This essay studies the practice of cultural translation in colonial Taiwanese cinematic space. Just as the Japanese translation of Western cinema brings into play traces of Japanese otherness, the Taiwanese translation of the Japanese translation disrupts the Japanese monopoly on the meaning of cinematic experience in colonial Taiwan. A key figure in this complex cultural translation was the benshi, a translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret the film for the audience. This study argues that an overemphasis on the interventional power of the benshi's word does not do justice to the complex role of the benshi as a translator. In spite of its inscription of the cultural specific in the cinematic space, the presence of the benshi is also a reminder of an unfulfilled desire: the desire for the (foreign) image and the desire for the other. Insofar as the act of translation is a critical engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration of local resistance does not help us fully address the complexity of cultural translation that defines the mediascape of the modern age.

In 1915, riots broke out in the British colony of Ceylon, the climax of a controversy between Sinhalese Buddhists and a new clement among the commercial “Moors” (Muslims). A court ruling disappointing to the Buddhists, combined with economic complaints against Moors in this centenary of British conquest, led to a communal clash in Kandy during Wesak (Buddha's birthday) in May 1915. During the following two weeks, the riots spread to Colombo and along the west coast, greed increasingly matching creed as a prime motive.

The colonial government reacted slowly, allowing disorder to spread, and then changed to a policy of heavy repression of a presumed anti-British uprising at a time the Empire was fighting for survival.

Three months of martial law ensued, more deaths caused by police and military action than had occurred during the actual riots. Prominent citizens were arrested without cause. Shoot-on-sight orders were issued, and over 8000 were arrested and imprisoned. This colonial maladministration reflected the gap between officialdom and the colonial peoples. Little evidence of a general plot against government came to light. Since, however, headmen, monks and traders had planned anti-Moor action, especially in coastal areas, the question of conspiracy remains unsettled.

The 1915 Riots in Ceylon seriously undermined Ceylonese confidence in British justice, led to peaceful mass protests and a mission to London, and stimulated the maturation of nationalism, with independence as its objective.

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

Narendranath Bhattacharya, later known as M. N. Roy, was in his youth a devoted revolutionary and lieutenant to a famous Bengali revolutionary leader, Jatin Mukherjee. A description of the revolutionary career of Roy is useful and appropriate for several reasons. First, Roy is one of the few revolutionary Bengalis about whom interesting data is available. Second, Roy followed a pattern oft-repeated among Bengali political workers during the twentieth century: from terrorist and insurrectionary activity to Communism and then open Congress work. Third, both the data collected about Roy and some of his own writings give graphic pictures of two important features of Bengali revolutionary politics: the dal or faction and the dādā or leader of such a group.

The socio-religious songs composed in village Bengal by the adherents of the mystical sect known as the Bāuls are of great interest to students of folk music and poetry, but they are of no less interest to a student of the history of the religions of Bengal. In his songs, the Bāul expresses his religious beliefs and experience, his view of life and of the world, his thoughts and emotions. They are his only form of worship; there is no treatise embodying the doctrines and practices of this sect. It is only in his songs that we can get a glimpse of what a Bāul is and what he believes in. Famous for their spontaneity of expression and charm of melody, their rustic language and imagery, these songs clearly bring out the various themes that together form the general body of Bāul thought. And there are threads of many religious traditions: tantric; Sahajiyā—both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava; and Ṣūfī.

This article attempts an assessment of the putative similarities between generic fascism and the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. Whatever characteristics the two ideologies have in common can be traced to similarities between Sun's thought and pre-Fascist Italian Nationalism. The latter was only one of the elements that contributed to Italian Fascism. A distinction is then drawn between Sun's ideology and that of the Italian Nationalists by identifying the latter nationalism as “exacerbated.” Further distinctions are attempted between such nationalisms and the mature ideology of Italian Fascism. Italian Fascism is viewed as a subspecies of revolutionary nationalism, while revolutionary nationalism itself is understood to include a relatively pacific and potentially democratic species and an exacerbated, potentially authoritarian one.

This paper examines the problem of theodicy as seen by the medieval Tamil poet, Kampaṉ. God appears throughout Kampaṉ's retelling of the Rāmāyaṋa as the ideal man, Rāma, an incarnation of the great god Viṣṋu, the source of the moral law and universal order (dharma). But in the famous episode in which Rāma slays Vālin, the king of the monkeys, Kampaṉ challenges the assumption of the deity's righteousness and freedom from evil. Kampaṉ's treatment of this issue is unusual among South Indian devotional texts because of its clarity and boldness; the answers suggested by the poet lead the devotee to a recognition of the relativity of dharma and to an acceptance of a basic dimension of evil within the deity. This conclusion is seen to be consistent with the positive attitude of the South Indian theistic traditions toward mundane reality—an attitude that contrasts markedly with important elements of the classical Sanskritic tradition.

It is now more than twenty years ago that I was first introduced to the Urdu ghazal —the classical Urdu lyric—and found with something like dismay that there was almost nothing about it which I understood and liked. This was not because I had not an adequate command of the language. I had begun speaking Urdu in 1942, and from about 1945 had acquired some competence in the language of prose literature. Nor was it because I was not moderately well read in the love poetry of various cultures and civilizations, from Sappho and Catullus to Shakespeare and Burns, not to speak of later poets. But this was a new, strange experience. From that day to this I have been convinced that to understand and appreciate the ghazal is the most difficult task that confronts the modern Western student of Urdu literature; and as my own understanding increased I have become equally convinced that this is a task which, once accomplished, brings the greatest reward. Such conclusions of my own about the ghazal as I have put into writing fall short of a comprehensive study of the form, and I have never entirely ceased to hope that others more knowledgeable than I would, either in Urdu or in English, write something in which one would find at least most of the answers to the major problems which the ghazal presents to us who study it with the values of the modern West. Hitherto this hope has not been realized, and for that reason I now attempt to set out my own views—spurred on, I should confess, by Muhammad Sadiq's judgement in his History of Urdu Literature (Oxford University Press, 1964)—the latest, longest, and (so far) best history in English—that the ghazal stands “very low in the hierarchy of literary forms” (p. 19). This judgment could hardly be more completely opposed to my own.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. The author endeavors to analyze and critique the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese characters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought.

As Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupation was a decisive factor in the shaping of political developments in Indonesia after 1945. It is indeed probable that the impact of those eventful forty months was greater in Indonesia than in Burma and the Philippines, both of which countries had progressed further toward autonomy and self-rule under Western colonial rule than had the Netherlands Indies. It is certainly no coincidence that Japan granted “independence” to these areas during 1943, while in Indonesia a guarded promise of the distant goal of such independence came only as the result of the adverse course of the Pacific War in the latter part of 1944, when Allied landings in Indonesia appeared a probability. It was not until September of that year that, on instructions from Tokyo, the military administration on Java took steps which facilitated the ultimate success of the nationalist revolution in Indonesia. An examination of Japanese policies during the early months of the occupation of Java, the center of Indonesian political life then and now, leaves little doubt that the fate of Indonesia would have been far different had Japan continued victorious in the war.

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

Though Taiwan has since 1949 been the seat of the Nationalist Government and the domicile of several millions of exiled Chinese, no serious literature has been produced until the late fifties.1 Explanations are not difficult to give. For one thing, since nearly all the important figures of modern Chinese literature have remained in the People's Republic of China,” their works are therefore proscribed for political reasons. Cut off from their mainland base, the disinherited young Taiwanese writers, having no native idols to emulate and anxious to create a tradition of their own, could only import from the West whatever “isms” they considered to be the literary fashions of the day—symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, futurism, modernism, phenomenalism, etc. Quite often, however, what they regarded as daring experiments at the time of initiation later turned out to be

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China's most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People's Republic of China's adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This article looks at prototypes of the SEZ in Bao'an County, the precursor to Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949–76). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao'an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown colony of Hong Kong. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, Communist cadres in Bao'an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the hallmark of Deng Xiaoping's economic statecraft.

The history of “area studies” as an academic discipline remains to be written. When it is, it will have to begin with a little known, historically important Japanese institution in China. That institution, Tōa Dōbun Shoin (East Asia Common Culture Academy or, after 1939, College) in Shanghai, 1900–1945, was established to train young Japanese for business and government service related to China. The author focuses upon the area studies dimensions of this pioneering institution's training and research program. After identifying five requisites of area studies training and research, he moves on to examine the origins, raison d'être, and meaning of Tōa Dōbun Shoin's program and to chart the phases of that program's development through each of the five requisites. In important ways, the center's curriculum, facilities, research, and publications equalled or surpassed the best American post–World War II language and area programs.

Through a study of the corpus of contemporary literary depictions of the early medieval/medieval king of Bengal, Lakṣmaṇasena, in the works of the royal literary salon, this essay defines a cluster of poetic elements inseparable from the monarch. It suggests that this official poetic projects its proximity to the contemporary Turkish invasion (ca. 1205 ce), and the attendant crisis and restructuring of the Sena state. Some idiosyncratic poems, however, evince a historical dynamic that is both distinct and inseparable from the official poetic: the proud assertion of a Sanskrit literary provincialism in the context of a shrinking and threatened state. By correlating a pattern of poetic representation with a discrete period and locality, the present inquiry brings into focus the mutually constitutive relationship between literary interpretation and political historical interpretation for the study of early South Asia. And by tracing what was relatively peculiar and singular to this literary world, it strives to erode established scholarly visions of the endless uniformity of premodern literary-political life.

The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text—one “Orientalist” and the other “nationalist”—with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production.

This article explores the performances of a particular category of young men often derogatively referred to as “chamchas” (sycophants) who are using the art of making do (jugaad) by exploiting and bluffing links with powerful political networks and political parties, as well as friendships with strongmen and their criminal crews. Crucially, the comparative ethnography across India (western Uttar Pradesh) and Bangladesh (Sylhet) introduces readers to the “contact zone” where legality, semi-legality, and organized criminal systems meet. In so doing, the article unravels the working of the democratically elected “Mafia Raj.”