This article offers an explanation for disparities in the speed and level of political opposition to reform of the financial services sector in India. Focusing on the disparity of outcomes in reform of the insurance and the banking sector, the author suggests why some barriers to entry were present in India during the reform process. The author extends this argument to explain differing levels of political opposition to reform in the banking and insurance sectors. To provide empirical support for this theoretical construct, the author uses measures of market segmentation and market concentration to show how specific forms of state ownership helped promote divergent types of political opposition that built in India during the decision-making stage of reform and during the implementation of second-generation reforms. The experience of financial services reform in India offers important lessons for the new institutional economics literature on early transition elsewhere.

Although Punjab experienced serious violence during the 1947 partition, no one died in Malerkotla. This peace at partition is central to the collective identity of the town, founded in 1454 by a Sufi saint. Focusing on the power of the saint, his tomb shrine, and his multireligious cult, this study demonstrates how Malerkotla's idealized reputation is produced and perpetuated. Through ritual exchanges and oral and written accounts, residents and pilgrims integrate the partition experience into the history of the saint and his town, so that this moment comes to symbolize Malerkotla's pacific civic identity.

This article examines how the bodies of Japanese women became a key site of political and cultural contestation during the Allied occupation. The sale of sex, once legally recognized and regulated, became a conspicuous symbol of postwar chaos. Ostracizing sex workers who catered to servicemen provided a means to display an abiding nationalism without directly confronting the occupiers. But these women were also indispensable in the economy of military base cities. Journalists and social critics sought to discern or impose order by devising elaborate taxonomies, cartographies, health regimes, and moral codes. Sex workers were active participants in this process, but their personal testimonies show how their lives defied categorization. When the Diet finally intervened with the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, it was merely the culmination of a long process involving every segment of Japanese society.

Through the reading of two plays written by Kaneko Shigeri, this article examines the way in which Japanese suffragist women, who actively participated in the local governance of Tokyo in prewar Japan, joined in the production of two mutually related sets of discourses on democracy and waste control. Relying on the idea of “purity” (jôka), these women gendered the discourse of democracy along the divide of “pure” women and “impure” men, and succeeded, to a certain extent, in eliminating corrupt officials from the Tokyo prefectural and city assemblies. Yet their efforts to control waste, which was dumped on the residents of Fukagawa Ward in lowland Tokyo, largely failed, for suffragist women hardly paid attention to the intricate relationships among gender, class, and space in Greater Tokyo. This article aims to reveal the limit of the ideas of democracy and environment shared among the suffragist women in prewar Japan.

How to best maintain public goods under conditions of chronic resource shortage and insufficient state administrative capacity is a challenge for nearly all developing states. This article concentrates on a range of attempted reforms in China's forestry sector in the 1990s. It first evaluates the dynamics of long-standing “leakiness” in forestry conservation initiatives. After a set of major floods in 1998, major uncertainties remained as to how to effectively implement conservation initiatives, given systemic underfunding and patchy administrative supervision from higher levels. The article then argues that higher (central and provincial) levels of the state have employed measures substantially unchanged since late imperial times: (1) the partial rationalization and extension of formal bureaucratic systems of direct control, and (2) the manipulation of moral incentives through exhortation and appeals to a complex trope of “cadre quality,” concluding that subjective notions of moral “character” in local leadership can combine with objective economic and infrastructural factors to either support or undercut central state initiatives.

This essay attempts to bring greater subtlety to our understanding of the role that print and newspapers play in the shaping of modern society. The essay begins by focusing on the centrality that Jürgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson give to print and newspapers and examines the applicability of their ideas to Kerala, India's most newspaper-consuming state, over the past 200 years. The essay suggests that by conceptualizing print and newspaper development in three stages, we arrive at a more accurate understanding of the impact of print consumption on societies and their politics.

This paper explores the causes behind the institutional change that promoted regulated private-sector competition in India's booming telecommunications sector. This change occurred incrementally by resolving conflicts of interest driven by the twin engines of fiscal crisis and technological change in cellular telephony. The Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance pushed for the change, whereas the Department of Telecommunications resisted it. As private participation succeeded, the relationship between the private sector and government financial organizations made a significant impact on parts of the government that favored change. Cellular technology offered the private sector with a first-mover's advantage because it had gambled on it when government-owned corporations had ignored its commercial potential. Evolutionary change occurred through a process of institutional layering that involved establishing new institutions along the edges of old ones and allowing them to grow differentially. The pace of institutional change accelerated in times of financial crises when the mismatch between policy intention and institutions led to a withdrawal of private investment.

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 the winter of 1909, at the height of Japan's informal rule in Korea, the protectorate government sent the Korean emperor Sunjong on an extended tour of the provinces. Applying the nation-building techniques of Meiji Japan, the residency-general had intended to promote unity and cooperation through the Korean royal house. Instead, the progresses sparked anti-Japanese nationalism and culminated in expressions of resistance. This article explores the political context of the progresses, the role of the newspapers in Korea and Japan in shaping public opinion, and the contest of official and popular nationalisms in Korea, defined by the symbols of the throne and the national flag.

With the death of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), both anthropology and Asian studies lost one of their most prominent, influential, and wide-ranging figures, as many obituaries and retrospective assessments of his life and work have noted (see, e.g., the unusually thoughtful and balanced one by Sherry Ortner, 2007). For more than forty years, Geertz's books and articles had a profound impact on his own discipline and on many neighboring ones, and though he dealt at length with other parts of the world, from Morocco (the subject of some of his fieldwork) to the United States (he sometimes turned his gaze to the rituals of his own culture), he often wrote about Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular. In terms of topics, he made major contributions to general debates on how to study history and culture, and to more specific discussions of issues such as the path that Islam took into and through individual nation-states.

Perhaps the most renowned leftist writer of late colonial Korea, Kim Namch'ŏn left a complex body of work that has so far defied an encompassing interpretation. On the one hand, in his theoretical writings, Kim consistently advocated realism as his aesthetic principle. On the other hand, within his fictional writings, Kim also displayed an antithetical interest in the fragmentary scenes of modern life, which he often depicted through experimental techniques of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, an attempt is made to provide a unified account of Kim's works. Special attention is given to Kim's early theorization of the everyday as a proper literary space for a materialist critique of society. This focus on everyday life, it is argued, enabled Kim to critique both the teleological outlook of dogmatic socialism and the utopian vision of pan-Asianism, but it did not shelter him from a fascination with the daily spectacles of urban modernity.

This article offers a critical analysis of the growing emphasis on security in South Asia through an ethnographic study of Operation Sadbhavna, an Indian military initiative that was launched in 2001 after the Kargil War between India and Pakistan. It demonstrates how a renewed emphasis placed on security requirements through the adoption of the development paradigm and discourses of peace building and human security further legitimizes the military's role in governance and civil society in postcolonial democratic states such as India. The data for this article derive from the project's application in the Ladakh region of the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The ways in which the official objectives of the project were interpreted and incorporated into the political, cultural, and economic aspirations of communities in Ladakh reveal both the coercive and ambiguous nature of democracy and state power in South Asia today.

Japanese within the Manchukuo education bureaucracy stood out from their contemporaries in other Japanese colonies in their opposition to including militaristic and Japanese emperor-centered materials in the schools. As late as 1943, they published textbooks that focused on the students' daily lives rather than on encouraging respect for the military or reverence for the Japanese imperial family. Here, the author discusses how the congruence of an attempt by Manchukuo authorities at gaining authenticity and the progressive background of leading Japanese educators in the region brought about an education system that was unlike any other in the Japanese empire. Using Manchukuo textbooks, education journals, and postwar memoirs, the author examines a school of thought among Japanese colonial language educators, referred to as “reform optimists,” who held that whole language education could solve the contradiction between Manchukuo's stated ideal of ethnic equality and the reality of Japanese domination.

This essay examines the cross-border trade among the migrant Yunnanese between Burma and Thailand during the era of the Burmese socialist regime. It was a period when the Burmese government implemented a nationalized economic system and strictly forbade free movement and private trade. Taking a transborder perspective, the essay looks beyond government institutions and probes the mercantile agency of the migrant Yunnanese traders, which contributed to the formation of their socioeconomic mechanisms. The findings suggest that the economic practices of the Yunnanese traders in effect constituted a transnational popular realm that formed an informal oppositional power against the Thai and Burmese national bureaucracies on the one hand, and incorporated varied state agencies on the other hand.