The development of Indonesian as a new national language is closely linked to the development of Indonesia as a new nation, but the Indonesian language has only rarely been studied as a part of larger patterns of social and cultural change. An overview of the language situation in Jakarta, Indonesia's center and capital, highlights linguistic continuities and discontinuities between that modern speech community and the traditional culture of the dominant Indonesian ethnic group, the Javanese. The speech repertoires of Jakartans do not resemble the well-known Javanese speech levels, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, but they are better described with the widely known sociolinguistic concept of diglossia. This relatively abstract characterization can be complemented by a study of patterns of borrowing into Indonesian from foreign languages, which may reflect long-standing indigenous attitudes toward power and the use of foreign linguistic codes. Different aspects of the rapidly changing linguistic situation in Jakarta may reflect on the emerging national language and culture.

Riots, rebellions, and other disturbances have broken out periodically in most parts of South Asia in modern times. Both early resistance to British rule and the religious and nationalist violence of the later colonial period have attracted a good deal of attention from scholars. One of the general trends apparent from this research is the weakening of distinctions among “communal,” “economic,” and “political” disturbances, and detailed studies have emphasized the ambiguity of most riots. Ostensibly religious affrays often reflected more general social and economic tensions, while the expression of economic grievances was often channeled by cultural or political beliefs.

An estimated seven and a half million people died of starvation and related diseases in China, Vietnam, and India during the last half of the Second World War. This death toll reflected the severity with which the poor were affected by the combination of natural disaster, military imperative, political conflict, economic dislocation, and corruption that caused these famines. But famine mortality is also a function of the effectiveness of the relief system. The famines in China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, occurred in times of administrative disruption. During the Bengal famine of 1943, however, the central and provincial administrations were intact, if under strain, as the Japanese army tested the eastern defenses of India. Moreover, the Bengal government had recently revised the instructions for bringing relief to those affected by famine. The possibility of an ordered administrative response to the crisis means that the analysis of this operation provides an opportunity to make a contribution to the general understanding of famine relief.

Xuanwei, a county-level municipality (xianji shi) located in the northeastern corner of Yunnan province, has nothing remarkable to boast. It is, of course, one of the largest counties in China and “home of the Yunnan ham.” Xuanwei is even the native place of Zhuo Lin, wife of the late Deng Xiaoping. Such trivia apart, Xuanwei's vital statistics read as a microcosm of interior China that moreover cover a wide variety of ecological and socioeconomic regimes. For mainly this reason, Stig Thøgersen of Aarhus University and I decided in 1998 that Xuanwei's unremarkable status made it the ideal rural inland fieldwork site that we sought for European researchers.

The history of Indonesia in the last two or three decades of Dutch colonial rule still has to be written, and it can only be written when the abundant archival materials for this period, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands, come to be opened up for scholarly investigation. Scholars who, since the Second World War, have turned their attention to modern Indonesian history have tended to focus on the development of Indonesian nationalism, and for understandable reasons. The Indonesian Revolution, crowned by the attainment of Indonesian independence in 1949, rendered an understanding of the Indonesian nationalist movement in colonial times imperative not only to Indonesian historians attempting to come to grips with their country's recent past but also to an ever-increasing number of foreign students. Welcome as this ongoing re-examination of Indonesian nationalism is, it, too, must remain incomplete until documentary evidence, whether archival or (auto)-biographical, can substantially enrich it.

One of the topics of Chinese history that deserves greater attention is the nature and direction of the expansion of the Chinese people beyond the geographical confines of China. It is a subject which, for want of more information, is still so cloaked in generalities as to present the misleading impression that the Chinese have always been a landbound people oriented towards the land frontier of the north and northwest. A Western scholar, for example, has written: “China has never been a sea-power because nothing has ever induced her people to be otherwise than landmen, and landmen dependent on agriculture with the same habit and ways of thinking drilled into them through forty centuries.” In a recent work we find this statement: “Essentially a land people, the Chinese cannot be considered as having possessed seapower…. The attention of the Chinese through the centuries has been turned inward towards Central Asia rather than outward, and their knowledge of the seas which washed their coast was extremely small.”

The Zaibatsu are said to be reviving in Japan. In his widely-read Nippon Keizai Nyumon (Introduction to the Japanese Economy) Professor Nagasu wrote in 1959:

The Zaibatsu have steadily built their power and have revived. No, more than that. Before the war, the Zaibatsu had to share their hegemony with large landowners and were under the Emperor and the militarists, but now there are no militarists or large landowners. The Emperor, too, has become an accessory. The power of Japan now rests squarely in the hands of the Zaibatsu, the sponsors of the Conservative Party.

Policymakers in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are situated at the top of what is essentially, despite reforms, a communist system—with an ideology that is the point of reference for what is admissible action, a communist party that monopolizes political power, an economy that remains in large part centrally planned, and a coercive apparatus that effectively penetrates urban society. Top leaders in Beijing have available to implement their policies several massive bureaucracies in which relations of authority are clearly delineated.

This paper analyzes multi-layered religious practices among local Buddhist Karen on the plains of Karen State in Burma, within the context of the larger socio-political dynamics of Burmese Buddhism. The purpose is threefold: first, to give ethnographic details of the hybrid nature of religious practices among Buddhist Pwo Karen, thereby demonstrating how sacred space and power are contested, despite the strong hand of the state; second, to challenge the assumed equation between non-Buddhist minorities on the one hand, and Buddhists as a lowland majority aligned to the state on the other; and third, to raise an alternative understanding to predominantly state-centered perspectives on Theravada Buddhism. Field-based observations on the young charismatic Phu Taki and his community, as well as on the practice of pagoda worship called Duwae that has hitherto been undocumented are presented. These are examined in relation to the changing religious policies of the regime, especially since the policies of “Myanmafication” of Buddhism by the reformist council began in 1980.

In the late 1930s, three groups of Sino-Muslims went on hajj trips to Mecca. Two of them represented the Republic of China, while one represented the puppet government in Japanese-occupied North China. Reflecting the political importance of the Muslim population in the Sino-Japanese struggle, each group engaged in propaganda efforts for its government. However the Sino-Muslims who participated in these missions were not merely the passive pawns of Chinese authorities. Rather, archival material and published sources in Chinese and Arabic show that Sino-Muslims actively used these missions to advance a vision of the Chinese nation in which Muslims would play an important role in domestic and foreign affairs. This vision was based on a particular understanding of global politics which allowed Sino-Muslim elites to reconcile the transnational characteristic of Islam with loyalty to the territorially bound “Chinese nation.”

How do ordinary people of India adapt themselves to the Hindu theory of karma and rebirth? It is said that these concepts justify and reconcile Hindus to the inequalities of the caste system and that they result in fatalism and “other-worldiness.” These, in turn, are said to obstruct interest in modernization and progress. Although hypotheses such as these have been formulated by students of Hindu texts (Singer, 1961; Weber, 1958; Schweitzer, 1936), there have been few investigations of the living contexts within which Hindu philosophical ideas operate.

Beginning in 1892 Prince Damrong as minister of the interior in King Chulalongkorn's reformed government began a reorganization of provincial administration. At that time the country was divided into provinces of four different classes and vassal states. The latter were recognized as quasi-independent under their own hereditary ruling families, and many of the former, although in theory completely subordinate to the capital were in fact ruled by local elite families in which the governorship remained from one generation to the next. Over this structure Prince Damrong established the monthon as a supra-provincial unit headed by an appointed official from the central government bureaucracy, and within a few years was able to replace the old-style hereditary governors with appointed officials changed at frequent intervals. The elite families of the different regions appear to have been affected in different ways. The old rulers of the vassal states kept their nominal positions until death. Many of the governing elite of the southern provinces maintained themselves in the national bureaucracy in positions of comparable rank. The greatest change was in the northeast where the governing elite families lost their old positions and were unable to integrate into the reformed bureaucracy.

The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion?

In a bookstore in delhi, a salesman, apprised of my interest in lower-caste politics, handed me a tome about the officially listed Dalit, or untouchable, groups, The Scheduled Castes (Singh 1995). The first thing to strike me was the cover, a glossy photograph of a presumably Scheduled Caste woman with her back against a tall stone wall, surrounded by her four grubby kids. She is beaming. The second thing to strike me was the title of this new series, of which this was the second volume. The series, by the central government's Anthropological Survey of India, was called the People of India, a name that had been used for several rather notorious colonial ethnographic projects. Intrigued, I began to examine this most recent avatar of the People of India.

This paper addresses the problematic birth of the Malayalam language of Kerala in medieval South India. I say “problematic” because, of course, languages are never really born. Indeed, the dominant tradition of language genesis in India long asserted that all languages there only gradually arose by degenerate mutation out of the primordially beginningless Sanskrit. If there is a general truth to be found here, it is that since there are no human communities without speech, novel forms of language must always be emergent from earlier forms. Language genesis is thus always a matter of linguistic differentiation, away from some standard and towards another. But the sustained contrivance of these particular claims for Sanskrit also reflects another linguistic truth: that languages and their constituent elements are routinely shaped, conditioned, and ideologically figured by being themselves made into objects of discourse. In terms of language differentiation, this means the continuum of transformations that may at some point coalesce into a claim for linguistic separateness is always modeled and monitored in and through language itself. The reflexive or metalinguistic nature of this process, however, is always contextually oriented to the social fields in which it operates, so that the ideological positions and interests in those fields tend to carry over into the discursive products of a language and its literature. This study will attempt to highlight the web of relations among language varieties, ideologies, social contexts, and identities, as documented in a treatise on the language of medieval Kerala when that region first raised its claims for a distinctive linguistic identity.

The shrine constructed in 1498 to the faithful widow Qian of Changshu county (modern Jiangsu province) gave her a place in local history that no woman had occupied before. Though the ideal of widow-fidelity was nearly two millennia old and was understood to be part of “Confucian” (ru) teaching, it had always been expressed more as precept than as practice. Earlier communities rarely congratulated themselves on their faithful widows; even widows whom the emperor had honored were generally recorded in the dynastic rather than the local histories. But the widow Qian, who committed suicide in 1435 upon the death of her husband, was celebrated in prose and poetry, written up in the county history, and granted a shrine with the same spring and autumn sacrifices that the government accorded enshrined men. Now she was a visible part of the ritual landscape, with a corresponding multiplier effect on her iconic power.

In the early twentieth century, Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, was a philosophy premised on exclusivist notions of “nation-ness” and “nation-state-ness.” India, proponents claimed, had since the earliest times been the pitrabhumi and the punyabhumi of Hindus—their fatherland and holy land. This ideal realm was corrupted by Muslim and Christian “invaders,” foreigners who defiled and split asunder “Akhand Hindustan,” the one India of Hindus. In the context of British rule of the subcontinent, Hindu nationalists mirrored colonial claims and held up the native princely states as exemplars of “tradition,” as territories unspoiled by foreign hands and thus representative of the “true India.” The idea behind Akhand Hindustan came from a prominent member of the princely state bureaucracy, K. M. Munshi. Here the author explores how and why princely states were idealized in the Hindu imaginary and what role reformers, particularly Munshi, played in perpetuating this hard-line ideology. By exploring the regions on which early Hindu nationalism was mapped, the author illuminates the teleology of Hindutva while providing a better understanding of the place of princely states in the politics and society of colonial India.

The second half of the twentieth century may be remembered by Chinese archaeologists as the Golden Age of their discipline. A unique combination of factors and circumstances has produced, and will probably continue to produce for a time, enormous amounts of new material for the study of Chinese prehistory and history. These factors and circumstances include a deep-rooted interest of the Chinese people in their past, not only for its own sake but also for guidance, as lesson; the introduction, in the first half of the century, of Western archaeological science; systematic, large-scale, and sustained national projects to construct roads, canals, reservoirs, and buildings throughout China; and a conscious and conscientious effort to include archaeology as an important part of the political education of the people. This sudden flood of new data—most hitherto unknown, and many unexpected and almost unimaginable—provides unprecedented opportunities for gaining new and much richer knowledge of China's past. China scholars will be busy coping with the new materials for decades to come. They should count themselves extremely lucky, for such opportunities are not likely to arise again after the present century; archaeological relics are a limited resource, even in China.