Lokamanya Tilak (1856–1920) represents the full tide of ideological activity in the Indian Nationalist movement. Long overshadowed by his younger contemporary, Gandhi, his life and thought are only now, a third of a century after his death, receiving due recognition.

Prior to his entrance upon the political stage, Indian leadership afforded the spectacle of a rather polite debating society which accepted British ideals and values as almost axiomatic. Protests against government policies consisted of thoughtfully worded petitions calculated to appeal to the sense of reason and fair play of officials. Tilak saw little profit in such method, but his rivals in the Nationalist leadership, particularly G. K. Gokhale, were wedded to the traditions of British parliamentary procedure.

The Sung period (960–1279), as is generally recognized, shaped the pattern of China's development for the last millennium. Carrying forward the trends originating in late T'ang, it integrated both the traditional and the new ingredients into a distinctive way of life which gradually permeated the entire society down to the level of the average villager. The result was a broadly based, deeply rooted, stable, but conservative culture. Remarkable economic advancement and social reconstruction took place. The same was generally true, though to a lesser extent, of political institutions and thought: the bureaucratic empire was now thoroughly centralized under a generally attentive and restrained absolutism; great gains were achieved in the number, quality, and especially the status of the nonaristocratic scholar-officials; the enriching variety of theoretical formulations known as neo-Confucianism carried increasing weight. Government administration in particular, the most effective ever to exist in China itself, was probably the best in the world then and for several centuries to come. Improvements made by the Ming and the Ch'ing, after the intervening period of the Mongols, were more or less within this general pattern.

The industrial sector of China, as of Japan and many other nations, is a “dual” economy. Jobs with radically different labor productivities tend to receive different wages; thus, there are many kinds of labor-capital relations. Some workers perform their duties—often with the aid of machines—on a relatively permanent basis; these people have secure job tenure. Others are marginal workers, “lumpenproletarians” as Marx called them; sometimes they have jobs, sometimes they are unemployed. Often these are seasonal farm workers. They live in factory dormitories when they can obtain temporary positions in the city, and they keep strong ties with the rural villages from which they came.

Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong with China in the seventeenth century. The trouble was this, they felt: men had strayed from the fixed ideals of Chinese civilization. In the early twentieth century, anti Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong in the China of their day; they traced disaster, however, not to the flouting of fixed ideals but to blind and slavish respect for them, to the fixity itself. A seventeenth-century world, a t'ien-hsia, in which traditional values claimed authority, had become a twentieth-century nation, a kuo, in which traditional values were impugned as tyranny.

The civil examination system in the Confucian state of Yi Dynasty Korea was an important channel of recruitment for government officials and the graduates of the civil examinations carried enormous power and prestige. The determination as to who participated in these examinations will shed more light on the nature of Yi society. Contrary to the prevailing belief that the civil examinations were open only to men of yangban birth and closed to the commoners, there is strong evidence suggesting commoners' participations in the examinations. Legally, there was no statutory restriction against commoners. The state educational system that trained the future examination candidates not only did not discriminate against commoners but even encouraged qualified commoners to enroll in schools. Moreover, certain social groups whose social status was clearly lower than that of commoners were also allowed in the examinations. There were also individual cases in which men of non-yangban origin rose through the civil examinations to become government officials, some holding high ranking posts. In view of such evidence, the notion that the yangban status was wholly hereditary is no longer tenable. Instead, what distinguished yangban from commoners was one's determination and commitment to pursue Confucian scholarship by enrolling in a Confucian school, for student status exempted him from burdensome military duty.

The literature on nationalism ascribes a pivotal role to schools in creating what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” through the formation and dissemination of a common national identity and a shared national consciousness where none existed before (e.g., Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Smith 1991). It is not unusual to find Japan cited as a prime example of this process, not only among theorists of nationalism, but among Japan specialists, as well (e.g., Beauchamp 1988, 226–29; Cummings 1980, 17–25; Hunter 1989, 192–97; Ienaga 1978; Pyle 1996, 125–30; Rohlen 1983, 46–57; Schoppa 1991, 29–31; Thomas 1996, 254–62). In general, they portray the first two decades of the Meiji period, between 1868 and 1890, as the era when a modern national consciousness merged with a revivified nativist identity to form an “emperor-centered nationalism” that was institutionalized and propagated by the state, chiefly through a newly established compulsory, centralized school system. Frequently, this assertion is supported by citing the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), which begins, “Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof.” This distinctive brand of Japanese nationalism is also regarded as a factor contributing to the subsequent development of Japanese imperialism and the country's pursuit of a colonial empire abroad, which began with its victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and concluded fifty years later with its defeat in the Pacific War.

This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the languages of the colonized. This article discusses the inverse process, examining how Caodai textual production used French spiritist language and tropes to occult its Chinese roots, translating Daoist cosmology into a universalist and anti-colonial spiritual discourse rooted in Vietnamese nationalism. These shifts are examined through a close examination of translingual practices in the production and translation of the core esoteric scripture of Caodaism, the Đại Thừa Chơn Giáo 大乘真教 (The True Teachings of the Great Vehicle), rendered in its 1950 Vietnamese-French edition as The Bible of the Great Cycle of Esotericism. This study demonstrates how colonial religious institutions and networks of circulation in Asia stimulate the emergence of new movements and textual practices that mimic, invert, jumble, and transcend the cosmologies of both the Chinese imperium and the European colonial regime.

The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.

In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by this trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.

In 1993, in response to the international Human Genome Project pioneered by the United States, the Chinese government began to sponsor national projects in conjunction with the international effort. The result of this scientific endeavor confirmed international geneticists’ conclusions regarding a very recent “African origin” of all modern humans, or Homo sapiens. This scientific development confronted the longstanding nationalist belief that the “Chinese” had lived in “China” as an independent human group since Homo erectus, represented by the 700,000-year-old Peking Man. By examining the still pervasive political uses of a presumed prehistoric ancestor of the people as well as the controversy sparked by the scientific challenge that has provoked public discussions, this article identifies a potent racial discourse in contemporary Chinese nationalism and connects it to a broader international context.

This essay examines the changes in hairstyles that have become overdetermined signs of Japan's transition to modernity in histories of the Meiji era (1868–1912). It demonstrates that Japanese men's adoption of short styles, relentlessly cited as a key example of modernization (understood as Westernization), was a much longer and more complex process than most accounts suggest. It explores the politics of pervasive assumptions about how and why men and women cut their hair in the 1870s, and concludes that knowledge about daily life must be understood not simply as concrete facts but also as politically charged representations of social life that have served diverse agendas both during the Meiji era and since.

For most of the twentieth century, geography has been pushed so far into the background in the English-language corpus on early modern Japan as to be rendered virtually invisible. To the extent that it has been noticed, geography is typically seen precisely as background: the passive (if sometimes predestining) stage on which the historical drama is acted out. While attention is ritually paid to Japan's location and topography, most historians' analyses of Tokugawa development have until recently been couched in essentially aspatial terms.

The Sarnyukta Gauḍa Sārasvata Brāhmaṇa [GSB] Parisad was founded in 1910 A by members of several historically related subcastes in western India. The association represented an attempt by men experiencing the insecurities of urban middle class life to obtain the presumed benefits of caste for themselves and their families through reintegration within a single structurally unified caste. They experimented also with the idea of caste as a means to mobilize rural kin and caste fellows in the quest for modernity. Although efforts to structurally amalgamate the subcastes through intermarriage and related ritual acts proved fruitless, the members of the Parisad did stimulate development of educational and economic institutions which supported their middle class aspirations. The problems of recruitment and the content of Parisad proceedings reveal considerable social and economic disparities among the GSB. This illustrates the inaccuracies of characterizing castes by reference only to those members who hold elite positions in public affairs. The Parisad ultimately atrophied after 1917 although its related institutions have survived. Though the structural unity of caste was not obtained, a sense of GSB corporate identity did develop which ascribed to all members the achievement-oriented virtues of adaptivity and excellence.

This article discusses the 1903 Human Pavilion's Ainu Fushine Kōzō, who advanced a notion of imperial subjecthood, where one could be Ainu and a loyal subject of the Japanese empire. Fushine urged that the Ainu be treated equitably not because all races were equal, a rather modern and Western notion, but because he viewed imperial subjecthood as predicated upon military conscription and being children of the emperor. I examine the removal of the Okinawan women, Nakamura Kame and Uehara Ushi, from the display, amidst a larger debate where competing visions of imperial subjecthood and what it meant to be civilized were tied up with the charge that the pavilion was a humanitarian concern (jindō mondai). The Human Pavilion became a nexus between colonial and imperial subjects, which, rather than reifying distinctions between the two, called into question the coherence of civilizational taxonomies in Japan and the world.

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

K. C. Chang's Shang Civilization is an invaluable, encyclopaedic guide to the archaeology, anthropology, and culture of East Asia's first historical dynasty. After a summary of the book's scope and a sampling of its interpretations, the review discusses six of Chang's major themes: (1) the acceptance of the “longer” rather than “shorter” dynastic chronology; (2) the identification of Cheng-chou as a Shang capital; (3) the hypothesis that two major groups held royal power in alternategenerations; (4) the extent to which the states surrounding the Shang enjoyed cultural and ethnic unity; (5) the existence of numerous walled towns; and (6) the relation between bronze tools and agricultural productivity.

Nationalist struggles are invariably civil as well as anticolonial wars. The processes of popular politicization are shaped as much by internal contests as by mobilized sentiments against foreign rule. Political engagement by the rural poor is typically influenced by local power struggles, ethnic conflicts, and class tensions that may deflect the poor's stakes in and concern for national liberation. To discover the quotidian contours of revolution, we must turn to these sorts of relationships and constraints. To understand the conditions that foster or discourage the active participation of subordinate groups in revolution, we must appreciate the local relations under which people labor as much as the political context in which they fight.

It has often been stated that the core of Japan's social structure is the family system. Research on any aspect of Japanese life is likely to lead to that subject sooner or later, because of its importance. The Japanese themselves, particularly the conservative groups, understand this fact more clearly than do most Westerners. They find in the family system the essence of Japanism, contrasting it to individualism, which forms the basis of Western culture. In more recent times, individualism was presented as a menace to Japan's “national polity” and as a “dangerous thought.” It became the ideological whipping boy of Japanese nationalists. The term “individualism” itself assumed the abhorrent qualities which the words “nihilism” or “anarchism” had in Europe at the turn of the century. Even today “individualism” means hardly more to many Japanese than selfishness and an antisocial attitude.

The current Chinese language reform movement is of the most profound cultural and political importance in China itself as well as to foreign students of the area. Its goal is within a relatively short period to standardize the basic northern dialect as the common national language of China and to replace traditional Chinese characters with a phonetic script. As Mao Tse-tung stated in 1951: “The written language must be reformed; it should follow the common direction of phoneticization which has been taken by the world's languages.”

There are several reasons why the legal institution of dien . (generally, but, as will be shown, erroneously rendered in English as “mortgage”) should be of interest to the student of Chinese and Vietnamese law. First of all, it merits attention on account of its very wide use, a fact which has been recognized by its incorporation, in a modified form, into the Chinese Civil Code. Then again it affords a striking example of an attempt by the Chinese government in Imperial times to develop by legislation the scope and purpose of an institution of private customary law, and of the way in which customary law asserted its vitality in face of the legislator by surviving unchanged into modern times. And lastly it illustrates, by the erroneous interpretations that for 150 years have been put upon it by European lawyers, the pitfalls that lie in the way of anyone who tries to explain Far Eastern legal concepts in European terms.