The subject of this essay—better so labeled than as a research paper—is too broad to permit more than a sweeping as well as selective treatment in the short space of a journal article. It may nevertheless be worth presenting in those terms, painting with an overly broad brush on too large a canvas perhaps, but attempting through its scope to relate as parts of a common phenomenon events and patterns in separate areas. Such an effort may help to throw light on an aspect of the grand design of European colonialism in Asia and on some of its consequences. These were different in each area and some of the differences, notably between China and the rest of Asia, may be instructive as they can help us better to understand idiosyncratic aspects of the diverse history of modern Asia. But the similarities in events, patterns, and consequences which such a gross comparison can also illustrate may be equally instructive, and often overlooked. India's modern history and China's, Japan's, and Southeast Asia's, are for good reasons commonly examined separately by separate specialists. Many politically conscious Asians of the colonial or semi-colonial period, and most of the colonialists themselves, did not see Asia that way but more nearly as a single system, for all its regional variety, on which the overt and implicit force of the modern West as an alien system was attempting to impinge.

This essay traces the colonial origins of the concept of endogamy and its history as a foundational idea in the modern study of society in South Asia. The history of the concept of endogamy reveals how the control of female sexuality shaped the overlapping fields of Indology and ethnology. The invention and deployment of endogamy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is discussed in the writings of key colonial writers and British administrators, such as J. F. McLennan and H. H. Risley, and Indian intellectuals, including S. V. Ketkar and B. R. Ambedkar. It argues that the modern study of caste naturalized the control of female sexuality through the uncritical use of the concept of endogamy, which Ambedkar diagnosed as the irresolvable problem of the “Surplus Woman” in 1917. The essay reflects on the long life of endogamy and the enduring problem of nonconjugal sexuality in modern social theories of South Asia.

This article presents a series of statistical tests of the spatial framework offered by G. W. Skinner for use in analyzing Chinese history. Skinner argues that China is best viewed as a collection of nine distinct economic regions, each composed of a core and periphery. The authors use discriminant analysis, a multivariant statistical technique, and a twentieth-century Chinese data set to test the relevance of this view empirically. Their tests show that the Skinner framework is not supported by the data, and therefore they conclude that the model's contribution to the historical analysis of China is questionable.

Circumscribing the place of taoists in Chinese society is not straightforward for any period: honored by emperors and members of the nobility, they were scorned, as a rule, by literati-officials and treated with a mixture of reverence and familiarity by ordinary people. The paradoxical strength of passivity, the power of compliance, and the endurance of the peripheral already form a central theme in the mystical writings gathered in the fourth and third century b.c.Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The Taoism of these ancient texts advanced a doctrine of liberation through submission, of control by means of noninterference, and of transcendence as a result of physiological and mental regimens. The ideal of liberation from the physical, epistemological, and social constraints of the human condition in time translated into a quest for immortality which, by the Ch'in unification of the empire, became quite explicit. Huang-Lao thought, named for the Yellow Emperor and patron of the immortals (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu, dominated court politics from this period through the middle of the second century b.c.

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.

Over the last thirty years or so, there has been a broad consensus about what constitutes modern forms of Theravāda Buddhism. “Buddhist modernism,” as it has been called, has been marked by an understanding of the Buddha's thought as in accord with scientific rationalism; increased lay participation, particularly in meditation practice and leadership of the Buddhist community; and increased participation by women in the leadership of the Sangha. In this paper, I call into question the universality of these forms by examining a contemporary Theravāda Buddhist community in southwest China, where Buddhism is best understood within the context of the modern governance practices of the Chinese state. Buddhists of the region describe their knowledge and practices not in terms of scientific rationality, for example, but within the ethnic categories of the Chinese state. I suggest that instead of understanding modern forms of Buddhism as a natural response to modernity, scholars should pay attention to how Buddhist institutions shift within the context of modern forms of state power.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government, led by Narendra Modi, imposed a stringent lockdown with only four hours notice. It paid no attention to the millions of migrants who work on a temporary basis in Indian cities. Most lost their livelihoods as a result of the lockdown, and millions sought to return to their native villages. At the same time, the rural economy confronted its own difficulties caused by the lockdown. The relief that the Modi government offered to the large numbers of poor people who had been adversely affected by its response to COVID-19 was limited and poorly delivered. The episode showed the lack of responsiveness of Indian democracy to the needs of working people and the failures of development. Yet Modi's particular brand of authoritarian populism worked so well that a government displaying very little compassion retained strong popular support.

Chinese have been immigrating to Siam for at least six centuries. We are concerned here with the process whereby the descendants of Chinese immigrants become full members of Thai society. Assimilation is, of course, a social process. For the descendants of a given immigrant, its progress is defined by increasing social intercourse with members of Thai society, first public and then private and intimate; and by self-identification in an ever larger proportion of social situations as Thai rather than Chinese. Since social interaction is based on linguistic communication, assimilation perforce involves a command of the Thai language. Taking over the language of the society with which immigrants are in contact is but one part of acculturation, that is, the progressive incorporation of the way of life of the other society. While extensive acculturation can take place without complete assimilation, complete assimilation is inevitably accompanied or closely followed by fairly full acculturation. For our purposes here, assimilation is considered complete when the immigrant's descendant identifies himself in almost all social situations as a Thai, speaks the Thai language habitually and with native fluency, and interacts by choice with Thai more often than with Chinese.

Aside from its current significance, the recent report from Taiwan announcing the inauguration of a new urban land tax grogram based upon the teachings of Sun Yat-sen serves to reawaken interest in one of his most controversial doctrines—the min sheng principle. The use of Sun's pʻing-chün ti-chʻüan—“equalization of land rights”—as a specifically urban taxation device raises a question concerning the original scope and purpose of this major aspect of the min sheng program. Taken by itself, “equalization of land rights” has an agrarian land tenure reform connotation, and has often been associated with land redistribution, some of its alternative translations being “equitable redistribution of the land” and more recently “proportionalization of the land.” Yet a study of Sun's prolific expositions of this theme starting with the Tʻung Meng Hui manifesto of 1905 down through the first year of the Republic when he was most actively concerned with the promotion of min sheng fails to substantiate the agrarian reform interpretation. On the contrary, according to the available sources for this period, there are few explicit references to the excesses of rural landlordism and the maldistribution of landholdings which in 1924 finally prompted Sun publicly to declare a “land to the tiller” policy. During this formative period for Kuomintang ideology, Sun's use of “equalization of land rights,” and the Western doctrines from which it was derived, indicate a definite preoccupation with the potential problems of a future capitalist order rather than concern with the aberrations of China's current agrarian structure.

In 1956, eight years after political independence was secured for Sri Lanka, a major transformation was effected through the ballot. A confederation of forces led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) under S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike turfed the United National Party (UNP) and its right wing, English-educated leadership out of office. These forces represented a groundswell of the underprivileged against the privileged, and, as such, represented a radical socialist thrust. They also included a powerful strand of Sinhala nativism, i.e., of cultural nationalism, which made Sinhala the language of administration and which espoused conspiracy theories directed against the influence wielded by Catholic cabals. This body of thought has been described in the literature as “Sinhala linguistic nationalism” and “Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.” What requires underlining here is the fact that this ideological corpus had previously been in a defensive position because it was deemed a “communalism.” But, now, in 1956, the majoritarian sanction of a populist and radical victory converted it into a nationalism (see Roberts 1994, 258–59, 263–64, and ch. 12)–a force which some scholars, standing in the mid-1990s, would redefine as “chauvinism.”

The Deccan Riots of 1875 highlight the social transformations brought about in rural Maharashtra in western India during the first five decades of British rule. The riots are of special interest to the social historian since they hinged upon relations between two important and well defined rural social groups, namely, the cultivators and the moneylenders. This paper will focus on the social changes which precipitated this conflict. I shall also attempt to link these changes with the social ideals and the political objectives which inspired the new rulers of Maharashtra and determined their administrative policy.

This article looks at efforts to revitalize “tradition” (in Indonesian, adat) among the Tobelo people in the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku in the aftermath of the ethnic and religious violence that swept the region in 1999–2001. It examines how some groups in Tobelo society are attempting to revive previously marginalized adat practices as a way to facilitate reconciliation between Muslim and Christian communities. Those involved in these efforts believe that a revitalization of adat will shift people's focus of identity from their religion—the focus of the recent conflict—to their ethnicity. They hope this shift in focus will transcend religious differences. The paper explores these attempts to articulate Tobelo tradition and Tobelo identity in order to prevent future violence. It also discusses the rationales and historical justifications for seeing adat as a mechanism for reconciliation and conflict prevention.

Although Punjab experienced serious violence during the 1947 partition, no one died in Malerkotla. This peace at partition is central to the collective identity of the town, founded in 1454 by a Sufi saint. Focusing on the power of the saint, his tomb shrine, and his multireligious cult, this study demonstrates how Malerkotla's idealized reputation is produced and perpetuated. Through ritual exchanges and oral and written accounts, residents and pilgrims integrate the partition experience into the history of the saint and his town, so that this moment comes to symbolize Malerkotla's pacific civic identity.

The article focuses on the spiritual capital negotiated in the Indian-Indonesian networks of an Indian Hindu missionary currently living in Bali. These networks bridge different social groups and thereby foster—like the American mainline Protestant churches examined by Robert Putnam—the conditions for transnational community building and commerce. The value of spiritual capital is gauged against the backdrop defined by the rise of Hindu nationalism and a new economic agenda in India since the end of the 1980s. Parallel to these developments, Indonesian Hindus began to grow wary of the growing influence of Islam and Islamism in their country.

Studies of the early Khmer empire have so far been inevitably concerned with establishing the chronological structure of its history and with its religious institutions, of which much is now known. Other areas of inquiry have tended to be postponed in order to undertake these basic tasks, and the impression may exist that the inscriptions, which are the principal documents for such research, contain no other types of information. This impression is ill-founded. The extensive library of translated Cambodian inscriptions, available in the Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient and, above all, in Professor Cœdès' Inscriptions du Cambodge, contains a storehouse of material relevant to studies of Khmer social and economic institutions as well as to further work in political and religious affairs. Professor Cœdès himself has called for continuing research in these epigraphic materials. Such studies promise exciting contributions to the scholar's understanding of the Angkor monarchy, and of earlier Southeast Asia in general.

Richard Solomon's book Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture is a pioneering effort to interpret the Chinese Communist revolution and its revolutionary social policy by using the emergent methodology of “political culture.” Although it poses several valuable questions, the author's command of the traditional Chinese civilization is inadequate to inform his judgment. Information about literacy in traditional China is mis-used, and the extent and content of education is misunderstood. Various cultural features, e.g. the Chinese counterpart to the West's Oedipal myth, are introduced but their import is erroneously explained. Family values are mistakenly interpreted in relation to the Confucian Great Tradition. The inadequacy of Solomon's handling of such cultural information casts doubts on the validity of the entire book.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome.

In a scene in the genre-bending documentary film The Act of Killing (2012), a journalist, Soaduon Siregar, claims to have a sudden insight while standing in a film studio. Having just watched two executioners reenact their deeds of 1965–66 before a camera, he realizes why he had never known that they had garroted hundreds of detainees when he was working with them in the same building. His old friends had been so “smooth” (he used the English word) that he had not noticed them running a human abattoir upstairs. One of the executioners standing in the studio with crude makeup plastered on his face, Adi Zulkardy, is incredulous and insists Siregar must have known since even the neighbors heard the screams of the victims: “It was an open secret (rahasia umum).” When the director of the film, Joshua Oppenheimer, interjects, noting that Siregar's longtime boss at the local newspaper had already admitted to being an interrogator who decided which detainees were to die, Siregar becomes only more adamant in denying any knowledge of the killing.

This essay argues that to understand twentieth-century Khmer-Vietnamese ethnic antagonism, the contest for the lower Mekong Delta (in today's Vietnam) since the mid-eighteenth century has been key. It argues, however, that while this pre-1945 background can explain antagonism, it cannot sufficiently explain the violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that occurred after 1945. For that, the First Indochina War (1945–54) and decolonization marked a turning point. This period saw the creation of a dynamic of violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that hardened ethnic antagonisms, shaped the character of the war, and affected arguments over sovereignty. This dynamic of violence also contributed, in the long run, to a common Cambodian antagonism to the Vietnamese, including that of the Khmer Rouge.