South Asianist Research Articles

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Do You Have to Have a Home to Leave?

This essay draws on diaspora theory’s longstanding focus on inheritance and generational prerogative in order to theorize the interdisciplinary identity of the South Asianist as the product of “reverse migration.” It proceeds from my own example: trained in interdisciplinary Literature and Rhetoric, I now work in a traditional discipline, English, as a scholar of South Asian Anglophone literature. My journey is contextualized as part of a larger, generationally-specific movement from interdisciplines into disciplines. Until recently, the typical trajectory was for a scholar to be trained in a traditional discipline like English, Philosophy, and History, and then leave to either found or take up residence in a program in Ethnic Studies, Area Studies, or Cultural Studies. The institutionalization of interdisciplines means that scholars of my generation made the opposite move. This essay challenges a longstanding, tacit consensus about earned, as opposed to inherited, interdisciplinarity. It reconceives interdisciplinarity as a mode of intellectual formation that confers a specific identity on student-scholars, who are then positioned to make interventions and contributions to the ongoing project of interdisciplinary field constitution.

Dismantling violence: Refocusing the Camera to BLM in South Asianist Humanities

ABSTRACT This essay is a first-person account of the material reality of being a South Asian scholar-activist, a university faculty who has been teaching at a Texas men’s prison for thirteen years now. It speaks to how the BLM has been always already a large part of this scholar’s pedagogical impulses and curricular design; for her graduate seminars in humanities, she centers black subjectivities in the texts, theories, and trajectories that are chosen. When the M4BL put out their philosophical vision, she brought, shared, and taught it in the prison classroom. Key themes of prison studies inform her classroom texts from abolition democracy to Afropessimism; her work critically reflects on these connections in classrooms that often have both black and brown students alongside white students, some of whom are declared white supremacists. Through a memoiristic-exercise of dwelling on the lived material reality of being a teacher who travels between the free and the carceral worlds, the knowledge transmitted as tools to dissemble walls, the essay attest to extant bridges of personal-political-ideological in which a brown immigrant woman can draw from a deep well of black epistemologies to speak about humanity in the last stops of the U.S. academy, its prisons.

Opening the black box – The making of India’s foreign policy

ABSTRACTMost studies looking at India’s external policies continue to “black-box” the actual process of how Indian foreign policy is made. More specifically, most studies generally overlook how India’s complex domestic polity and bureaucratic apparatus shape India’s foreign policy outlook. Unlike works on India’s security policy which have built from and contributed to broader academic debates, studies on India’s foreign policy have failed to directly engage with concepts and theories developed by the sub-discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Why have these concepts and approaches not been consistently applied to the Indian context? There are various reasons for this, ranging from these disciplines’ excessive reliance on Western case studies, or the lack of interest in mainstream International Relations scholarship by South Asianists (in contrast to disciplines such as economics, political theory, and developmental studies, all of which have benefited from the Indian experience). This special issue is a step towards bridging this gap and to encourage a greater dialogue between FPA and the systematic study of Indian foreign policy. Through the careful analysis of specific case studies, the different papers offer a conceptually grounded and empirically innovative reading of India’s foreign policy across time, space, and themes.

Introduction.

Introduction Prakash Kumar (bio) The history of technology of South Asia should justifiably reflect the particularities of South Asian colonial pasts and the trends that became palpable at its postcolonial moment. In what historically specific ways has coloniality intersected with technology in South Asia? The particular questions of colonial power and exclusions, the autonomy of the subaltern voice, and the imagined futures as India at independence grappled with a new socio-economic order in the midst of colonial legacies call upon historians to make purposeful selection of archives and to deploy specific methods. These choices should determine the nature of South Asian technological history. In other words, a technological history of South Asia cannot simply be a history of technology "in South Asia," a one-sided imposition of historiography of technology on a new geographical site.1 The contributors to this volume agree that South Asia should not be treated simply as an empirical site to which the already existing analytics and methodologies of the broader field of history of technology can be "extended." Our implicit claim in writing these technological stories is that South Asia should be (and it already is) also a location to unravel new analytics and methods. The contributors thus aim to demonstrate how looking at the history of technology from South Asia changes what it means to do history of technology. Calling the approach followed by the contributors to this volume post-Marxist and post-nationalist would be eminently inadequate, if a safe label. Just as much as they are distanced from older Marxist and nationalist [End Page 933] approaches, the contributors are also heirs to standard critiques of modernity within a certain mode of analysis in South Asia. Readers will find in these articles a direct engagement with the question of the modern and the place of technology in the construction of the modern. Political modernity and its various institutions, Dipesh Chakrabarty told us, "all bear the burden of European thought and history."2 In a sign that such questioning of modernity's universal claims have become mainstream, all South Asianists proceed with the assumption that the metanarrative of modernity may after all be inadequate to assess all of the lived experiences in South Asia. This reflexivity to "modern" defines all of the contributors' technological histories, and perhaps sets them apart. While questioning modernity is a staple in the historiography of technology, the contributors in this volume will critique modernity from a position firmly within South Asian scholarly conventions. Approach and Themes The articles in this volume display a distinctive crossdisciplinarity that is not out of sync with trends in the field of South Asia, and reflects the way the field has evolved and honed its disciplinary practices over the years. A distinct porosity of the discipline of history in South Asia can be traced to its earliest incarnations. The 1960s works of Bernard Cohn, a pioneer in the field, are instructive. Cohn's work is distinctive, among other things, for exploring conjointly the methods, practices, and theories of two disciplines, what Cohn referred to as "Anthropologyland" and "Historyland." Later, writing a foreword in an omnibus to Cohn's work, Dipesh Chakrabarty celebrated the ease with which Cohn was known to navigate the disciplines of history and anthropology and to call them both "home."3 The 1960s trend was further consolidated with the emergence of the subaltern studies in the 1980s that emerged as a critique of historicism across several disciplines. The active crossdisciplinarity of the subaltern and postcolonial arms of South Asian historiography accelerated the field's spread into disciplines of social sciences and invited the involvement of postcolonial theorists from multiple disciplines.4 The same crossdisciplinarity marks the [End Page 934] approaches in South Asian technological history broadly, which have come to incorporate the practice of radical social history, a new political economy, historical and cultural anthropology, ethno-history, and literary and textual analysis. Historians of technology in South Asia marshal this crossdisciplinarity to address a number of questions that can be seen as central to the historiography of technology. To review every pertinent question would be a herculean task even for a start. But in trying to keep the review of...

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

The Strange Tale of Sino-Pakistani Friendship

The Strange Tale of Sino-Pakistani Friendship Daniel Markey (bio) Andrew Small’s The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics delivers a comprehensive assessment of one of the world’s most consequential, peculiar, and poorly understood bilateral relationships. [End Page 151] Small weaves together his own interviews and travel observations with extensive use of other histories and narratives that touch on various aspects of China-Pakistan relations but, as he rightly observes, have thus far failed to deliver a full and up-to-date version of the story. Small’s book took a half-dozen years to write, but its timing is nearly ideal. He concludes his history by observing that “the China-Pakistan axis is almost ready to step out of the shadows” (p. 181). It is now quite safe to remove the caveated “almost” from his phrase. China’s new One Belt, One Road initiative—the grand scheme to extend and improve interconnectivity throughout China’s western periphery through massive state-led investments—is finding its most important test case in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, where, according to Pakistan’s probably inflated accounts, China has pledged $46 billion in new investments over the coming years. The China-Pakistan Axis is truly one of a handful of books that must be read by professionals seeking to understand Pakistan’s past or hoping to catch a glimpse into its future. And as China’s own fate becomes more intertwined with South, Central, and West Asia, the book will be an increasingly vital resource for serious China hands as well. As Small correctly notes, the study of relations between China and Pakistan is “something of an intellectual orphan, falling between a variety of regions and disciplines” and is complicated by the reality that it “encompasses some of the most sensitive areas of the two sides’ national security policies” (p. 5). To put it bluntly, most China scholars have not bothered to give much thought to Pakistan, while most South Asianists are ill-equipped to contemplate Beijing’s strategies, motives, or capabilities. Those who are interested must crack into the realm of tight-lipped security services, an especially tough task on the Chinese side. Small ably bounces between strategic perspectives, having spent sufficient time in Beijing, Islamabad, and Washington to build networks of reliable expert sources. He avoids ideology and dogmatism, rendering different perspectives in a dispassionate effort to understand them rather than to mount moralizing critiques. He does, however, pause to debunk myths, such as the claim that 11,000 Chinese troops were deployed to Pakistan’s north (p. 6), and punctures grand illusions like the notion that either Gwadar port or the Karakoram Highway has ever demonstrated any serious prospect of commercial success (p. 101, 106). Small also offers a steady flow of insider tidbits that demonstrate his grasp of the wider political processes at work, such as how Sino-Pakistani defense ties “ensure buy-in [End Page 152] from some of China’s highest ranking party and military families” (p. 108), and wades into controversial and sensitive topics, including China’s troubled policies in Xinjiang (p. 72). The book’s historical account of Sino-Pakistani ties is useful as a stage-setter for present circumstance, mainly because Small reminds the reader of the many twists and reversals in the region’s geopolitics. The very closeness between Beijing and Islamabad has its roots in the 1959 Lhasa uprising that hastened the death of good relations between India and China (p. 21). With the spirit of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers) buried, China and Pakistan teamed up to support a range of insurgencies within India, such as the Nagas and Mizo (p. 77). Later, Small recounts how Pakistan was the handmaiden for some of the most sensitive military and intelligence cooperation between China and the United States during the Cold War (p. 36) as well as the more widely recognized cooperation to fund the Afghan mujahideen (p. 123). Small also delves into China’s many—often dimly perceived—links with the Afghan Taliban before and after September 11. He describes, for instance, how China’s ambassador to Pakistan was the first senior representative of a...

Debating Shirk in Keralam, South India: Monotheism between Tradition, Text and Performance

Inspired as much by interfaith dialogue as by ethnographic discussions of intersubjectivity, I draw some narrow debates within Indian Islam outside of their usual South Asianist and/or Islam-centric frameworks and also resist the academic injunction to purify boundaries between theology and anthropological analysis. I present ethnography from Kerala factional debates raising two vexed questions: authority of interpretation; and the matter of shirk or deviation from tauheed, or true monotheism. My analysis follows impulses towards, firstly, a de-exceptionalising of Islam via comparison, drawing ethnography towards a wider ‘Abrahamic’ framework, in an eccentric move of reading Islamic debates through moments in commentary on Christian traditions; and secondly, I engage recent theological moves toward performative and deconstructive readings of religion. In Muslim traditions, Quran and hadith as ultimate authority are supported by the methods of qiyas – analogy – and considerations of ijma – community consensus. From the beginning, Islam has recognised that, “The Quran does not speak with a tongue; it needs interpreters and interpreters are people” (Esack, 1997). Performative and deconstructive understandings of religion are perhaps then already anticipated in the Islamic tradition, unlike (Western) Christianity, which has long been restrained by a narrow focus upon either scriptura or traditio – with the third pole of ‘community consensus’ hidden from sight and not often acknowledged, matters of consensus/performativity only recently becoming recognised as a proper and legitimate part of processes of interpretation, as Dalit, queer and feminist theologies emerge and come of age.

Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History. By Andrew J. Nicholson

Unifying Hinduism received the 2011 American Academy of Religion's award for Best First Book in the History of Religions, and for good reason: lucid and accessible, Andrew Nicholson's book offers an excellent model for South Asianists seeking to engage with the wider field of religious studies. At one level, the book is a study of Vijñānabhikṣu, a relatively neglected sixteenth-century Sanskrit intellectual who synthesized disparate schools of Indian philosophy. But Nicholson skillfully places his study of Vijñānabhikṣu within the context of a broader religious history, attempting to trace the process by which premodern Hindu thinkers came to see themselves as representatives of a single, unified tradition. Nicholson asserts that prior to the twelfth century, the various schools of Hindu philosophy were more or less independent, and there was no explicit articulation of a unified “orthodox” (āstika) identity in opposition to the “heterodox” (nāstika) schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and materialism. By the sixteenth century, however, thinkers such as Vijñānabhikṣu and his contemporary Madhusūdana Sarasvatī had come to view the originally distinct schools of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta as fundamentally united, if not in their actual teachings (Vijñānabhikṣu), then at least in their commitment to the Vedas (Madhusūdana). Nicholson refers to these thinkers as having formulated a “proto-Hindu” identity, which he believes was foundational to the subsequent transformation of Hinduism into a “world religion” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (23).

Imagining Otherwise: Comparative South Asian Literatures and the MLA

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

Imagining Modern India: The Genesis and Goals of a Course-in-the-Making

By training I am a South Asianist, specializing in the transformation of Hindu traditions during the colonial and postcolonial era. However, when I joined the Religion Department at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1992, I was the sole ‘Asianist.’ As such I was asked to provide coverage of the religious traditions of both South and East Asia. Accordingly, over the years I created a range of lower- and upper-level courses dedicated to such topics as ‘Asian Religious Literature,’ ‘Asian Religious Practice,’ and ‘Religion in Contemporary Japan,’ along with selected courses focusing on South Asia and Hinduism.

Question: What Are the Fruitful New Directions in Subaltern Studies, and How Can Those Working in Middle East Studies Most Productively Engage With Them?

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (review)

Reviewed by: A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire Ned Bertz A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. By Sugata Bose. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 333 pp. $27.95 (cloth). Revealing early on that his title is paraphrased from none other than Fernand Braudel, Sugata Bose alerts his readers that he intends his book to be an epic journey of "human agency, imagination, and action" (p. 4) carried on the warm waves of the Indian Ocean. This body of water's scholarship suffers neglect in comparison to the rich literatures of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific. This was clear from the unfortunate omission of the Indian Ocean from The American Historical Review's otherwise stimulating June 2006 forum on "Oceans of History." Who better than Bose, then—with a title of Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University—to captain Indian Ocean studies back into the conversation with theorists of oceanic world history and globalization? While he does sail into this discussion briefly, and with incisive skill, the author's eyes are fonder of other horizons: those that bound Indian Ocean world historiography, especially as seen from the shores of South Asia. It is here that Bose makes his greatest contributions, in particular by extending early modern understandings of the Indian Ocean into the twentieth century, in exploring cosmopolitan notions of anticolonialism across the region, and through the South Asianist project of deterritorializing Indian nationalism. One tension that has long beset Indian Ocean studies, like other transnational or world or global historical fields, is the question of balancing the ebb and flow of movement with the power structures that prevent or control it. At a 2002 conference on the Indian Ocean world, South Asian historian Vinay Lal of UCLA commented, in response to many papers about interregional flows and fluidity, that we needed to think more about "constipating" the Indian Ocean world. On the other end of the balance, the dominant view established by leading historians Kenneth McPherson and Michael Pearson is that European global empires sundered or subordinated preexisting Indian Ocean [End Page 377] linkages while fusing the region to the world economy. Bose offers a nuanced corrective by borrowing from Ranajit Guha, founder of India's subaltern studies collective, to argue that Europeans merely achieved "dominance without hegemony" in the Indian Ocean: "The peoples of the Indian Ocean made their own history, albeit not without having to contend with economic exploitation and political oppression, and the oceanic space supplied a key venue for articulating different universalisms from the one to which Europe claimed monopoly" (p. 273). The human agents Bose follows to illustrate his argument are a motley crew: Indian laborers in the oilfields of Bahrain and on the rubber plantations of Malaya; Gujarati merchants in Zanzibar and Tamil financiers in Burma; Indian soldiers deployed overseas in service of the British empire to France, Mesopotamia, and Southeast Asia; "expatriate patriots" such as Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and Subhas Chandra Bose, who marched from Singapore to northeastern India with an army of colonial liberation during World War II; Muslim hajjis who traveled from India to Arabia on spiritual pilgrimage; and finally Rabindranath Tagore, whose peripatetic poetry written while on oceanic voyages made him a pilgrim of another sort, one in search of a "Greater India." This dazzling ensemble provides Bose with just a handful of the "hundred horizons" that represent the varied shared experiences found across the interregional Indian Ocean arena. Bose argues that the same scholars who sought out a precolonial Indian Ocean world "organic unity" inevitably read its collapse with the coming of European power (p. 20). Bose tells us that we must instead "keep in play an Indian Ocean interregional arena of economic and cultural interaction as an analytical unit while avoiding the pitfalls of assuming any uncomplicated and unsustainable thesis about continuity" (p. 21). The method employed here is to sketch the histories of the "circular migrants" listed above, centering their encounters with the Indian Ocean as the backdrop. However, one can see the challenge in trying to hold these stories together within a single ambitious book. One downside of...

Resurgent South Asia: an introduction to the annual conference edition of the British Association for South Asian Studies

As a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), its 2006 annual conference marked an auspicious juncture in the history of the association. One of the conference's central themes was to highlight several important shifts, both imminent and long term, in the pace and direction of South Asian studies in the United Kingdom. The unprecedented large international turnout at the conference provided concrete proof that the interdisciplinarity and global reach of the academic community working on this region remains as strong as ever. Growing recognition within the media, government and business of the significance of South Asia in international affairs, particularly the emergence of India as a global economic and political power, has given a much-needed impetus to the spirit and purpose of BASAS. The ambition to maintain and build on the capacity of British and European universities to produce linguistically and culturally skilled South Asianists, both for furthering knowledge as well as meeting the requirements of industry and the diplomatic services, has never before been so crucial. There are promising signs that the role of BASAS in fostering an intellectually vibrant environment for South Asianists is winning broader institutional support. This article surveys the key themes covered during the conference, some of which are well reflected in the diverse range of papers selected for this special edition.

Introduction to the Third British Association for South Asian Studies Annual Conference edition of Contemporary South Asia

The year 2006 marks the 20th anniversary of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), and the organisation continues to enjoy a strong membership drawn from among South Asianists both in the United Kingdom and abroad. This is the third year that papers from the annual BASAS conference have been included in an edition of Contemporary South Asia. While neither the conference nor this edition sought to elicit participation from scholars working on particular themes, a number of cross-cutting issues do emerge within the following contributions. In particular, several of the papers focus upon the ways in which the marginalised in Indian society seek to secure their livelihoods and to express their identity. Other papers engage with broader political themes from independence to the current day.

Walter C. (Terry) Neale (1925–2004)

Walter Castle Neale, more usually known as Terry, was in different aspects an institutional economist, an economic historian, a South Asianist, and an economic anthropologist. This describes his contributions under three heads: South Asia, which includes the main bulk of his technical economic arguments and his policy analyses; Economic anthropology, which covers his importance in Anthropology; and General theory, which covers the themes that provide his work with its underlying consistency and unity.

Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia Robert D. King Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Edited by Sheldon Pollock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xxix, 1,066 pp. $80.00. ISBN 0-520-22821-9. Perhaps nowhere on earth are history, culture, language, and literature more involved with each other than in South Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Why this is so goes back primarily to the fact that the study of language—Sanskrit—in ancient India was the core of the intellectual tradition. Indian grammarians conceived their ministrations on behalf of the Sanskrit language as a devotional. Their activity was more akin to a priesthood, a calling, than it was a profession or an academic pursuit. (The great Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali is sometimes depicted as a demigod—a coiled snake from the waist down, with a cobralike hood.) Because of this extraordinary sacralization of language in the intellectual pantheon of India, all other areas of intellectual study such as literature, history, epic, and myth were themselves dipped in spirituality, a spirituality made more sublime by the basic conviction of Vedantism (Hinduism) that philosophical dualism is profoundly wrong: all is seamless continuum, nothing is either-or, black-and-white. All connects. Something of that mindset and dedication to the uniting role of language informs this very large book. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia is written for the specialist, not the general reader. The essays are grouped into five parts: "Globalizing Literary Cultures"; "Literature in Southern Locales"; "The Centrality of Borderlands" (note the characteristically Indian love of paradox); "Buddhist Cultures and South Asian Literatures"; and "The Twinned Histories of Urdu and Hindi." Pieces I especially liked were "Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out" by Sheldon Pollock; "The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal" by Sudipta Kaviraj; "The Indian Literary Identity in Tibet" by Matthew T. Kapstein; and "The Progress of Hindi, Parts 1 and 2" by Stuart McGregor and Harish Trivedi. One's heart sinks upon reading the opening sentence of the preface: "[This book] originated in a research proposal consciously designed to implement a new practice of scholarship in the service of new historiographical and theoretical objectives." To the ear trained to nuance in contemporary critical dialogue (and now fatigued by it), that opening sentence suggests a heavy dose of Bourdieu [End Page 335] and Baudrillard and Terry Eagleton to follow. And yes, there is some of that, the postmodern thing, here, but surprisingly little of it for a contemporary work of scholarship on history, culture, and literature, especially in a "developing world" area such as South Asia. The result is an interesting assortment of essays that exemplify the best in multidisciplinary scholarship. An impressive blend of disciplines, approaches, and opinions informs this collection: literary theory, linguistics, philology, politics, religion, and, refreshingly, an old-fashioned love of literature and language—of the text. The preface makes clear that this was a seriously collective enterprise in which each contributor had to confront criticisms from other contributors and where in the end the editor did what editors of academic collections should do but so rarely do: exercise editorial authority. The prose of the contributions is happily free of the deadened academic jargon of postmodernism: I hardly noticed the relatively few instances of "hegemony" and "Orientalism" that insinuated themselves into the text. For this, of course, we have the editor, Sheldon Pollock, to thank. Whatever his private view of postmodern theory may be (I assume he is sympathetic to it, though a "postmodern Sanskritist" is an oxymoron), we are grateful to him for minimizing its prominence in the essays that make up this book and thereby giving us a resource that is readable and enjoyable to South Asianists beyond the narrow circle of inner postmodernism. Nothing that eschews academic jargon can be all bad. Old sins cast long shadows in the unforgiving sun of the Indian subcontinent. There are few conflicts in Indian history that do not lay their skeletal hand on the shoulder of today's events: Hindus vs. Muslims, center vs. periphery (in domains ranging from politics to literature and the wearing of saris), Hinduism vs...

A time for tea: women, labor, and post/colonial politics on an Indian plantation

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and the Practice of Architectural History

of the profoundest order, in large measure due to the legacy of a handful of inspired articles on architectural subjects that he wrote during a brief period in the late twenties and early thirties. Chief among these is a four-part series modestly titled Early Indian Architecture, in which Coomaraswamy set out to reconstruct the principal building types that dominated India's architectural landscape in the early historic period (approximately fourth century B.C. to third century A.D.). Coomaraswamy's writings on early Indian architecture are well known to specialists in the architectural history of India, but unfortunately the wider reception they deserve-both among architectural historians working in other areas and among South Asianist art historians and archaeolo-

Historicizing ‘the PostcoloniaT from Nineteenth‐Century Peru

Abstract This paper deploys an Andean case to suggest that Latin America's nineteenth‐century histories may usefully intervene in contemporary discussions of colonialism and the postcolonial. Such an intervention potentially pluralizes the ‘abstract singularity’ or ‘universal historicism’ of much contemporary postcolonial discourse produced from diasporic‐metropolitan, South Asianist. and Africanist perspectives. The proposed move also brings history, particularly history thought from the predicament or location of subaltern Latin America, to the center of post‐universal discussions that link postcolonialities to subaltern(ist) perspectives.