In the early twentieth century, Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, was a philosophy premised on exclusivist notions of “nation-ness” and “nation-state-ness.” India, proponents claimed, had since the earliest times been the pitrabhumi and the punyabhumi of Hindus—their fatherland and holy land. This ideal realm was corrupted by Muslim and Christian “invaders,” foreigners who defiled and split asunder “Akhand Hindustan,” the one India of Hindus. In the context of British rule of the subcontinent, Hindu nationalists mirrored colonial claims and held up the native princely states as exemplars of “tradition,” as territories unspoiled by foreign hands and thus representative of the “true India.” The idea behind Akhand Hindustan came from a prominent member of the princely state bureaucracy, K. M. Munshi. Here the author explores how and why princely states were idealized in the Hindu imaginary and what role reformers, particularly Munshi, played in perpetuating this hard-line ideology. By exploring the regions on which early Hindu nationalism was mapped, the author illuminates the teleology of Hindutva while providing a better understanding of the place of princely states in the politics and society of colonial India.

This article explores factors contributing to a boom in Buddhist temple construction in contemporary mainland China. In contrast to recent studies focusing on struggles between religious believers and the state over the revival of local temples and churches, this article examines the culture of merit making and morality building that leads clergy and lay practitioners to form translocal networks with the aim of constructing temples in rural areas where they have few or any cultural ties. The author explores how temple building is driven by differing moral visions within the urban Buddhist community, but with little consideration for the culture and history of the people in the localities where the temples are constructed.

The article focuses on the spiritual capital negotiated in the Indian-Indonesian networks of an Indian Hindu missionary currently living in Bali. These networks bridge different social groups and thereby foster—like the American mainline Protestant churches examined by Robert Putnam—the conditions for transnational community building and commerce. The value of spiritual capital is gauged against the backdrop defined by the rise of Hindu nationalism and a new economic agenda in India since the end of the 1980s. Parallel to these developments, Indonesian Hindus began to grow wary of the growing influence of Islam and Islamism in their country.

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a “traditional” genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives.

In 1944, a rebellion in China's northwestern Xinjiang Province prompted Chiang Kai-shek to send his most trusted lieutenant, Zhang Zhizhong, to negotiate with the rebels and to attempt to consolidate Nationalist China's hold over the perennially restive frontier province. Zhang's innovative adaptation of tested Soviet models of minority representation tapped into and reinterpreted a long tradition of established cultural paradigms for digesting and representing the internal “other” within China. The most visible and widely disseminated projects that Zhang sponsored in the waning days of Nationalist China represent a determined eleventh-hour propaganda attempt to integrate the seldom-seen Central Asian frontier into the greater conception of a unified Chinese republic. This effort also marks one of the earliest instances of the Chinese state attempting to employ mass propaganda media to disseminate—among a large and diverse audience—a modified version of established modes of ethnic representation previously in currency only among a limited subsection of elite and official society.

Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, the main centers of political and cultural gravity for the Pashtuns lay in India, where numerous Pashtuns migrated in pursuit of commerce and soldiery. Amid the cosmopolitan pressures of India and its alternative models of self-knowledge and affiliation, Pashtun elites elaborated a distinct idiom of “Afghan” identity. With the Afghans' absorption into the Mughal Empire, earlier patterns of accommodation to the Indian environment were overturned through the writing of history, whereby the Afghan past and present were carefully mapped through the organizing principle of genealogy. While the Afghan religious world was being reshaped by the impact of empire, in response, tales of expressly Afghan saints served to tribalize the ties of Islam. With the decline of Mughal power, the collective “Afghan” identity of the diaspora was transmitted to the new Afghan state, where the relationship of this tribal template of Afghan authenticity to the non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan remains the defining controversy of national identity.

Working in Bali in the late 1930s, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made an extraordinary advance in the understanding of human performance. They observed bodily practices constituting processes of signification that resembled linguistic communication far more closely than had ever been suspected. The Mead/Bateson theory of human performance prefigured research in performance studies that has only recently begun to challenge poststructural convictions regarding the ephemerality of symbolic action. Essential to Mead and Bateson's achievement was their pioneering use of film. Equally vital, however, was their construction of Bali as a place, phenomenologically speaking. The Bali in which Mead and Bateson lived and worked was a cosmopolitan yet excessively localized product of their own design, to an extent contemporary perspectives find highly problematic. Nonetheless, the actual complexities of Balinese history and culture can be seen to have intervened into their collaborative process in ways that enabled pathbreaking insights.

A movement to “revive the spirit of Punjab and Punjabi” in South Asia has enabled a surprising thaw between the two Punjabs of Pakistan and India. That this revival movement has been catalyzed from within Pakistan rather than India raises intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation—insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land—its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan's Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the center against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan's troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture's critical role in the nation's political imagination.

In the mid-1930s, criticisms of modern women's habits, clothing, and hairstyles exploded in the Burmese popular press, showing that “modern fashion” made a man no less virtuous and patriotic but rendered a woman immoral and unpatriotic. This article examines the nature of these criticisms and their motivations, and reveals that the controversy over the dress and comportment of modern women was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon sustained by irreducibly plural interests. It argues that neither the appeal for traditionalism and national sufficiency in the face of multiple modern and colonial temptations, nor the changing tides of Burmese nationalist movements sufficiently explain the preoccupation with modern women's fashion, and suggests that the discourse on modern women needs to be analyzed as stemming from a profound unsettling of existing notions of masculinity and femininity, and its effect on relations between the sexes.

This article explores the importance of transnational forms of Muslim cultural identity in northern Pakistan. By documenting the dynamism of a transnational form of Muslim identity that encompasses people belonging to a wide range of ethnic communities and Islamic doctrinal traditions, as well as extending across countries whose Muslim peoples have experienced the differential effects of their incorporation into both the Soviet Union and British India, the author seeks to challenge the work of Islam specialists who emphasize the centrality of “globalizing modernity” to the making of contemporary forms of Muslim identity. In contrast, this article builds on historical accounts of premodern forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism, notably Engseng Ho's study of Hadrami Muslim scholars who saw themselves as active creators of a universal world structured around the transregional ideals of their faith in the expansive Indian Ocean trading world. Building on this and other work on cosmopolitanism, the author documents the ways in which older experiences of mobility in this politically sensitive region of the world influence villagers' present-day engagements with globalizing processes. The ethnographic focus is on the ways in which Sunni and Shi'a Ismai'li Chitrali Muslims interacted with refugees into their region from Afghanistan and Tajikistan between 1979 and 2002, a time when both countries were experiencing violent civil and international conflict.

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.

This article explores the representation of chigo—adolescent males attached to Buddhist temples or aristocratic households who were educated, fed, and housed in exchange for personal, including sexual, services—in medieval Japan. The author discusses how chigo were depicted in historical records, in contemporary short fictional narratives, and in a “Chinese” legend invented by Japanese Tendai monks; the chigo are also compared to the Tang consort Yang Guifei. Fictional and real chigo tend to fall victim to violence, and it is argued that the chigo functions as a surrogate sacrificial victim, a cultural figure whose role is outlined most prominently in the works of René Girard.

This essay is a revisionist history of the Padri War and the place of Tuanku Imam Bondjol in the intellectual history of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, of the Dutch colonial state, and of Indonesian nationalism. The Tuanku Imam is an official “national hero” from the early nineteenth century, a putative Wahhabi, and leader of the Padri War, the first Muslim-against-Muslim jihad in Southeast Asia. The essay examines the Tuanku Imam in contemporary sources and then his construction as a serviceable trope of controlled Islam, Minangkabau patriotism, or Indonesian nationalism by successive states. Using memoirs by the Tuanku Imam and his son, Sutan Caniago, the essay analyzes the Tuanku's renunciation of Wahhabism in the face of matrifocal opposition and the interplay of three connected texts that serve to secularize the story of the Padri War.

Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of “hello,” “please,” “thanks,” “sorry,” or “goodbye” existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these “five courteous phrases” (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this “verbal hygiene” is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an “advanced civilization” is being retooled in international terms.

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.

This article discusses how contemporary Chinese Muslims in the city of Xi'an remember a massive conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims that devastated northwest China in the Tongzhi period (1862–74) of the Qing dynasty. Every year on the seventeenth day of the fifth lunar month, local Hui hold a series of mourning rituals for the Muslims who died at that time. They recount stories about these events during the ritual and in other settings. The author uses Bakhtin's concept of “social heteroglossia” to explore the discursive features of three accounts of the violence, arguing that Xi'an Hui memories of this past show the influence of state-sponsored ethnic policies, a religious model of Hui identity, and a less formally articulated collective sentiment (what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”) based on shared experience. The author discusses how these discourses are disseminated and which factors generate the “structure of feeling” that colors contemporary Muslim accounts of the Tongzhi period, and reflects on the consequences of Xi'an Hui internalization of the state's framework for ethnic identity.

This paper argues that Dalit consciousness in Punjab emerged against the backdrop of the teachings of Ravidass, an untouchable saint-poet of the North Indian Bhakti movement who presented a middle path between assimilation and radical separatism for the construction of a separate Dalit identity. Dera Sach Khand Ballan, one of the most popular Ravidass Deras in Punjab, played an important role in concretizing this path by chiseling the markers of a separate Dalit identity in the state. The author assesses the long-term implications of the newly emerged Dalit consciousness in Punjab for the deepening of democracy in India.