The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text—one “Orientalist” and the other “nationalist”—with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production.

Study of China in the Soviet Union has just experienced a decade of rapid growth and fundamental change. Until the early 1960's the overwhelming reality for Soviet specialists was the fact that the Chinese revolution had succeeded—China had joined the camp of Soviet allies building socialism. Under these conditions, interpretations of the society which emerged after 1949 and of the historic circumstances which gave rise to revolution reflected both a need to reaffirm doctrinal principles about the uniformities of history and a hesitancy to contradict official Chinese communist positions. By the mid-1960's these limitations had been removed. Soviet sinologists repudiated the previous period for the “uncritical use of tendentious Chinese materials” and switched abruptly to demonstrating what had gone wrong in China, i.e., the abnormalities of history. The search was begun for those exceptional qualities of China's past which had deflected its advance to socialism and before that to capitalism.

Article III of the Philippine Constitution is the Bill of Rights. It establishes the relationship of the individual to the State and defines the rights of the individual by limiting the lawful powers of the State. It is one of the most important political achievements of the Filipinos.

The concept of a Bill of Rights, as such, is essentially an occidental prod-uct. For a number of centuries in British, French, and American political thought, there has grown the conviction that the rights of the individual must be preserved and safeguarded, not through the authority of an individual, not through membership in a particular group or party, not through reliance upon force of arms, but rather through the accepted processes of declared constitutional law.

In Bangladeshi student politics, political performances in public spaces play an essential role in establishing patronage relationships and determining local authority structures. As Thomas Blom Hansen has famously argued, “visibility means everything” in such a context. With the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook, new digital public spaces have appeared. Focusing on ruling-party student activists at Rajshahi University, this article examines how student politicians in Bangladesh utilize Facebook to become visible in their everyday politicking. It shows how longstanding performative repertoires in the nondigital public space have gained a new salience through performances in the digital public space. It is those digital spaces that allow the performer to rearticulate even mundane everyday events as political performances. As these new digital public spaces impact the politics of visibility, it is crucial to integrate them in our efforts to understand local politics in South Asia and beyond.

Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, edited by J. F. Richards, is a courageous attempt to survey late medieval and early modern monetary history on an appropriately global scale, while simultaneously representing the fragmentation of the present state of knowledge on the subject. Asian history has been particularly subject to an a priori compartmentalization that has hindered comparison and prevented appreciation of the elaborate connections and dependencies developing among different regions during this period; Moreover, the various ways in which flows of precious metals have been explained merely confirm this compartmentalization, both by neglecting other, central aspects of monetary history and by ignoring the wider historical questions to which it is inseparably linked. By supplementing the approach to precious metals with a parallel focus on the vigorous trades in less precious monetary media, it becomes possible to rephrase the problem in terms of infrastructural societal conditions in different regions, which in the first place permitted trade flows to take place. In this respect, we need to dissolve the hard frontiers separating the conventional units of discussion and to see international commerce, and a wide range of different regional developments, as part and parcel of an increasingly complex, many-levelled web of interactive stimuli, which now needs to be reconstructed, debated, and researched.

Following the collapse of the old indigenous social order, tenth-century Korea was engaged in innovative cultural borrowing of a societal scale under the influence of the brilliant and mature Chinese civilization. Among the many institutions borrowed during this period, the civil service examination system (k‘o-chü in Chinese and kwagŏ in Korean), introduced in 958 by King Kwangjong (r. 949–975) of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392), constitutes perhaps the most engrossing case of institutional borrowing in traditional Korea. Aside from its long-range consequences for Korean society and culture, the significance of this particular instance of institutional transplantation lies in the wholesale manner in which the borrowing was made, adopting the system complete with its Confucian examination content as well as its Chinese system of writing. Significant too is the fact that the proposal for this institutional borrowing did not come from a Korean but the king's Chinese advisor, Shuang Chi. It was also to Shuang Chi that the youthful Korean king entrusted the role of cultural innovator in instituting the examination system. The far-reaching social and cultural implications of this undertaking and its great success as a cultural borrowing make this particular case a fascinating subject to study; that is, when fully explored, it may shed light on the problems of ongoing cultural borrowing in Korea today.

The history of “area studies” as an academic discipline remains to be written. When it is, it will have to begin with a little known, historically important Japanese institution in China. That institution, Tōa Dōbun Shoin (East Asia Common Culture Academy or, after 1939, College) in Shanghai, 1900–1945, was established to train young Japanese for business and government service related to China. The author focuses upon the area studies dimensions of this pioneering institution's training and research program. After identifying five requisites of area studies training and research, he moves on to examine the origins, raison d'être, and meaning of Tōa Dōbun Shoin's program and to chart the phases of that program's development through each of the five requisites. In important ways, the center's curriculum, facilities, research, and publications equalled or surpassed the best American post–World War II language and area programs.

Though Taiwan has since 1949 been the seat of the Nationalist Government and the domicile of several millions of exiled Chinese, no serious literature has been produced until the late fifties.1 Explanations are not difficult to give. For one thing, since nearly all the important figures of modern Chinese literature have remained in the People's Republic of China,” their works are therefore proscribed for political reasons. Cut off from their mainland base, the disinherited young Taiwanese writers, having no native idols to emulate and anxious to create a tradition of their own, could only import from the West whatever “isms” they considered to be the literary fashions of the day—symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, futurism, modernism, phenomenalism, etc. Quite often, however, what they regarded as daring experiments at the time of initiation later turned out to be

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.

Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”:

The ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last and most successful of the dynasties of alien rule in China. “The key to its success,” noted Professor Ping-ti Ho, “was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization.” The integration of the Manchu ruling class with their Chinese subjects was most striking in staffing the bureaucracy. Unlike preceding alien dynasties, the Manchus over the course of 268 years of rule shared a good proportion of key offices with Chinese. The system of dual appointments of Manchus and Chinese operated in the capital, while Chinese dominated the local officialdom.

This article argues that the study of China's history has long been caught in a teleological trap that presumes that history could have had only one evolutionary track. The author explains how he came to recognize the problems inherent in the teleological trap and to reconceptualize his approach. The article contrasts the history of the North China Plain, culturally rooted in dry-land grain agriculture and from time immemorial deeply intertwined with that of the adjacent grasslands, with that of the south, a culturally and linguistically diverse land of river valleys and riziculture. It concludes that the holistic empire we know today was not an inevitable outcome of these contrasting trajectories and that alternative paths are plausible, and asserts that scholars must recognize that until history is accomplished it does not follow a teleological trajectory.

Responding to recent critical reflection on the concept of anuvāda within the fields of translation studies and South Asian literary cultures, this article explores the complex colonial mediations shaping modern Bengali understandings of the term. The goal is to situate the production of new meanings of anuvāda within the zone of the Dubash, a phrase used here to conjure the highly mediated space of vernacular translation as practiced by Bengali intellectuals under colonial rule. This article argues that if we wish to employ anuvāda as a tool for rethinking the meaning and practice of translation, we must first attend to the processes that transformed the norms and goals of textual transmission in the colonial era. In the end we can hope not only to enrich our understanding of South Asian translational practices but also to appreciate the role played by translation in the story of literary modernity in Bengal.

When buddhist institutions directed their efforts to the evangelization of the common people during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1192–1573), they met a set of popular beliefs that were deeply entrenched in the lives of their new audience. In spite of local variations in the names of the deities worshiped and in the details of ritual performances, a series of “defiling” practices that were perceived as dangerous taboos (imi) provided Japanese worshipers with a common denominator that transcended geographic, linguistic, and time boundaries.

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).

Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

This article attempts to explain the extraordinary popularity of Vietnamese composer and singer Trịnh Công Sơn. Although he attracted attention with love songs composed in the late 1950s, it was his antiwar songs, particularly those collected in Songs of Golden Skin (1966), that created the “Trịnh Công Sơn phenomenon.” Though these songs were banned by the Saigon government, they circulated widely in the South during the war. Though he was distrusted by the new Communist government after the war, Sơn continued to compose until his death in 2001, and his songs are still popular in Vietnam today. Some reasons for his popularity are offered, including the freshness of his early love songs, his evocation of Buddhist themes, his ability to express the mood of Southerners during the war, and a mixture of patience and persistence that enabled him to continue to compose in postwar Vietnam.

Ruling large expanses of terrain, imperial Chinese state-builders deployed bureaucratic resources sparingly, explicitly defining administrative priorities for county-level jurisdictions. Supported by primary evidence from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this article investigates where exactly the empire placed its priorities, what their effect was, and how rational the system was. The empire's priorities were the product of manmade spatial organization, defying macro-regional center-periphery divides, patterns debated in past issues of this journal. Moreover, even when priorities were biased, outdated, and manipulated, they had tangible effects on local state presence, creating distinct bureaucratic spheres: the many non-prioritized routine counties tended to have smaller governments with more first-time magistrates, whereas priority counties typically had bigger governments led by magistrates who were chosen in a deliberative yet corruptible process. The construction and uses of the empire's mental map demonstrates the merits and vicissitudes accompanying the still ongoing Chinese practice of differentiated local government.

Activist art and political resistance became popular aesthetics in the work of Indonesian artists after the fall of the New Order in 1998. In subsequent years, more art alternatives have emerged in cities and small towns across Indonesia, including diverse and vernacular modes of artistry such as street art and community-based international festivals. Where artists formerly focused their energies on critiquing the state, present art initiatives have become far more diffuse, counter-establishment, and localized in their approach. Local artists started the Jogja mural movement to rebrand Yogyakarta as a city of murals, while Jatiwangi Art Factory, an arts collective founded in a semi-industrialized village in West Java, has become a haven for performance arts and community-based projects for Indonesians and foreign artists in residence. This article looks at such experiments of legibility and presence as a new means of redefining publics and broadening the domain of political participation in Indonesia.

Historiography has long been concerned with the problem of determining standards for evidence. For traditional Chinese historians, it was Confucius who provided the model for historical writing. As the attributed author of the Springs and Autumns, Confucius demonstrated qualities of narratival restraint, historical factuality, moral profundity, and a refusal to engage in idle speculation. Of course, his model was not an easy one to emulate, and later historical writings have drawn on both the factual records of the imperial court (which were not always factual or free of ideological interests) and nonofficial sources, such as private accounts, anecdotal literature, and hearsay. The present essay focuses on this intersection between anecdotal sources and historiography. This is precisely the point when historiography must reflect on its narrative condition, as narrative has interests other than factuality or moral truth. The author shows how the historiographic anxiety over unreliable sources has often coexisted with a fascination with anecdotal stories and gossip.