own critique of liberalism and popular democracy as lacking cultural foundations. Bellah's engagement with Watsuji reveals the tensions within Bellah's thought and in his subsequent call for community in America as a means of overcoming the excesses of American individualism. This article considers both the contributions and the limits of Bellah's attempt to invoke Japan as an alternative modernity in Japan studies.

Malaysia's plans to become a transnational hub for Islamic finance represent an effort to mobilize religion to create new global networks for the circulation of capital. This article first contextualizes such efforts within the broader contours of Malaysia's political history, addressing the classification of ethnicity and religion by both the colonial and postcolonial states. The article describes how Islamic finance is defined by practitioners in Malaysia and explains the key features they invoke to distinguish it from what they call “conventional finance”. Finally, it identifies the steps undertaken by the state to make the country a global center of Islamic finance. As the recent financial crises have shaken confidence in North Atlantic financial systems, Malaysia is geographically and culturally well-positioned between two emergent economic regions currently at the forefront of global economic growth.

According to prevailing historical opinion, the United States made reasonable claims against China after the Boxer rising in 1900 and later spontaneously remitted the surplus indemnity as an act of friendship. In gratitude, the Chinese freely determined to use the returned funds to educate Chinese in the United States. The records of the Chinese foreign office and the Department of State suggest a different story. In 1901 John Hay intentionally inflated American claims against China despite protests that his demand of $25,000,000 was excessive (in fact twice real claims). After three years of persistent effort, the Chinese Minister to the United States committed the reluctant Roosevelt administration to return of the surplus. But W. W. Rockhill, the Minister in Peking, feared the Chinese would squander the money and campaigned to have the funds devoted exclusively to education even though the Chinese government preferred projects of more immediate benefit. In 1908 Yuan Shih-k'ai and Hsu Shih-ch'ang sent a subordinate, T'ang Shao-i, to Washington to propose use of the funds in Manchuria. However, the Roosevelt administration, already won by the education scheme, rebuffed T'ang. The remission was accomplished essentially on American terms in 1909.

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.