During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.

The historical study of Western medicine in nineteenth-century Siam has emphasized the dichotomy between Western medicine and traditional Thai medical practice. The former is often represented as a monolith, and the epistemological transformation of Western medicine during the nineteenth century is glossed over without sufficient attention. Pasteurian medicine, especially the idea of germs, was introduced to Siam by the American missionary Dan Beach Bradley. Its introduction spurred a process of negotiation with both pre-Pasteurian Western and traditional Thai medicine. In its pre-Pasteurian and Pasteurian variants, Western medicine was constituted as a new medical practice and disciplinary regime in Siam. As a discursive instrument of state hegemony, the ideas, structures, policies, and institutions of Western medicine furthered the understanding and management of virulent epidemics, the institution of the sanitary system, the shaping of new concepts of population and a healthy workforce, and not least, the framing of a medicalizing project to police people's bodies pursued by the Thai state in the 1930s.

This article attempts to explain the extraordinary popularity of Vietnamese composer and singer Trịnh Công Sơn. Although he attracted attention with love songs composed in the late 1950s, it was his antiwar songs, particularly those collected in Songs of Golden Skin (1966), that created the “Trịnh Công Sơn phenomenon.” Though these songs were banned by the Saigon government, they circulated widely in the South during the war. Though he was distrusted by the new Communist government after the war, Sơn continued to compose until his death in 2001, and his songs are still popular in Vietnam today. Some reasons for his popularity are offered, including the freshness of his early love songs, his evocation of Buddhist themes, his ability to express the mood of Southerners during the war, and a mixture of patience and persistence that enabled him to continue to compose in postwar Vietnam.

This paper traces a side story to the well-known tale of the poligar rebel Kattabomman, who was hanged in 1799 for his refusal to accept the authority of the emerging colonial state in south India. Specifically, it draws on the story of seventy-three poligars who survived the brutal Poligar Wars and were transported to Penang in Southeast Asia in 1801, an episode that highlights the workings of the coercive power and moral authority of the new regime in early colonial India. The paper illustrates the variety of forms that resistance to the regime took and the extent to which the colonial state in south Asia strengthened and was strengthened by the rising British Empire across the Indian Ocean. The poligars' lives in exile are reconstructed as a story of their struggle for status and dignity in a settlement where they were initially lumped together with convicts brought there from Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay.

This article examines the market for cocaine in India during the early twentieth century and the efforts of the colonial state to control it. The British authorities issued regulations to prohibit the drug's use as early as 1900, and yet by the start of World War I, cocaine's appeal had become socially diverse and geographically wide. This account of a significant market for a powerful new drug suggests that Indian society was able to rapidly develop a demand for such products even when the colonial state had no part in their introduction. Indians used these new products in complex ways—as medicines, as tonics, and as intoxicants, albeit through the localized medium of the everyday paan leaf. The study points to a reconsideration of a number of debates about the history of drugs and modern medicines in Asia.

“Arirang” is known worldwide as the quintessential Korean folk song. Its iconic status in contemporary Korea derives from its perceived role in strengthening Korean resolve to resist the cultural violence of the Japanese colonial occupation (1905–45). A musical “skeleton” capable of countless improvised variations and interpretations, some “Arirangs” explicitly assailed the Japanese and thus were censored by colonial authorities. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, precisely the time when assimilationist pressures in colonial Korea were intensifying, Japanese songsmiths, singers, and recording companies released “Arirang” renditions in prodigious quantities, sometimes in collaboration with Korean performers. “Arirang” became the most familiar song in the Japanese empire: Its persistent theme of loss spoke to Koreans of their lost sovereignty and to Japanese of the ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways. For both peoples, it served as a mirror for self-contemplation and an “ethnographic lens” for gazing upon the other.

History, it seems, has to attain a degree of scientificity, resident in the truth-value of its narrative, before it can be called history, as distinguished from the purely literary or political. Invoking the work of Jacques Rancière and Hayden White, this essay investigates the manner in which history becomes a science through a detour that gives speech a regime of truth. It does this by exploring the nineteenth-century relationship of history to poetry and to truth in the context of the emerging discipline of history in Bengal. The question is discussed in relation to a patriotic poem, Palashir Yuddha (1875), accused of ahistoricality, as well as to a defense made by Bengal's first professional historian, Jadunath Sarkar, against a similar charge in the context of Bankimchandra Chatterjee's historical novels. That the relationship of creativity to history is a continuing preoccupation for the historian is finally explored through Ranajit Guha's invocation of Tagore in History at the Limit of World-History (2002).

The Ramayana, one of Hinduism's two preeminent epics, has been retold in diverse ways over the centuries, but one modern rendition is unique: Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?). Its author, C. Virudhachalam (1906–48), wrote in Tamil under the pen name Pudumaippittan, meaning “one who is mad about newness.” Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?) presents colonialism as a continuation of the Ramayana narrative, showing how an ancient South Asian narrative can serve as an imaginative framework for modern Indian writers. The text mounts an astute critique of the notion of perfect rule, Ram Raj, and suggests that such a utopian ideal fosters the veneration of a glorified past that never existed. The text's modernist literary ploys encourage scrutiny of culturally constructed concepts such as nationalism, consumerism, and narrative coherence. This unusual Ramayana reveals how narrative resources can be used to question both ancient and modern ideologies.

This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through an examination of lists of physicians. I consider the debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on the contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical histories, I argue that temporally organized lists document the place of medicine across time, geographically organized lists document the reach of medical knowledge across space, and thematically organized lists document the intertwining of medical knowledge and skill with other aspects of intellectual and civil life. In making these lists, medical historians paint a portrait of the Tibetan medical tradition that evokes connections to Buddhism and the strength and cosmopolitanism of the imperial period. Medical histories thus emphasize a picture of Tibet in the broader context of Asia—a Tibet whose empire lives on culturally or intellectually, if not militarily.

In 1999, the East Kalimantan Dayak Association convened a watershed conference in Samarinda, Indonesia, that was attended by indigenous people from across the province. The conference, which was intended to nurture an emerging indigenous solidarity that aimed to transcend narrower loyalties, included sessions on organizational reform. This article examines the ongoing process of organizational rationalization within the association and investigates how that process comports with the evolving vision of indigenous solidarity that its leaders promote. It addresses challenges to that vision offered by constituents and others. The article also explores the role of symbols drawn from the social and natural worlds in fostering the development of an ethnic identity. The article reveals a paradox in the way that ethnicity is framed within the organization—one that invites comparison with the methods and goals of other indigenous and pan-indigenous movements.

Focusing on colonial Calcutta in the later decades of the nineteenth century, this essay explores the evolution of a particular festival, the Durga Puja, to explore the ways in which religion negotiated its place in the ideological determinants of modernity. The essay surveys the evolution of the goddess Durga from premodern times and shows why and how the perception of both the deity (in gender terms) and the festival (in historical terms) had to be recalibrated following the imperatives of new classes and new discursive parameters. While the essay interrogates the development of new particular categories introduced by modernity, such as urban spatiality and the rhetoric of individual rights in colonial Calcutta, it also aligns these developments to answer the general paradigmatic question of the actual relationship between religion/faith and the modern moment.

This essay discusses changing images of island Southeast Asia and its Muslim populations in the modern Arabic press during the late colonial period. It commences by surveying the general informational letters sent to the largely pro-Ottoman papers of Beirut and Cairo during the 1890s by increasingly vocal local Arabs who were seeking to redress their situation as second-class colonial citizens. Thereafter, it considers the role played by Malays, Javanese, and other Southeast Asians in the globalizing Arabic media. In doing so, it demonstrates that although many Southeast Asians bought into and actively participated in the often Arabocentric program for Islamic reform in their homelands, they were by no means in agreement that their situations were any worse than those of other Muslims or that they could all be treated under one ethnic rubric.

This paper analyzes how democracy is conceptualized and operationalized among Tibetan exiles based on fieldwork conducted among Tibetans in Dharamsala during 1994 and in two settlements in Nepal throughout 1995. The Tibetan exiles are in a democratic transition, yet their transition resembles much more of a “muddling through” than a linear progression, as they struggle to interpret democratic values in the context of their own worldview and political circumstances. The Tibetan exiles' case can be interpreted as a new variation on the Asian democracy debate, with a focus on how authoritarian and popular choice interrelate in an actually existing democratic system. For the Tibetans, the issue is the place of the “enlightened mind” in modern forms of governance. The author finds that the exile context has both facilitated and limited the Tibetans' reform efforts.

This article examines the practice and meanings of the new veiling and of Islamization more generally for young Muslim Javanese women in the new middle class. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta in 1999 and three subsequent one-month visits during 2001, 2002, and 2003, I explore the social and religious attitudes of female students at two of Yogyakarta's leading centers of higher education: Gadjah Mada University, a nondenominational state university, and the nearby Sunan Kalijaga National Islamic University. The ethnographic and life-historical materials discussed here underscore that the new veiling is neither a traditionalist survival nor an antimodernist reaction but rather a complex and sometimes ambiguous effort by young Muslim women to reconcile the opportunities for autonomy and choice offered by modern education with a heightened commitment to the profession of Islam.

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906–8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century.

This paper explores the context in which skilled artisans introduced innovations in India around 1900 and suggests that such steps carried the potential for conflicts between the innovator and those affected by his actions. Conflicts could arise over the protection of knowledge, over the right to make a change, in the form of resistance, or as a choice between maintaining and diluting quality. Conflicts were absent when the mediation of social and political leaders was available and when skilled artisans emerged from unconventional backgrounds. By stressing the capacity of artisans to innovate and by suggesting that individuals were the agents of innovation, this paper refocuses attention on the skilled individual within a historiography that has been rather neglectful of both craftsmanship and the craftsman.