Our Cover

Our cover features a 1967 chromolithograph portrayal of Bharat Mata (Mother India) made by artist V. A. Sapar, entitled “The Motherland.” Used courtesy of Sumathi Ramaswamy and reprinted by permission of the J. P. S. Uberoi and Patricia Uberoi Collection, New Delhi.

Terror and the Pamphlet

Read as companion pieces, our first two articles provide a comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-regional look at the way in which pamphlets provoke or legitimize political violence. Historian SuklaSanyal examines the circulation and rhetoric of anticolonial pamphlets issued by revolutionary terrorists in early twentieth-century Bengal. Sanyal identifies the unflinching, anticolonial Bengali newspaper Jugantar as the most influential precursor to the pamphlets. After British authorities shut down the newspaper in 1908 on sedition charges, revolutionary pamphlets—published anonymously and in fleetingly irregular fashion—did much to promote the vitality of the terrorist movement among Bengalis. The pamphleteers broadened their rhetoric with figures, themes, and motifs drawn from Hindu religion, mythology, and philosophy and, with these resonant cultural materials, sought to render anticolonial terror as righteous and divinely guided self-sacrifice for Mother India. In this way, argues Sanyal, the pamphlets established empathetic bridges between the terrorists and the male, middle-class, upper-caste Hindu audience they sought to impress.

Religious rhetoric was especially pronounced, too, in the pamphlets that animated and amplified communal violence in North Maluku, Indonesia, during 1999 and 2000. According to anthropologist NilsBubandt, these pamphlets tapped into a culture of rumor and paranoia and helped bring about a dangerously murky political atmosphere among Christian and Muslim neighbors. Arguing that these inflammatory leaflets were “social agents” in North Maluku's political terrain, Bubandt describes their “rumor politics” as both “a discourse on and a prosthetics of violence.” Of special concern to Bubandt is the way in which print surpassed oral rumor in legitimizing and mobilizing violence. Detailing the tragic inflammatory effects of the anonymous “Bloody Sosol” letter that circulated as a leaflet in 1999–2000, he explores the conspiratorial reason and political paranoia of Indonesia's post-Suharto era, concluding that murkiness is a structural feature of the era's political discourse. In these circumstances, rumors—especially in leaflet form—produce the troubling “truths” that summon neighbors into deadly conflict.

Nationalism in South Asia

Our next four essays take soundings of the nationalist imagination in India and Pakistan. SumathiRamaswamy begins with a set of reflections on Martin Heidegger and the colonial and modernist cartographies that made it possible to visualize India's geo-body. Following the work of Christopher Pinney, Jyotindra Jain, Kajri Jain, and others, Ramaswamy alerts us to the powerful (if quotidian) cartographic supplement of the “barefoot artists” in India's bazaar who helped citizens visualize Bharat Mata—Mother India—and then themselves as martyrs for her. So pictured and embodied, “India” became the mother for whom loyal sons risked death and dismemberment. Ramaswamy surveys the codes of a patriotic visual economy in which the mother/goddess, the map, and the mutilated and martyred sons are brought together to pictorially embody and incite self-sacrifice for nation. The martyred sons do not appear pained. But then again: The pictorial rendering of the murdered Indira Gandhi, who declared that “every drop of [her] blood would strengthen the nation,” reveals the pain of India's martyred daughter and so suggests that her death was virtually the death of Mother India.

PrachiDeshpande explores the contested Indian historiography of the 1857 rebellion and rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. In the nationalist reckoning, Lakshmibai is a heroic Indian mother struggling for her lands. Yet Deshpande finds some contradictory regional projects within the nationalist narrative, ones that place Lakshmibai, her politics, and her womanhood in a different light. Tacking from Marathi biographies and memoirs to Hindi historical novels and translations and back, Deshpande considers the many editorial and authorial practices that have shaped Lakshmibai's story in the “nationalist archive.” The authority and reliability of modern Hindi historical narrative, she observes, relies on the stories that have emerged from a multitude of local and regional languages.

We shift attention from Mother India and the heroic queen Lakshmibai to the role of princes and princely states in the formation of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and nationalist dreams of an Akhand Hindustan, an indivisible India belonging to Hindus. ManuBhagavan examines the communitarian rhetoric that was characteristic of male Hindu nationalists in early twentieth-century India in order to shed light on once-prevailing ideas and attachments to a “traditional'” and “princely” India. Indeed, the princes were in precarious circumstances, idealized and demonized by British and Indians alike, though for different political ends. Giving special attention to nationalist organizations, reformer K. M. Munshi, and the “Hindu” public sphere that they helped create, Bhagavan reveals how emerging nationalist elites diminished the agency of the princes in forming a modern postcolonial state and politically mobilizing the Hindu right.

Cultural and linguistic nationalism are at the heart AlyssaAyres's study of the “Punjabiyat” (Punjabi-ness) movement in Pakistan. Although Punjab and Punjabis dominate Pakistan, Urdu is privileged as Pakistan's national language and as the vehicle of Muslim identity and high culture in that country. Punjabi, by way of contrast, is the language of “low” culture and a potential centrifugal force in a nation uneasy with regional identities. The Punjabiyat movement aims at reviving Punjabi as a legitimate language in political and national cultural life, even as Punjabis dominate Urdu-language government and public spheres. Using Pierre Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, Ayres sees in the Punjabiyat a challenge to the theoretical models of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner in relating language to nation. For here it appears that Punjabis are trying to rescue their language from the margins as a supplement to their already existing dominance with the nation-state. What to make of that, politically, is hard to know: Would reclamation of Punjabi end in Pakistan finding greater pluralism and inclusiveness, or might it portend something quite vexing and threatening, especially with so many Punjabi speakers across the border in India?

Desire and Sacrifice in Medieval Japan

Our next essay concerns the medieval Japanese chigo—young adolescent males who, in exchange for companionship and sexual intimacies with clerics and courtiers, were attached to Buddhist temples and elite households. Paul S. Atkins asks why the chigo are so often the victims of murder and suicide in medieval Japanese literary works and, following René Girard, suggests that an answer will reveal the sacrificial foundations of the period's cultural order. The relationship between the chigo and his master was institutionally transgressive—that is, it violated monastic precepts against all sexual contact. Frequently, after the relationship is severed through the loss or death of the boy companion, the chigo is revealed as bodhisattva of wisdom or compassion; thus the chigo's death was part of a divine plan for monastic masters to experience enlightenment. In many genres of literature, says Atkins, the chigo or chigo-like figures appear as scapegoats that “deflect or absorb [the] violence that would otherwise tear apart the community.” Atkins concludes that the chigo diverted and absorbed the prohibited sexual energies of their clerical masters and so prevented those energies from defiling women or peers.

Violence, the State, and Memory in Muslim Asia

How is the religious conflict of the past remembered by states and their diverse citizens? Historian JeffreyHadler combs through the archive for stories about Tuanku Imam Bondjol, an official Indonesian national hero and the leader of the Padri War, the early nineteenth-century jihad in the Minangkabau region of West Sumatra that brought reformist Muslims into conflict with traditionalist Muslim defenders of Minangkabau custom (adat) and matrilineal elites. Imam Bondjol in time renounced Wahhabist teachings, and reached a kind of compromise between adat and shariah law; what had been a deeply unpopular civil war between Muslims took new energy and direction as an anti-colonial struggle against the Dutch. Tapping Imam Bondjol's memoir, dime novels (roman pitjisan), and various documents and published histories, Hadler examines how colonial and postcolonial states successively reworked through historical writings the politically ambiguous figure of Tuanku Imam Bondjol, along with his religious idealism and his defeat, in line with secular political interests.

The Hui, or Chinese Muslims, of Xi'an commemorate—annually and ritually—the massive numbers of Hui who died during the Han pacification of northwest China from 1862 to 1874. MarisGillette‘s interviews with contemporary Hui in nonritual contexts show that narrative commemorations of that Tongzhi-era violence can be related to institutional backdrops: Those who did not attend state-sponsored secular schools—particularly the Muslim religious specialists known as ahong—portray the dead as religious martyrs; those who did attend the schools and had familiarity with state-sponsored ethnic policies see the violence as a Hui peoples’ uprising (Huimin qiyi) against Qing feudalism. Gillette asserts that the frame of annual ritual mourning allows the Hui to express their mistrust of the Chinese state, and she argues that this “unauthorized transcript” of suspicion and critique is no longer confined to ritual but colors the everyday narrative remembrance of the dead. Gillette closes on an apprehensive note about the consequences of internalizing the state's framework for interpreting ethnic difference and linking it to violence.

Special Review Essay

We take opportunity once again to publish a special review essay that engages with a number of thematically or topically related books rather than a single volume. We are pleased to include in this issue EricTagliacozzo‘s discussion of four recent works on the social and cultural history of the Indian Ocean world during the colonial age. I thank Book Review Editor Andrew Willford for commissioning Tagliacozzo's fine essay.