Since 2000, a number of performing troupes have been established in South Korea, made up largely of musicians and dancers who were professionally trained in North Korea prior to their migration and presenting a range of music and dances related to both the North and South. Combining ethnographic data with performance analysis of one such troupe, the Pyŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, I show how the nation and the state intersect in the space of performing arts as the troupe's creative culture reflects the settlement experiences of North Koreans in the South. While the troupe's organization, membership, and performance culture delineate migrant adaptation and understanding of their new citizenship, the performance of these Koreans is a complex terrain in which the two Koreas converge and are contested as the performers enact a constant negotiation between “being” and “negating” North Korean-ness, expressing their cultural hybridity as emergent citizens of the South.

In both China and India agriculture is the key sector and yet detailed comparisons of agricultural development in the two economies are difficult to obtain. A major problem is, of course, the availability and reliability of data. This paper puts together some of the information that is now available and assesses its reliability to draw some rough generalizations.

On the whole it seems that agricultural production in the two countries has grown at fairly similar rates. In terms of absolute level Chinese yield per hectare in most crops, of course, exceeds that of India by a significant margin, but this has been true for quite a long time in the past.

In provision of inputs like organic and inorganic fertilizers and irrigation water the Chinese performance has been much better than that of India. Both countries have devoted not a very low proportion of their total gross investment to the agricultural sector. But the effectiveness of this investment has been quite unsatisfactory on account of, among other things, technical deficiencies and faulty planning in both countries, and the excesses of over enthusiastic but unskilled party cadres in China and a very much restricted framework of village institutions and administrative setup in India. In land policy much of the period under consideration was taken up in China in bold experimentations—with the inevitable advances and retreats—in search of the optimum size of land management in a backward peasant economy, while in India in spite of copious land legislation some of the crucial land relations have remained basically unaltered. The Chinese policy of moving away from age-old small-scale family farming and of emphasizing joint management of land and labour has, on the one hand, significantly strained peasant incentives, but on the other hand rid Chinese agriculture of the burden of uneconomically small and fragmented holdings, tenurial insecurity and crop sharing which still afflict a substantial part of Indian agriculture. The problem of ensuring enough marketed surplus of foodgrains to feed the nonagricultural sector has, however, remained unsolved in both countries, in spite of all changes in institutions and production.

The contemporary study of Chinese painting history varies considerably according to cultural locus, be it mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, or the West, making broad generalization about the state of the field quite difficult. Where the intellectual and social context of traditional East Asian culture remains most intact, the study of painting has perpetuated the concerns and modes of the thousandplus years of traditional historiography, yet this has become increasingly rare. In the People's Republic, innovation has come largely through Marxist influence, bringing a focus on social aspects of the art, but no systematic Marxist analysis has ever emerged and the influence of ideology is now noticeably on the wane. In the West, where most of those who study Chinese painting cannot themselves paint, do more than dabble in calligraphy, or lay claim to being part of the Chinese cultural elite, and where an understanding of the Chinese context cannot be taken for granted, the need for cross-cultural explanation has generated studies unique in character, blending sinology with Eurocentric art-historical questions and methods. This Western approach, with its skeptical analysis and egalitarian perspective, has provided new techniques of stylistic analysis for reevaluating the traditional dates and attributions of paintings and yielded a new, more objective basis for examining the theory, content, and sociocultural basis of Chinese painting.

The field of traditional chinese fiction studies is as diverse in its approaches and findings as the body of material included in the term xiaoshuo, with which the modern field imprecisely corresponds. As a term for classifying writings in early China, xiaoshuo seemingly meant “other” works that did not fit into the major category of narrative, i.e., history. In the bibliographical section of Ban Gu's (c.e. 32–92) Han shu, the Yiwen zhi, titles identified as xiaoshuo apparently were miscellaneous writings of no uniform characteristics or content. In the Han shu bibliography, xiaoshuo were classified under the zhuzi or “miscellaneous philosophers”; during the Six Dynasties period these writings were grouped in the zi or “philosophers” section of the sibu, the durable four-fold bibliographic division of all writing originated in the third century and still in use. This Han shu designation reflected the assumption that xiaoshuo are or should be generally “discursive,” even if they are of less significance than formal philosophical works. The clear discrimination between verifiable narrative works (hence historical) and fanciful (or fictitious) writings was a product of the Tang period; however, the assignment of fictional xiaoshuo to the same category as philosophy continued then as well. Like Aristotle, early Chinese bibliographers saw general truth, rather than the specific truth of history, as the operative criterion in fiction, despite the origins of many fictional narrative conventions in historiography (see K. J. DeWoskin, “Six Dynasties Chih-kuai,” esp. p. 46). Twentieth-century scholarly attempts to see the term as synonymous with the modern concept of fiction are frustrated by its original lack of specificity and the fact that patently fictitious (from the modern rationalist perspective) elements appear in all other forms of early literature, both philosophical works (as parables or the flights of imaginative fancy in Zhuang zi) and history (in fabricated conversations and fantastic events). While it may be argued that a term like “narrative,” with its coincident concern for story, discourse, and conventions (using distinctions drawn by Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], pp. 9, 83, 117, etc.), would more adequately serve to describe the range of materials modern scholars might address, because the term xiaoshuo still delineates the field for its specialists, narratives in philosophy and history are usually disallowed, and there is no general agreement on criteria by which to identify its earliest examples (see Hou Zongyi, Liuchao xiaoshuo shi, pp. 1–4, for a history of the term).

The term munshi (scribe) usually refers to the clerical assistants employed by Indian lawyers (vakils), particularly by those who practice at the district and subdivisional courts at the lowest level of the legal system. The majority of vakils maintain only the most rudimentary records of their cases; their business correspondence is minimal and often conducted by postcard; the average law practice accounts are kept for the most part in the vakil's head, with occasional help from a note scribbled on a file cover. Not surprisingly, the routine duties of the munshi are relatively simple and easily mastered. They include safeguarding the documents the vakil does maintain during a case; completion of applications to the court; copying of cause lists obtained from magistrates' clerks; updating the vakil's diary of pending cases; occasional copying of case material; and running innumerable errands for the master, often of a purely domestic kind. In several respects, the munshi's role is a marginal one. His duties, for example, are not formally defined within the legal system. Nor are a munshi's services indispensible to a lawyer; many a vakil gets along without an assistant. The population of munshis at a district court is likely to be a transient one: munshis move from vakil to vakil, working only a year or two for each employer; and they drift in and out of the occupation, usually from and to ones of equally low status. Finally, the occupation is economically marginal: it provides a precarious livelihood for the majority of munshis; only a few are prosperous or enjoy much security.

Mr. Chang, who lived in Hopei Province in China, found himself in need of money to meet some special business expenses back in 1918. He might have gone to his relatives and asked them, as members of his family, to lend him the money. Or if there were not enough relatives to provide the sum needed, he might have persuaded one of his friends to introduce him to one of the well-to-do money lending families of the community, but that would have involved the payment of interest of two, two and a half or even three per cent a month. To save the heavy interest charge and to avoid putting too much burden on his relatives, Mr. Chang went to thirty of his friends and relatives, told them of his need for funds and invited them to join a mutual savings society. Such societies are very numerous in North China. They are popular because the members provide the capital sums that they use in turn and so avoid the expensive services of the money lender.

There are approximately five million Muslims in Thailand (7 percent of the total population), with about 1.8 million in the southernmost provinces bordering on Malaysia. A considerable literature in history, anthropology, political science, international relations, and religious studies has been produced since January 4, 2004, when a violent Muslim insurgency dramatically erupted in the area. At that time over 100 Muslim insurgents raided an arms depot of the Fourth Army Engineers in Narathiwat Province. On January 22, in south Thailand, two Muslim young men on a motorcycle used a long knife to slit the throat of a sixty-four-year-old Buddhist monk, killing him. The monk had just returned from his early morning round of tham bun (alms-collecting extending merit to Buddhist families).

By way of framing Manan Ahmed Asif's intriguing personal (and poetic) reflection entitled “Idol in the Archive” in this current issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, it must always be remembered that in August 1947, the old British Raj gave birth to not one but two independent nation-states, namely India and Pakistan. India became a “Sovereign Democratic Republic” when its Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950, following adoption of its draft Constitution by its Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949. Pakistan took a bit longer, becoming the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” when its first Constitution came into effect on March 23, 1956. Furthermore, of course, Pakistan underwent secession of its Eastern Province with the founding of the “People's Republic of Bangladesh” in 1971. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that partition is the defining event of modern independent India and Pakistan, and, more than that, continues to be the defining event of India and Pakistan even after more than fifty years of independence.

The Sadgapas and the Tilis, two Bengali castes broke with their parent castes. They formed themselves into new castes which gained higher social status than their parent castes in terms of the local caste hierarchy in Bangal. The emergence of the Sadgopa caste, as distinct from the Tilis, occurred at a period when none of the technological, political, and intellectual developments had yet occurred in Bengal that are generally used to characterize modernization. They were established as a caste by the second decade of the nineteenth century while the history of their growth and development goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Tili movement took an extensive form in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Tilis receives wider social recognition as a caste during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. The Tili movement was accelerated by modern conditions. Apparently the external factors helping social mobility varied from the case of the Sadgopas to that of the Tilis. But there are certain common features of development in both cases. Both the Sadgopas and the Tilis had collectively abandoned their traditional occupation to switch over to comparatively more lucrative and prestigious occupations, and became landowners. Complete dissociation from the traditional occupations which identified them with lower social ranks made it easier for the Sadgopas and the Tilis to aspire for better social status. But the crucial factor in their movements for mobility was ownership of land, which enabled them to have direct control over the life of the people in their respective areas and enhance their social prestige and power. This was the source of their strength as distinct groups and die source of their collective power to bargain successfully with the rest of the society for higher status. The incentive of corporate social mobility originated, both under traditional, pre-modern circumstances and under the circumstances of modernization, from the achievement of each group of a sense of corporate solidarity, regarding internal as well as external prestige. This enabled the groups to break away from the parent castes and to form new castes with higher social status. Previous writing on the subject has made this corporate solidarity a function of response to external forces, which are identified with only factors of modernization. It is the contention of this paper that corporate solidarity could have had its genesis in prcmodern times as well and that modernization marked only its acceleration.

The failure of Chinese agriculture to undergo a transformation whereby production could increase rapidly and institutional change could occur has been long regarded by many scholars to be one of the principal reasons China did not achieve modernization after the 1880's but instead became engulfed in revolution and war during the first half of the twentieth century. During the 1930's, various schools of thought explained this absence of agrarian transformation on the grounds that either institutional and social class relationships led to exploitation of the peasantry or that the lack of leadership and organizations failed to provide the peasantry with new farming technology and the resources needed to increase production.

Today, seven nations have maritime or island claims in the disputed South China Sea. This article historicizes the claims of one of the dispute's participants, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It argues that cartographic representations of its territory have their origin in the period of French rule, and locates a key moment in the formation of an Indochinese—and later Vietnamese—space encompassing the South China Sea in a series of four maps that represented research carried out by the colonial Institute of Oceanography. By recreating the biographies of these maps, the article reveals their origin in a contingent interplay of multiple factors, including global scientific networks, economic development, imperial defense, and personal research agendas. The article suggests that attention to the biographies of maps could be an effective means of deconstructing and denaturalizing many of the territorial claims that drive the dispute in the South China Sea today.

In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.

Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Place (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and The Ibis trilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), and Countdown (1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction, The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times and collected in The Iman and the Indian (2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of love and longing across generations, manifold religious manifestations, and the systematic pain of colonial oppression. The deep and abiding theme of many works is anthropogenic environmental damage, now boldly and directly addressed in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). Married to accomplished fellow author Deborah Baker, whose work traces the Asian peregrinations of Allen Ginsberg, the literary milieu of Laura Riding, and the complexity of Islamic conversion, Ghosh has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Queens College, and Delhi University. He has won more prizes and honorary doctorates, and been a fellow at more famous institutions and a distinguished visitor in more far-flung places, than you can shake a stick at. He even has two homes: Brooklyn and Goa. In short, Ghosh's profile makes you wonder if there might not be more than one of him.

This article examines the market for cocaine in India during the early twentieth century and the efforts of the colonial state to control it. The British authorities issued regulations to prohibit the drug's use as early as 1900, and yet by the start of World War I, cocaine's appeal had become socially diverse and geographically wide. This account of a significant market for a powerful new drug suggests that Indian society was able to rapidly develop a demand for such products even when the colonial state had no part in their introduction. Indians used these new products in complex ways—as medicines, as tonics, and as intoxicants, albeit through the localized medium of the everyday paan leaf. The study points to a reconsideration of a number of debates about the history of drugs and modern medicines in Asia.

The cult of Khaṇḍobā, one of the largest contemporary popular Hindu cults in the Deccan, is extremely rich in both mythology and ritual; yet, the most popular ritual festival in the cult has no corresponding cultic myth. Interviews with pilgrims, analysis of pilgrim behavior at the festival, and examination of certain astrochronological notions prevalent in popular Hinduism indicate that explanations of the place of the festival in the cult and of its importance for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year are to be found not in any aspect of the mythology of the cult but rather in notions, preserved generally in popular Hinduism, of the special accessibility of power at special times.

Baniyas (moneylender/traders) have a bad reputation. Though the functions they perform are similar, they in no way enjoy the respectability and admiration accorded bankers and businessmen, their brethren in spirit. They are castigated by villager and scholar alike as shylocks, parasites who—if given half a chance—squeeze clients dry through exorbitant interest rates on loans and on goods-on-credit. In an Indian village, one quickly becomes aware of the sometimes fearful respect they command. One approaches them for credit as a supplicant; for the defaultor, there is no more distressing sight than the Baniya at the door demanding to go over accounts. Baniyas are far from lovable; their popular image as fawning, cowardly, greedy sorts who take undue advantage of the weak while ingratiating themselves with the powerful appears singularly well deserved.

Views of desert regions of the world as areas with little productive use for the support of mankind have always been tempered by the optimism expressed in the phrase “to make the desert bloom like the rose.” We also know that the concept of the “Garden of Eden” was evolved in a desert environment. Thus, it is well realized that in a temperate or warm arid region, the flow of water from springs or from exotic rivers or the availability of fresh ground water derived from distant rainfall or snow-melt may create green oases of productive agriculture. One such region is China's colonial realm of Sinkiang, and especially the Tarim basin in central Asia. Here, such land and water resources presently provide some seven million people with food and materials for clothing. This also is a region with valuable unexploited mineral resources both varied and substantial.

Economic development makes resources available for a variety of desirable social goals. However, many of these goals are not automatically related to the economic mechanism of production and income distribution in a private enterprise economy. The social values that sustain economic development are often hostile to a non-market redistribution of resources. This dilemma between the welfare potential of economic development and the social values that make development possible has long been a subject of intense interest to sociologists. In recent years, economists have been paying increasing attention to the problem.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the biggest rebellion Imperial China had ever experienced, had undoubtedly exposed the many inadequacies of the dynastic government. The decrepit state of the army was at once revealed. The Manchu banner troops had long decayed while the Chinese Army of the Green Standard (Lü-ying) had also reached its nadir at the turn of the nineteenth century. The government, therefore, had to depend more and more on local, gentry-led armies. The defeat of the main government armies in 1860 eventually forced the court at Peking to place full responsibility in the hands of these gentry-led armies, thus introducing a new phase in the war of suppression.