Some years ago, in his contribution to a collection of essays on the Supreme Court and the Indian Constitution, Pratap Bhanu Mehta emphasized the political significance of the Court, saying, “there is not a single important issue of political life in India that has not been, by accident or design, profoundly shaped by its interventions … the courts participate and collaborate in governing India” (Mehta 2006, 162). How exactly might this happen? In beginning to explore answers to this question, I want to focus on the formation of a distinct environmental jurisprudence and its relationship to the changing and dynamic qualities of a democratic polity in India. And in formulating my analysis I draw here on my current work on courts and the environment in India or how the environment came to be a legal object in India over the last century.

Three broad concerns inspired Strange Parallels. First, like many students of Southeast Asia, I was long troubled by the fragmented, kaleidoscopic nature of much precolonial historiography. Curiosity to see if I could detect long term, overarching patterns provided my initial spur.

Every now and again a book comes along that “shakes foundations”, as it were. Such volumes let us know that something novel has appeared on the scene, in terms of new ways of knowing the shape and landscape of the past, the great “undiscovered country” of the proverb. Strange Parallels – not one book, but two – is this kind of project. In an age of hyperbole it is easy to believe the breathless hype of publishers when they tell us, the reading public, that such work has arrived. Many of us often end up feeling deflated, though, when the volume finally gets to our desks. On occasion, though, such books do live up to the praise, and happily this is the case with Victor Lieberman's absorbing two volumes. Lieberman is a well-respected historian of Burma; in recent years, his tastes have been ranging further afield, however, as he has sought to connect Burma to larger stories and themes. Strange Parallels is the result of that philandering eye, an occasion when infidelity of one's locus of choice cannot only be forgiven, but applauded because of the result. Lieberman did not just covet his neighbors in this exercise – Siam and Vietnam and the other polities of mainland Southeast Asia. He ended up coveting Eurasia, or the expanse of an entire continent. What happens when you marry a very specific area studies expertise to this kind of vastly expanded vision? What paradigms can be shifted, and what new patterns can be seen? Perhaps most importantly, what new things can be discerned about the “undiscovered country” of the past that previously were hidden, even to cognoscenti?

In his review of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1860: Expansion and Crisis, Victor Lieberman plied the margins of Anthony Reid's (1995) portrayal of early modern Southeast Asia and objected with purpose: “critical cultural and political transformations on the mainland without close archipelagic analogy receive little or no attention” (Lieberman 1995, 799). Where connections and crossings characterize historic social formation in insular Southeast Asia, Lieberman focused on a different shore – territorial consolidation of kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia, from over 20 in the pre-modern era to only three major empires, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, by the end of the seventeenth century. Yet Reid's two-volume work was exquisitely timed with the theoretical pulses of globalization and their keywords of crossings – diasporas, flows, linkages, mobilities, networks, routes and travels. Closely related to the poststructural theoretical shift, these themes have guided new area studies and are likely to prevail in international scholarship for some time to come.

In the presence of such a powerhouse lineup of Asianists I think I will tiptoe off to the other end of Lieberman's Eurasia and presume on my unique qualifications in this company as having published over twenty pages for the general reader on the France of Louis XIV and fifteen on the Russia of Peter the Great. Also, I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment about how the world changed between 1770 and 1830, and will have most to say about what Lieberman offers on that period. I owe Jerry Bentley a review article on all this for the Journal of World History, because he got me a review copy of the large work of Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. I also got hooked by listening in on a fine conference at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in 2008, which led to The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, edited by David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. A less recent book which I think is an under-appreciated breakthrough for this effort is Chris Bayly's Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830.

In chapter 1 of volume 2 of Strange Parallels, Victor Lieberman urges the reader to understand that: “The excitement of Eurasian comparisons derives not from a spurious superficial identity, but from the juxtaposition of overarching similarities with idiosyncratic local outcomes” (Lieberman 2009, 119). In “Creating Japan,” Chapter 4 of the same volume, Lieberman convincingly shows that Eurasian comparisons offer a valuable, and truly exciting, lens to explore Japan from circa 800 to 1830. He identifies numerous and provocative parallels with other states that present not only fresh ways to consider Japan within world history, but also to locate and assess idiosyncratic elements of the Japanese experience.

When volume 2 of Victor Lieberman's magnum opus first came out a couple of years ago, several colleagues specializing in Southeast Asian Studies called it to my attention and suggested that I read it. They told me that it made use of my ideas (which rather surprised me, since I am in East Asian Studies) and said that I would like it. I certainly found the title intriguing, but never had a chance to read it until being asked to join this roundtable. Now that I have read the book, I find it tremendously invigorating and thought-provoking, so I am all the more grateful for the opportunity afforded by my participation in this roundtable to become acquainted with Lieberman's masterwork.

In this response to Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, I provide an outline of some significant trends in the historiography of early modern South Asia as it has evolved in the last decade or so. Both the period and the themes reviewed here reflect my own research interests. While Lieberman cites much of the research that I describe here in his chapter on South Asia in Strange Parallels, my reading of the significance of that work is somewhat at odds with his interpretation. This outline is primarily intended for non-South Asianist readers of the JAS, who might find this thematic treatment to be a useful point of entry to the field. It was this thematically oriented conversation that provoked the liveliest discussion during the colloquium at the Hawaii Conference on which this response is based.

In this historical tour-de-force Victor Lieberman moves beyond the traditional area studies boundaries to examine common patterns in another configuration, Eurasia. He argues that island and mainland Southeast Asia, Japan, Russia, France, China, and South Asia experienced parallel developments in territorial consolidation, administrative centralization, and cultural integration that strengthened lowland polities at the expense of outlying areas. What made it all possible was the convergence of a number of factors: the expansion of material resources, new cultural currents, intense interstate competition, and state interventions. Lieberman nonetheless acknowledges that there were “major discrepancies” in geography, population, and social and cultural models among the polities that he examined (Lieberman II: 50–1). For island Southeast Asia, these “major discrepancies” constituted a fundamental impediment to the “territorial consolidation, administrative centralization, and cultural integration” by which Lieberman characterizes Eurasia

I am grateful to The Journal of Asian Studies for organizing this forum and to the seven contributors for taking the time to read my volume(s) and to wrestle with the issues raised therein. The resultant essays fall into two categories. Eric Tagliacozzo, Carolyn Cartier, and John Wills, Jr., examine Asia or Eurasia broadly conceived, whereas Robert Hellyer, Victor Mair, Ramya Sreenivasan, and Leonard Andaya weigh the applicability of my work to particular Asian regions. I consider each set of contributions in turn.

On August 30, 2009, East Timor's Prime Minister, the former resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, quietly authorized the release of a man directly implicated in one of the country's most notorious massacres. Maternus Bere, a commander of the pro-Indonesian Laksaur militia group, had been indicted for his role in the September 1999 killing of as many as 200 unarmed supporters of independence who had taken refuge in the Catholic Church in Suai. Of the 40 victims whose identities could be determined, three were priests, ten were under the age of 18, and more than a dozen were women. The Suai Church massacre was part of a shocking campaign of violence that followed a United Nations-organized referendum in which Timorese had voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia.

Drawing on recent survey data, digital ethnography and comparative analysis, this article presents a critical re-appraisal of the interactive blogosphere in China and its effects on Chinese social and political life. Focused on the discursive and behaviorist trends of Chinese netizens rather than the ubiquitous information control/resistance paradigm, it argues that the Sinophone blogosphere is producing the same shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos that it creates elsewhere in the world, and these more prosaic elements need to be considered alongside the Chinese internet's potential for creating new forms of civic activism and socio-political change.

The field of Chinese internet studies is rich and diverse. Just this past year, exciting new books have been published on internet use among urban youth (Liu 2011), online videos (Voci 2010), online carnival (Herold and Marolt 2011), new media events (Qiu and Chan 2011), and cyber-nationalists (Shen and Breslin 2010).

Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original ‘hat photograph’ by tracing the portrait's journey from the time it was taken, in 1929, to the early 1930s. The portrait was devised as a tactic of political subversion and intended as revolutionary propaganda, although it became more widely interpreted as an icon of defiant nationalism and a symbol of imperial injustice. The image quickly morphed from its original format, and rapidly circulated in the form of reproductions, paintings and drawings, travelling well beyond the confines of the literate domain, making a decisive impact on the charged political landscape of the early 1930s.

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.