Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615622
Jeremy Prestholdt
Abstract:The Indian Ocean region is a continuum of social, economic, and cultural engagements. It is also a remarkably elastic matrix of human relations that has profoundly influenced and been influenced by global engagements. These interregional engagements raise questions of how to frame global circularities within Indian Ocean pasts. How have imbrications with other world regions affected the networks and boundaries of the Indian Ocean region? And how have Indian Ocean societies affected the wider world? To answer these questions this article traces Indian Ocean histories within global contexts between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers a stereoscopic history of Indian Ocean Africa that appreciates Indian Ocean linkages alongside the region's global entanglements, which in turn demonstrates how Africa's Indian Ocean rim has affected and been affected by wider global relationships. The article suggests that imbrications of regional and extraregional networks do not negate the Indian Ocean's coherence or the central importance of regional linkages. Rather, it argues that such imbrications prompt alternative ways of perceiving Indian Ocean worlds: namely, as layered matrices shaped by the dual articulation of Indian Ocean rim societies.
{"title":"Global Currents and the Transformation of Space in Indian Ocean Africa","authors":"Jeremy Prestholdt","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615622","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Indian Ocean region is a continuum of social, economic, and cultural engagements. It is also a remarkably elastic matrix of human relations that has profoundly influenced and been influenced by global engagements. These interregional engagements raise questions of how to frame global circularities within Indian Ocean pasts. How have imbrications with other world regions affected the networks and boundaries of the Indian Ocean region? And how have Indian Ocean societies affected the wider world? To answer these questions this article traces Indian Ocean histories within global contexts between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers a stereoscopic history of Indian Ocean Africa that appreciates Indian Ocean linkages alongside the region's global entanglements, which in turn demonstrates how Africa's Indian Ocean rim has affected and been affected by wider global relationships. The article suggests that imbrications of regional and extraregional networks do not negate the Indian Ocean's coherence or the central importance of regional linkages. Rather, it argues that such imbrications prompt alternative ways of perceiving Indian Ocean worlds: namely, as layered matrices shaped by the dual articulation of Indian Ocean rim societies.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"146 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43813246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615674
Naz Yücel
Abstract:This article investigates the transformation of three coeval monarchs—Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), and King Leopold II (r. 1865–1909)—into private landed property owners in the late nineteenth century. In its comparisons, the article centers Sultan Abdülhamid II's transformation into a private landed property owner with the separation of his privy purse from the state treasury in the early 1880s, to show that despite the distinctive specificities of Ottoman law, institutions, and imperial finances, all three monarchs used private ownership of landed property as private individuals. This article not only joins the extended scholarly literature criticizing characterizations of an unproblematic capitalist "West" or "Europe" whose market society is underpinned by development of "private property" against a stagnant and undifferentiated "East" but also complicates the liberal distinction of "state" and "society" by focusing on the private property ownership of the pinnacle of "state actors," the monarchs.
{"title":"On Ottoman, British, and Belgian Monarchs' Ownership of Private Property in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Comparison","authors":"Naz Yücel","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615674","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article investigates the transformation of three coeval monarchs—Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), and King Leopold II (r. 1865–1909)—into private landed property owners in the late nineteenth century. In its comparisons, the article centers Sultan Abdülhamid II's transformation into a private landed property owner with the separation of his privy purse from the state treasury in the early 1880s, to show that despite the distinctive specificities of Ottoman law, institutions, and imperial finances, all three monarchs used private ownership of landed property as private individuals. This article not only joins the extended scholarly literature criticizing characterizations of an unproblematic capitalist \"West\" or \"Europe\" whose market society is underpinned by development of \"private property\" against a stagnant and undifferentiated \"East\" but also complicates the liberal distinction of \"state\" and \"society\" by focusing on the private property ownership of the pinnacle of \"state actors,\" the monarchs.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"208 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47332790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615596
Editorial| August 01 2023 Editors' Note Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2023) 43 (2): 137. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10615596 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Editors' Note. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2023; 43 (2): 137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10615596 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search Studies focused on Indian Ocean world have consistently argued for rethinking the relationship between mobilities and borders, peoples and communities, and periodizations and temporalities. In this issue, we carry a special section that pushes even further in helping us consider the ways in which media and mediality shape life in both liminal geographies and oceanic flows. “Thinking with the Indian Ocean,” edited by Rogaia Abusharaf, Uday Chandra, and Irene Promodh, offers layered and nuanced histories of the Indian Ocean that range from the early modern to the contemporary period across East Africa, South Asia, and West Asia. Jeremy Prestholdt looks at the circulation emanating from the East African rim outward carrying peoples and goods with a key agentive role played by those communities that had long traversed these channels. Mahmood Kooria focuses on changes made to structures of kinship and inheritance in Southeast Asian Muslim communities by itinerant men and... Issue Section: Editors' Note You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"Editors' Note","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615596","url":null,"abstract":"Editorial| August 01 2023 Editors' Note Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2023) 43 (2): 137. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10615596 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Editors' Note. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2023; 43 (2): 137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10615596 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search Studies focused on Indian Ocean world have consistently argued for rethinking the relationship between mobilities and borders, peoples and communities, and periodizations and temporalities. In this issue, we carry a special section that pushes even further in helping us consider the ways in which media and mediality shape life in both liminal geographies and oceanic flows. “Thinking with the Indian Ocean,” edited by Rogaia Abusharaf, Uday Chandra, and Irene Promodh, offers layered and nuanced histories of the Indian Ocean that range from the early modern to the contemporary period across East Africa, South Asia, and West Asia. Jeremy Prestholdt looks at the circulation emanating from the East African rim outward carrying peoples and goods with a key agentive role played by those communities that had long traversed these channels. Mahmood Kooria focuses on changes made to structures of kinship and inheritance in Southeast Asian Muslim communities by itinerant men and... Issue Section: Editors' Note You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136135783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615635
Mahmood Kooria
Abstract:In matrilineal societies, women had more status, power, and property than men. Most scholars of Islam believed that matrilineal cultures were against the ethos of the religion, which is patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal. But millions of Muslims across the Indian Ocean littoral have been following matriliny for several centuries. It was also one of the most convenient ways to engage in Indian Ocean trade: men could voyage as merchants, sailors, and itinerants, while women stayed on land with the property and controlled households and wider social spheres. This economic and social stability gave women an upper hand in economic and personal choices, and within marriages, they could and did move about freely. The matrilineal system not only connected maritime Muslims but also raised serious questions about the Islamic jurisprudential tradition that evolved in the Middle East through its peculiar practices of ownership of property, kinship, and marital norms. From the late eighteenth century onward, the system has been subjected to significant internal and external criticisms. These especially targeted inheritancerelated customs where men got no share in the property. With a special focus on debates over inheritance laws, this article explores the transregional and transtemporal ways in which matrilineal Muslims defended the system within Islamic legal epistemologies and maritime social systems.
{"title":"When Men Get No Share: Matrilineal Muslims and Their Laws of Succession","authors":"Mahmood Kooria","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615635","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In matrilineal societies, women had more status, power, and property than men. Most scholars of Islam believed that matrilineal cultures were against the ethos of the religion, which is patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal. But millions of Muslims across the Indian Ocean littoral have been following matriliny for several centuries. It was also one of the most convenient ways to engage in Indian Ocean trade: men could voyage as merchants, sailors, and itinerants, while women stayed on land with the property and controlled households and wider social spheres. This economic and social stability gave women an upper hand in economic and personal choices, and within marriages, they could and did move about freely. The matrilineal system not only connected maritime Muslims but also raised serious questions about the Islamic jurisprudential tradition that evolved in the Middle East through its peculiar practices of ownership of property, kinship, and marital norms. From the late eighteenth century onward, the system has been subjected to significant internal and external criticisms. These especially targeted inheritancerelated customs where men got no share in the property. With a special focus on debates over inheritance laws, this article explores the transregional and transtemporal ways in which matrilineal Muslims defended the system within Islamic legal epistemologies and maritime social systems.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"163 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44152978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615648
Bindu Menon Mannil
Abstract:Film and media circulation between India and cities on the Persian Gulf can be traced back to the 1940s. This article excavates the histories of media goods that made their way to the strictly regimented and highly taxed regimes of India, examining how these mobilities were enacted and what networks were activated in the movement of these goods. The article explores the dhow as an important media infrastructure for the acceleration of media modernity, and it analyzes infrastructure as a poetic object. It takes up and revitalizes infrastructure as aesthetic form, and it subjects visual texts ranging from mainstream commercial movies to independent cinema and photographic projects to closer analysis, through the assembly of infrastructure and aquatic elements. Combining textual analysis with accounts from divergent sources such as customs department personnel, distributors of audio and video, shipping agents, and contemporary periodicals, the article resurrects a history of confluence of media technologies, ocean movement, and coastal media markets. Through tracing such practices and the infrastructural narratives of the dhow, this article argues for a history of film and media in the Indian Ocean littoral that is more than the flow of texts.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10603157
E. Williams
Abstract:In 1905 the establishment of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), the forerunner to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, created a forum for bureaucrats and technocrats from around the globe to exchange information about the latest developments in agricultural practice and administration. Representatives from the Ottoman Empire were active participants in the institute's early activities. This article traces their contributions to the institute's formative debates that aimed to set international standards as well as the imperiallevel projects that resulted from their participation. It argues that the institute, in addition to representing a space in which Ottoman officials could assert their expertise and perform their capacity to be a part of global standard-setting processes, provided an impetus for collating and comparing statistics from across the empire. The projects undertaken drew from existing provincial statisticsgathering institutions and served to reveal differences across provinces in a step toward greater empirewide legibility. Focusing on the empire's Eastern Mediterranean provinces, the article demonstrates how these statistics' public circulation not only enabled Ottoman officials to identify regions they considered ripe for further agricultural development, but also supported French officials' justifications for imposing colonial rule post–World War I.
{"title":"\"The Agriculture Ministry of the Whole World\": The International Institute of Agriculture and the Politics of Ottoman Statistics Collection","authors":"E. Williams","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10603157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10603157","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 1905 the establishment of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), the forerunner to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, created a forum for bureaucrats and technocrats from around the globe to exchange information about the latest developments in agricultural practice and administration. Representatives from the Ottoman Empire were active participants in the institute's early activities. This article traces their contributions to the institute's formative debates that aimed to set international standards as well as the imperiallevel projects that resulted from their participation. It argues that the institute, in addition to representing a space in which Ottoman officials could assert their expertise and perform their capacity to be a part of global standard-setting processes, provided an impetus for collating and comparing statistics from across the empire. The projects undertaken drew from existing provincial statisticsgathering institutions and served to reveal differences across provinces in a step toward greater empirewide legibility. Focusing on the empire's Eastern Mediterranean provinces, the article demonstrates how these statistics' public circulation not only enabled Ottoman officials to identify regions they considered ripe for further agricultural development, but also supported French officials' justifications for imposing colonial rule post–World War I.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"224 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43929803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615609
R. Abusharaf, Uday Chandra, I. Promodh
This special section draws on the dynamic new field of Indian Ocean studies to rethink key concepts such as space and circulation (Jeremy Prestholdt), gender and kinship (Mahmood Kooria), and popular media and infrastructure (Bindu Menon Mannil). Through fresh interdisciplinary insights from the contributors' archives and fieldwork, the articles critically interrogate these concepts from a distinctive intellectual vantage point. Historians and anthropologists based in different parts of the globe come together in this special section to “think with the Indian Ocean.” The authors take a concept that is in wide currency in the humanities and social sciences and then reimagine it creatively in the contexts that they study. In doing so, they decenter familiar ways of seeing and knowing, offering a new decolonial lens to make sense of the circularities and connections that constitute our world.
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"R. Abusharaf, Uday Chandra, I. Promodh","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615609","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This special section draws on the dynamic new field of Indian Ocean studies to rethink key concepts such as space and circulation (Jeremy Prestholdt), gender and kinship (Mahmood Kooria), and popular media and infrastructure (Bindu Menon Mannil). Through fresh interdisciplinary insights from the contributors' archives and fieldwork, the articles critically interrogate these concepts from a distinctive intellectual vantage point. Historians and anthropologists based in different parts of the globe come together in this special section to “think with the Indian Ocean.” The authors take a concept that is in wide currency in the humanities and social sciences and then reimagine it creatively in the contexts that they study. In doing so, they decenter familiar ways of seeing and knowing, offering a new decolonial lens to make sense of the circularities and connections that constitute our world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44676769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10615661
Kelsey J. Utne
Abstract:Forty-seven years after his death, Jamaluddin al-Afghani was reburied in Kabul. Amid the chaos of World War II, Afghanistan had enlisted the governments of British India, Turkey, and Iraq in a scheme to bring the bones of this nineteenth-century intellectual and Pan-Islamist out of exile in Istanbul, where they had lain buried since 1897. The subsequent exhumation, transnational corpse transfer, and reinterment in Kabul provoked the ire of the Iranian state, which contested Afghanistan's claim to be Jamaluddin's natal state. The signif cance of Jamaluddin's corpse was inseparable from certain aspects of his self-curated hagiography as a consummate wanderer and antiimperial Pan-Islamist. Consequently, the two states competed for custody of his remains. This transregional case study engages multidisciplinary scholarship on commemoration of the dead and remaking nationalist spaces. The article proposes that the physical location of the dead conjoined with individual hagiographies is key to disrupting or reifying nationalist narratives.
{"title":"Corpse Politics and the Traveling Bones of Jamaluddin al-Afghani","authors":"Kelsey J. Utne","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10615661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10615661","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Forty-seven years after his death, Jamaluddin al-Afghani was reburied in Kabul. Amid the chaos of World War II, Afghanistan had enlisted the governments of British India, Turkey, and Iraq in a scheme to bring the bones of this nineteenth-century intellectual and Pan-Islamist out of exile in Istanbul, where they had lain buried since 1897. The subsequent exhumation, transnational corpse transfer, and reinterment in Kabul provoked the ire of the Iranian state, which contested Afghanistan's claim to be Jamaluddin's natal state. The signif cance of Jamaluddin's corpse was inseparable from certain aspects of his self-curated hagiography as a consummate wanderer and antiimperial Pan-Islamist. Consequently, the two states competed for custody of his remains. This transregional case study engages multidisciplinary scholarship on commemoration of the dead and remaking nationalist spaces. The article proposes that the physical location of the dead conjoined with individual hagiographies is key to disrupting or reifying nationalist narratives.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"191 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43024405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10375370
Ahmad Agbaria
The swift rise of a new guard of cultural thinkers from the margins of the Arab world during the 1970s amounts to one of the most striking yet forgotten episodes in postcolonial Arab thought. Coming primarily from Morocco, these intellectuals and activists rejected a long-seated assumption prevalent among the ranks of Arab nationalists according to which one must disown their past traditions in order to become modern. The advent of cultural thinkers posed a grave challenge to this cherished evaluation, calling into question the agenda of political decolonization that Arab nationalists had propounded. How did the new intellectual guard of cultural thinkers come to assume such intellectual power? And what change did they make in the intellectual field and Arab conversation in general? Exploring these questions, this article establishes a definitive distinction between categories of postcolonial actors that were originally clumped together. It demonstrates that the voices shaping the new world of the Arab peoples are increasingly skeptical of political decolonization of the Arab nationalists and more in sync with Moroccan cultural thinkers who take pride in their cultural repertoire and traditions.
{"title":"Cultural Decolonization","authors":"Ahmad Agbaria","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10375370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10375370","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The swift rise of a new guard of cultural thinkers from the margins of the Arab world during the 1970s amounts to one of the most striking yet forgotten episodes in postcolonial Arab thought. Coming primarily from Morocco, these intellectuals and activists rejected a long-seated assumption prevalent among the ranks of Arab nationalists according to which one must disown their past traditions in order to become modern. The advent of cultural thinkers posed a grave challenge to this cherished evaluation, calling into question the agenda of political decolonization that Arab nationalists had propounded. How did the new intellectual guard of cultural thinkers come to assume such intellectual power? And what change did they make in the intellectual field and Arab conversation in general? Exploring these questions, this article establishes a definitive distinction between categories of postcolonial actors that were originally clumped together. It demonstrates that the voices shaping the new world of the Arab peoples are increasingly skeptical of political decolonization of the Arab nationalists and more in sync with Moroccan cultural thinkers who take pride in their cultural repertoire and traditions.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49427324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10375344
Douglas Ober, P. Maitland
Abstract:During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Buddhism became deeply embedded in an array of social and political debates taking place across India. The unique history of Buddhism in India and of its spread across Asia offered a model of ideological and cultural emancipation that was used not only to challenge colonial rule but also to further numerous anti-caste movements against existing Brahmanical institutions and practices. While the history of anti-caste and Dalit engagements with Buddhism has largely been studied through a discussion of the Indian constitutionalist B. R. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism along with some half million of his followers in 1956, this article addresses the ways in which Buddhism came to be simultaneously seen as a "Hindu sect" and central to Hindu nationalist projects. It does so through a detailed analysis of the planning and construction of several "Hindu-Buddhist" temples constructed in the 1930s by the Birla family that sought to construct a vision of India as a Hindu nation. A close examination of these sites reveals the wider dynamics underlining the transformation of modern Buddhism in India and, by extension, modern Hinduism.
{"title":"Temple Architecture and Modern Hindu Appropriations of Buddhism","authors":"Douglas Ober, P. Maitland","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10375344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10375344","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Buddhism became deeply embedded in an array of social and political debates taking place across India. The unique history of Buddhism in India and of its spread across Asia offered a model of ideological and cultural emancipation that was used not only to challenge colonial rule but also to further numerous anti-caste movements against existing Brahmanical institutions and practices. While the history of anti-caste and Dalit engagements with Buddhism has largely been studied through a discussion of the Indian constitutionalist B. R. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism along with some half million of his followers in 1956, this article addresses the ways in which Buddhism came to be simultaneously seen as a \"Hindu sect\" and central to Hindu nationalist projects. It does so through a detailed analysis of the planning and construction of several \"Hindu-Buddhist\" temples constructed in the 1930s by the Birla family that sought to construct a vision of India as a Hindu nation. A close examination of these sites reveals the wider dynamics underlining the transformation of modern Buddhism in India and, by extension, modern Hinduism.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"43 1","pages":"43 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44972047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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