A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space already vacated by the Congress has so far been filled by three different sets of political forces. The first force, Hindu nationalism, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Basu 1997; Hansen and Jaffrelot 1998; Jaffrelot 1993; Varshney 1993). The second force, regionalism, has also spawned considerable research of late (Baruah 1999; Singh forthcoming; Subramanian 1999). A third force, not so extensively analyzed, covers an array of political parties and organizations that encompass groups normally classified under the umbrella category of “lower castes”: the so-called scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes, and the “other backward classes” (OBCs). How should we understand the politics of parties representing these groups? How far will they go? What are the implications of their forward march, if it does take place, for Indian democracy?

Was knowledge always the basis of colonial power? If so, were colonial rulers invariably confident of the accuracy of their knowledge? Among the Victorian British, for example, there was widespread agreement that India could be known and represented as a series of facts (Cohn 1996, 4). Based on this agreement, the British colonial officials, missionaries, and entrepreneurs tried to demonstrate their power through what Bernard Cohn calls “officializing procedures”: counting, gathering, characterizing, ordering, and classifying the populations and their attributes in India. Such procedures offered numerous agents of colonization “seemingly immense culture-defining capacity” (Cooper and Stoler 1989, 609). Yet, their power was “never so omniscient nor secure to imagine itself as totalizing” (Dirks 1992, 7). Their insecurity may have been the result of their incomplete knowledge or even ignorance.

The articles presented here grew out of a year-long discussion of the spatial dimensions of historical and cultural change in various parts of Asia during the early modern and modern periods. Each essay engages the ways in which geographies—here defined as visual and verbal discourses about space—perform political and cultural work. That is, we examine how geographies in Asia were deployed strategically, whether to map, narrate, frame, relocate, or dislocate particular places, regions, “homelands,” or nation-spaces. In recent centuries, these Asian geographies have necessarily coexisted with Western (principally European) geographies, whether in the colonial or postcolonial context. As these essays show, such coexistence has taken many forms, from conflict to emulation to apparent disinterest.

Salman rushdie calls mythology “the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] … future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles” (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, “the waking dreams our societies permit” that celebrate “the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks” (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.

The politics of ethnicity—caste, religion, and language—has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collection of monoethnic parties. Many of the smaller parties are in themselves multiethnic, although the coalitions that they seek to build are usually narrower than those built by Congress. Rather, the key aspect is the change in the type of ethnic politics that dominates the political arena. Congress plays a coded ethnic card, invoking ethnic identities quietly in its selection of candidates but not openly in its identification of issues; targets certain ethnic groups without openly excluding others; builds differentiated ethnic coalitions across constituencies and states; and courts the support of these ethnic coalitions through the distribution of patronage but never through the rhetoric of identity.

When the united states embarked on a campaign of overseas colonial conquest a century ago, it was for some Americans an unquestionably righteous venture in political tutelage. “[God] has made [the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples] adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples,” proclaimed Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge. “And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world” (Snyder 1962). The largest and most important U.S. colony was of course the Philippines, where a campaign of military conquest began in 1898 and continued into the early years of the new century.

We are currently witnessing two trends in Southeast Asia: first, an increase in what is often referred to as “civil society” activity including action by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and second, an increase in various forms of migration, one of the key human rights concerns of the post-World War II era. This article reviews the convergence of these two trends by examining activism on behalf of migrant workers in the largest receiving state of migrants in Asia, Malaysia. With approximately 700,000 documented and over one million undocumented migrant workers, Malaysia has one of the highest percentages of foreign workers in the world (Migrant News [MN], November 1999). Like many other countries with labor shortages, Malaysia needs these workers, but does not want them. Both of these facts are clearly reflected in government policies. There are frequent attempts to get rid of migrant workers, either in response to public concern or because of economic downturn, but with almost every halt to migration there is a corresponding exception allowing workers to stay or continue coming. Throughout this process there is little if any attention paid to the rights of migrant workers by the Malaysian government, or often the migrant's home government. Since this increased migration is occurring at a time of a general increase in activism in Malaysia and regionally, it is reasonable to ask what of this civil society energy is being addressed to the increasingly important issue of migrant rights.

This paper reports on the economic and political consequences of reserving government and public-sector jobs for members of the Scheduled Tribes in the Indian State of Bihar. It also contributes to a more general debate on the system of compensatory discrimination that has existed in India since the 1940s, and which was made tangible for middle class Indians by the decision of the government of V. P. Singh (1989–90) to adopt some of the recommendations of the Second Backward Classes Commission (1979–80: chairman B. P. Mandal). The Mandal Commission report advised that a system of reserved jobs in central government could usefully be extended from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes of India (roughly 15 and 7.5 percent of the population, respectively) to embrace a broader collection of Socially and Economically Backward Classes.1 In August 1990 V. P. Singh found it expedient to act upon Mandal's suggestion that up to 49.5 percent of all jobs in central government services and public undertakings should be reserved for the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

On 27 december 1932, prince bhidayalongkorn, the President of the Royal Institute of Siam, delivered a special lecture titled “What are the conditions called ‘siwilai’?” [Phawa yangrai no thi riakwa khwam siwilai]. Transliterated from the English word civilized, the term was widely used in public without elaboration. Bhidayalongkorn reported that there was a debate whether Siam was or was not yet siwilai, often referring to England, China, Haiti, Tibet, and many other countries, but it was not clear what made them siwilai or not siwilai. He went on debunking the general understanding that wealth, power, territory, monogamy, gender equity, cleanliness, dress, etiquette, or mechanization constituted the notion of siwilai. The meaning was slippery, no matter how anybody tried to claim or use it politically (Bhidayalongkorn 1970).

An the spring of 1984, officials of Taishan County, Guangdong, erected a statue in the central square of the county seat to commemorate the man whose life represented the highest attainment of ambition, idealism, and patriotism in recent local history. The man so honored was neither a conquering general nor a communist zealot. Taishan's chosen hero was a master of commerce and industry, who overcame the early disadvantages of birth to an impoverished family to become a wealthy and successful businessman, a powerful labor contractor, a railroad engineer, and the owner of a thriving import-export business based in the American city of Seattle. Chen Yixi (1844–1928) was not distinguished by financial success alone, for many other Taishanese men went to America, where, by dint of hard work, determination, and luck, they also became wealthy men.

My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other, we use it to avoid making obscene associations … I expect you to be familiar with the textbooks in physics and naturalhistory and urge you to also take a look at the textbooks from girls' schools … I consider knowledge a product, lecturers like myself both the creators of knowledge and at the same time original researchers and brokers of knowledge.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the geography classroom as a crucible of nationalist ideology. In the past decade, scholars from around the world have exposed the chauvinism of national atlases (Black 1997; Fahlbusch, Rossler, and Siegrist 1989), assessed the citizenship models implicit in social-studies readers (Bailly 1998; Soysal 1998), traced the institutional linkages between geography and imperialism (Bell, Butlin, and Heffernan 1995; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Livingstone 1992), and explored the role of spatial images and metaphors in shaping national identities (Hooson 1994; Thongchai 1994).

The rise of the other backward classes (OBCs) is certainly one of the main developments in the Hindi-belt politics over the last ten years. The OBCs are castes in the Indian social system that are situated above the Untouchables but below the forward castes (the “twice born,” Brahmins, Kshatriyas [warriors] and Vaishyas [merchants]) and the intermediate castes (mostly peasant proprietors and even dominant castes). They form the bulk of the Shudras—the fourth category (varna) of the classical Hindu social arrangement. The OBCs, whose professional activity is often as field-workers or artisans, represent about half of the Indian population, but they have occupied a subaltern position so far. Their rise for the first time seriously questions upper-caste domination of the public sphere.

Semicolonialism, as jürgen osterhammel noted, is a label that has been generally applied to China “without much regard for its potential theoretical implications” (Osterhammel 1986, 296). The partial character of semicolonialism—as incomplete colonialism—poses the question of what difference it made that throughout the modern period China never in fact became a subject nation, but retained sovereignty over nearly all of its territory and was recognized as a sovereign nation by international law. The writings of twentieth-century Chinese nationalists and a recent profusion of theorizing about colonialism and “colonial modernity” in China, by emphasizing colonialism (Barlow 1997), have perhaps obscured rather than clarified the answer to this question. Moreover, semicolonialism in China, as a gradual accretion of phenomena associated with imperialism, varied substantially over time. Its significance for understanding nineteenth-century China, when the foreign presence within China was still quite limited, remains unclear. Several decades of research on imperialism in Shanghai have produced much debate, but no clear mapping of “where, when, how and to what effect did which extraneous forces impinge” on Chinese life (Osterhammel 1986, 295).