Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000094
Muhammad Ali Jan
Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.
{"title":"The entanglements of exchange in India","authors":"Muhammad Ali Jan","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000094","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":"1677 - 1683"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46388445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000045
Thomas Blom Hansen
Abstract This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.
{"title":"Real abstractions: Markets, moralities, and social segmentation in modern India","authors":"Thomas Blom Hansen","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":"1684 - 1689"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44747016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000082
J. Mathew
Abstract This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.
{"title":"The fetish in the market","authors":"J. Mathew","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000082","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":"1650 - 1657"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44233710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X21000706
A. Balasubramanian
Abstract Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.
{"title":"A forgotten famine of ’43? Travancore’s muffled ‘cry of distress’","authors":"A. Balasubramanian","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X21000706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":"1495 - 1529"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000622
S. Poddar
This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.
{"title":"The decline of multilingualism in a divided public sphere: The Indian Press and cultural politics in colonial Allahabad (1890–1920)","authors":"S. Poddar","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000622","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42876034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000464
G. R. Reynolds
During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.
{"title":"Facsimiles of yore: printing technology and the page image in the Japanese Government General of Korea’s reproduction of historical sources","authors":"G. R. Reynolds","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000464","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46440283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-02DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000610
Michael Ng, Florence Mok, John Wong, Wallace Wu
Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.
{"title":"Hearts and minds in Hong Kong’s New Territories: Agriculture and vegetable marketing in a Cold War borderland, circa 1946–1967","authors":"Michael Ng, Florence Mok, John Wong, Wallace Wu","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000610","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46352519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-02DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000592
M. Woolgar
A growing body of scholarship has examined the intertwining of ideological polarization and inter-ethnic tensions during the Cold War. In this context, increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and how they were affected by international and national-level developments. Less scrutiny has been given to the role of sub-national forces, despite the fact that patterns of ethnic conflict sometimes varied markedly between different parts of a single country. This article addresses this lacuna via the case study of West Java, Indonesia. The article analyses the relationship between the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1950s and 1960s. International and national forces encouraged closer relations between the PKI and some ethnic Chinese Indonesians through the 1950s. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s there were also recurrent episodes of anti-Chinese harassment, driven primarily by anti-communist groups. The strength of the anti-communist coalition within West Java helped make the province the epicentre of anti-Chinese agitation during crises in 1959–60 and 1963. Yet shifts in the configuration of military and political forces in the region meant anti-Chinese actions in West Java during the contentious period 1965–67 were less severe than in some other provinces. Overall the article highlights the need to consider the interaction of not only international and national processes but also sub-national regional dynamics when analysing the relationship between Cold War polarization and inter-ethnic conflict.
{"title":"Ethnic politics, the Cold War and sub-national dynamics: the Indonesian Communist Party, the ethnic Chinese minority and anti-Chinese activities in West Java, 1949–67","authors":"M. Woolgar","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000592","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A growing body of scholarship has examined the intertwining of ideological polarization and inter-ethnic tensions during the Cold War. In this context, increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and how they were affected by international and national-level developments. Less scrutiny has been given to the role of sub-national forces, despite the fact that patterns of ethnic conflict sometimes varied markedly between different parts of a single country. This article addresses this lacuna via the case study of West Java, Indonesia. The article analyses the relationship between the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1950s and 1960s. International and national forces encouraged closer relations between the PKI and some ethnic Chinese Indonesians through the 1950s. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s there were also recurrent episodes of anti-Chinese harassment, driven primarily by anti-communist groups. The strength of the anti-communist coalition within West Java helped make the province the epicentre of anti-Chinese agitation during crises in 1959–60 and 1963. Yet shifts in the configuration of military and political forces in the region meant anti-Chinese actions in West Java during the contentious period 1965–67 were less severe than in some other provinces. Overall the article highlights the need to consider the interaction of not only international and national processes but also sub-national regional dynamics when analysing the relationship between Cold War polarization and inter-ethnic conflict.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45032145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-25DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x23000148
J. Jeong
Mecca is often conceptualized as a destination for the ḥajj or a source of leverage for both western and Ottoman imperial states, and in the twentieth century, for Saudi national foreign policy and Islamist movements. While building on such transnational angles, this article views the city as a convergence point for diaspora populations, an intermediary site that has received and redirected the mobilities of sojourners, refugees, and exiles from different parts of Asia throughout the manifold turnovers of the twentieth century. The article focuses on a community of first- to third-generation settlers in the Hejaz who trace their other homes to different places in China proper. Using archival documents, travelogues, and ethnographic interviews, the article argues that the routes to Mecca, coupled with imaginaries of the city as a home place for Muslims worldwide, served as a rare constant orienting force that sustained two-directional mobilities of Chinese Muslim diasporas through the wars and revolutions of modern times.
{"title":"Homeland, magnet, and refuge: Mecca in the travels and imaginaries of Chinese Muslims","authors":"J. Jeong","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x23000148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x23000148","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Mecca is often conceptualized as a destination for the ḥajj or a source of leverage for both western and Ottoman imperial states, and in the twentieth century, for Saudi national foreign policy and Islamist movements. While building on such transnational angles, this article views the city as a convergence point for diaspora populations, an intermediary site that has received and redirected the mobilities of sojourners, refugees, and exiles from different parts of Asia throughout the manifold turnovers of the twentieth century. The article focuses on a community of first- to third-generation settlers in the Hejaz who trace their other homes to different places in China proper. Using archival documents, travelogues, and ethnographic interviews, the article argues that the routes to Mecca, coupled with imaginaries of the city as a home place for Muslims worldwide, served as a rare constant orienting force that sustained two-directional mobilities of Chinese Muslim diasporas through the wars and revolutions of modern times.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46382311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-24DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000100
S. Datta, Rajnish Saryal, S. Saryal
Abstract Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social, and political life in these states. This article focuses on the political tussle between the BJP and the Church in this time period and attempts to explore the deeper ideological contestations and competing narratives underlying this struggle and their implications for the Indian political discourse. These include contestations over the very conceptualization of secular democracy in India and the role of religion in it; different understandings of religious conversions and freedom of conscience; and the conflicting agendas around the categories of ‘tribe’, ‘indigenous people’/‘adivasi’, and ‘janjati’/‘vanvasi’.
{"title":"‘Trishul vs Cross’: Hindutva, Church, and the politics of secularism in Christian-majority states of North-east India","authors":"S. Datta, Rajnish Saryal, S. Saryal","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000100","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social, and political life in these states. This article focuses on the political tussle between the BJP and the Church in this time period and attempts to explore the deeper ideological contestations and competing narratives underlying this struggle and their implications for the Indian political discourse. These include contestations over the very conceptualization of secular democracy in India and the role of religion in it; different understandings of religious conversions and freedom of conscience; and the conflicting agendas around the categories of ‘tribe’, ‘indigenous people’/‘adivasi’, and ‘janjati’/‘vanvasi’.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":"1332 - 1354"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44953354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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