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 paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.

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.

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.

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.

American military bases and the protests they have elicited have had a major impact on Japanese political culture. But after the end of the formal Occupation, and outside the territory immediately affected, the cultural consequences of the U.S. military presence are much less clear. This article offers a synthetic analysis that integrates diplomatic and social history and relates the strategies of U.S. policymakers to those of anti-base activists. It shows how much the base system has changed over time and how protests have long focused on the same issues, especially sex work and sexual violence, territorial disputes, and nuclear weapons. In each case, Washington and Tokyo worked together to insulate Japanese society, which made it easier for Japanese men and women to tolerate the bases and easier for U.S. servicemen to live within them.

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.

Article III of the Philippine Constitution is the Bill of Rights. It establishes the relationship of the individual to the State and defines the rights of the individual by limiting the lawful powers of the State. It is one of the most important political achievements of the Filipinos.

The concept of a Bill of Rights, as such, is essentially an occidental prod-uct. For a number of centuries in British, French, and American political thought, there has grown the conviction that the rights of the individual must be preserved and safeguarded, not through the authority of an individual, not through membership in a particular group or party, not through reliance upon force of arms, but rather through the accepted processes of declared constitutional law.

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.”

I began the work of this paper by trying to specify the different kinds of “hierarchy” that Louis Dumont uses in Homo Hierarchicus. Such an inventory, I thought, might be helpful to those who find the book difficult to read. Unexpectedly, in the course of the exercise, I began to uncover Dumont's argument and to find what I take to be solutions to two of the problems I had continued to have with this monumental work, even though it had been amply reviewed and discussed. I had been troubled by the mystery of “the mantle of our Lady,” that odd process of the encompassing and the encompassed, and the lack of fit between Dumont's model of the Indian caste system and that of his Anglo- American-trained colleagues. In the paper below, I present the inventory, argument, and solutions mentioned, as well as their implications for an understanding of Homo Hierarchicus by the empirically oriented social scientist.

In die pre-modern Chinese codes, Yoshimune (8th Tokugawa Shogun, 1716–1745) found much of use to him in his attempt to reform the administration of justice in early eighteenth century Japan. Building on an interest kindled by studies of Ming law in his native han, Wakayama, Yoshimune gathered about him a cluster of confucianists, including Ogyu Sorai and his brother Hokkei (Kan), and they in turn developed a new Chinese-based jurisprudence with new legislative concepts and roles for law generally. Hokkei did a recension of die Ming penal code supplied with diacritics, and Sorai did a commentary to the code, explaining its meaning in simple Japanese; together these two works vastly increased die accessibility of Ming law to Japanese scholars especially after these works came out in a wood-block publication.

Also, Yoshimune put several other groups of scholars to work on other Chinese legal sources—the T'ang codes, the Ch'ing codes and the eighth century T'angderivative Japanese codes (ritsuryō). At die same time the largest daimyo, Maeda Tsunanori, built up his own extensive collection of Chinese legal sources and encouraged their study in Kanazawa han. Similar studies and uses of Chinese law are found in several han later, notably Kumamoto, Wakayama, Aizu and Hirosaki. Thus a minor reception of Chinese law in Tokugawa Japan has been heretofore largely overlooked between the major eighdi century reception of T'ang law and the massive nineteenth century reception of European law a millcnium later.

In this paper I propose to look at Southeast Asian history for the most part before the era of European political control. My object is on the one hand to avoid the distortions of the picture caused by the wealth of writings on European activities in the area, which have tended to thrust into the background die history of the peoples of the area, and on the other hand to convey some idea of the importance of their history as a field of study today. Incidentally, it is a field in which most of the progress has been made by scholars whose names are largely unknown outside the esoteric circles of orientalism.

Study of China in the Soviet Union has just experienced a decade of rapid growth and fundamental change. Until the early 1960's the overwhelming reality for Soviet specialists was the fact that the Chinese revolution had succeeded—China had joined the camp of Soviet allies building socialism. Under these conditions, interpretations of the society which emerged after 1949 and of the historic circumstances which gave rise to revolution reflected both a need to reaffirm doctrinal principles about the uniformities of history and a hesitancy to contradict official Chinese communist positions. By the mid-1960's these limitations had been removed. Soviet sinologists repudiated the previous period for the “uncritical use of tendentious Chinese materials” and switched abruptly to demonstrating what had gone wrong in China, i.e., the abnormalities of history. The search was begun for those exceptional qualities of China's past which had deflected its advance to socialism and before that to capitalism.

Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”: