Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987801
A. Truschke
Abstract:Siddhicandra’s Bhanucandraganicarita (Biography of Bhanucandra, ca. 1620s) enacts a stunning development in Sanskrit historiography. The text’s title bills it as a biography of a Jain mendicant, a standard genre of Jain-authored works. But, in fact, the text treats cross-cultural relations between Jain ascetics and Mughal elites as its main subject. It is arguably the first Sanskrit text to focus specifically and exclusively on Mughal contexts. This literary and historiographical choice is allthe more noteworthy because of the text’s carefully delineated approach to negotiating between Sanskrit, Jain, and Mughal cultural norms. Throughout the work Siddhicandra depicts the Mughals as steeped in Sanskrit literary culture while showing himself to be fluent in a Persianate cultural zone. In the tradition of Sanskrit writing on Indo-Persian political figures, which was several hundred years old by the early seventeenth century, the Bhanucandraganicarita marks a moment when the Mughals ceased to be other in any identifiable way, except as offering a new cultural context for Jain self-expression.
摘要:Siddhicandra 's Bhanucandraganicarita (Bhanucandra Biography of Bhanucandra，约1620年代)在梵文史学上取得了惊人的发展。这本书的标题标榜它是一本耆那教乞丐的传记，这是耆那教著作的一种标准类型。但事实上，文本将耆那教苦行僧与莫卧儿精英之间的跨文化关系作为其主要主题。它可以说是第一个专门关注莫卧儿上下文的梵文文本。这种文学和史学上的选择更值得注意，因为文本仔细描述了梵语、耆那教和莫卧儿文化规范之间的谈判方法。在整部作品中，悉迪犍陀罗描绘了沉浸在梵文文学文化中的莫卧儿王朝，同时显示出自己在波斯文化区的流利程度。到17世纪初，关于印度-波斯政治人物的梵文写作已经有几百年的历史了，《巴努犍陀罗》标志着莫卧儿王朝不再以任何可识别的方式存在，除了为耆那教的自我表达提供了一种新的文化背景。
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987775
Cynthia Talbot
In tribute to Allison Busch, who did so much to restore the reputation of vernacular literature not just as poetry but also as history, Talbot offers an account of an obscure Rajput warrior from Bikaner who decided it would be better to die. In asking why Ramsingh Kalyanmalot sought death in 1577, we must address the larger issue of the changes wrought on the Rajput world by the expanding power of the Mughal empire, one of the main questions that Busch probed in her research. Vernacular texts composed at Rajput courts not only provide a valuable alternate perspective on the power dynamics of the Mughal era, as Busch repeatedly pointed out, but can also cast light on the lives of locally powerful men who hardly figure in imperially sponsored Persian histories. In Dalpat Vilas, a prose biography composed in Marwari, we witness the dilemma of Ramsingh, a second son who was caught between his older brother, the Bikaner Raja and obedient Mughal servant, and his younger brothers, occasional bandits who wandered freely. Their story illustrates how competing loyalties and priorities could strain brotherly bonds, especially in times of political turmoil.
{"title":"Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties","authors":"Cynthia Talbot","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987775","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In tribute to Allison Busch, who did so much to restore the reputation of vernacular literature not just as poetry but also as history, Talbot offers an account of an obscure Rajput warrior from Bikaner who decided it would be better to die. In asking why Ramsingh Kalyanmalot sought death in 1577, we must address the larger issue of the changes wrought on the Rajput world by the expanding power of the Mughal empire, one of the main questions that Busch probed in her research. Vernacular texts composed at Rajput courts not only provide a valuable alternate perspective on the power dynamics of the Mughal era, as Busch repeatedly pointed out, but can also cast light on the lives of locally powerful men who hardly figure in imperially sponsored Persian histories. In Dalpat Vilas, a prose biography composed in Marwari, we witness the dilemma of Ramsingh, a second son who was caught between his older brother, the Bikaner Raja and obedient Mughal servant, and his younger brothers, occasional bandits who wandered freely. Their story illustrates how competing loyalties and priorities could strain brotherly bonds, especially in times of political turmoil.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46461230","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987879
Caitlin C. Monroe
This article explores the unconventional life of Ugandan Akiki Nyabongo, an “intellectual misfit” whose career and legacy reveal some of the limitations of global intellectual history. Nyabongo led a remarkably global life: he lived and worked with George Padmore, collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois, and introduced civil rights activist Eslanda Goode Robeson to Uganda during her trip to the African continent in 1936. He conducted research for his doctorate degree at Oxford University, and he pursued additional projects in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and numerous universities across the United States. Thus far, though, Nyabongo has remained at the margins of stories about pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, or African anti-colonialism. This article argues that conventional global frameworks—often determined by scholarly priorities and interests that originated outside the African continent—have confined Nyabongo's relevance and importance. This scholarly and international invisibility is worth correcting, in part because he remains an important figure in western Uganda. And, his importance there reveals the limitations of conventional scholarly categories and sheds light on how western Ugandans, using oral traditions and long-standing idioms of power and prestige, understood global mobility and international importance in the midst of an increasingly globally connected world.
{"title":"Searching for Nyabongo","authors":"Caitlin C. Monroe","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987879","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the unconventional life of Ugandan Akiki Nyabongo, an “intellectual misfit” whose career and legacy reveal some of the limitations of global intellectual history. Nyabongo led a remarkably global life: he lived and worked with George Padmore, collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois, and introduced civil rights activist Eslanda Goode Robeson to Uganda during her trip to the African continent in 1936. He conducted research for his doctorate degree at Oxford University, and he pursued additional projects in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and numerous universities across the United States. Thus far, though, Nyabongo has remained at the margins of stories about pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, or African anti-colonialism. This article argues that conventional global frameworks—often determined by scholarly priorities and interests that originated outside the African continent—have confined Nyabongo's relevance and importance. This scholarly and international invisibility is worth correcting, in part because he remains an important figure in western Uganda. And, his importance there reveals the limitations of conventional scholarly categories and sheds light on how western Ugandans, using oral traditions and long-standing idioms of power and prestige, understood global mobility and international importance in the midst of an increasingly globally connected world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44985079","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987788
Christine Marrewa-Karwoski
Scholars of the Hindavi Nath sampraday have placed particular importance on the two largest and most comprehensive works attributed to Guru Gorakhnath: the Sabadi and the Pada. Engaging with Allison Busch's research, this essay investigates the significance of the lesser-known texts of the Gorakhbani, often called granths, and examines how they were composed to address specific audiences and topics. In particular, Marrewa-Karwoski considers the Narvai Bodh (Instructions to the King) and explore how the Nath sampraday negotiates power and sovereignty in a text that specifically addresses ruling elites.
{"title":"Listen O King","authors":"Christine Marrewa-Karwoski","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987788","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars of the Hindavi Nath sampraday have placed particular importance on the two largest and most comprehensive works attributed to Guru Gorakhnath: the Sabadi and the Pada. Engaging with Allison Busch's research, this essay investigates the significance of the lesser-known texts of the Gorakhbani, often called granths, and examines how they were composed to address specific audiences and topics. In particular, Marrewa-Karwoski considers the Narvai Bodh (Instructions to the King) and explore how the Nath sampraday negotiates power and sovereignty in a text that specifically addresses ruling elites.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43383027","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987866
Dalpat S. Rajpurohit
Allison Busch's seminal work on the classical Hindi literature of Mughal India demonstrated how the composition of works of poetic theory (ritigranths) became a defining literary enterprise of vernacular court poets in the Mughal-Rajput milieu. Though firmly based in a Sanskrit worldview, Hindi intellectuals exhibited newness in their theorization of the art of poetic craft. Engaging with Busch's work on the ritigranth genre, this article demonstrates how the poet-scholars of Rajasthan who were experts in Brajbhasha and Marwari—or Hindi and Rajasthani, respectively, as they are largely understood today—theorized and created new knowledge systems to define their four-hundred-year-old Marwari literary culture. Keeping up with the theoreticians of Brajbhasha who blended Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) with poetic theory, the Rajasthani scholars placed their work in a multilingual literary culture that was increasingly expanding as India came under the knowledge regimes of colonialism.
{"title":"Defining a Tradition","authors":"Dalpat S. Rajpurohit","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987866","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Allison Busch's seminal work on the classical Hindi literature of Mughal India demonstrated how the composition of works of poetic theory (ritigranths) became a defining literary enterprise of vernacular court poets in the Mughal-Rajput milieu. Though firmly based in a Sanskrit worldview, Hindi intellectuals exhibited newness in their theorization of the art of poetic craft. Engaging with Busch's work on the ritigranth genre, this article demonstrates how the poet-scholars of Rajasthan who were experts in Brajbhasha and Marwari—or Hindi and Rajasthani, respectively, as they are largely understood today—theorized and created new knowledge systems to define their four-hundred-year-old Marwari literary culture. Keeping up with the theoreticians of Brajbhasha who blended Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) with poetic theory, the Rajasthani scholars placed their work in a multilingual literary culture that was increasingly expanding as India came under the knowledge regimes of colonialism.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48769689","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987996
A. Azoulay, Sohail Daulatzai, A. Davari, Mamadou Diallo, Bouchra Khalili, E. Zeleke
This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators working between Asia, Africa, and the West, each of whom address the relationship between revolutions and archives in their own practice. What does it mean, in practice, to unlearn the archive? What does it mean to do so from the global periphery, the still present specter of a third world?
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9988035
Christopher J. Lee
Abstract:This roundtable intervention applies the concept of cruel optimism, as formulated by Lauren Berlant, to situations of decolonization with the purpose of understanding the myths and fantasies of political self-determination. It also examines the idea of a Jacobin spirit, as explored by C. L. R. James, as a counterpoint to the limits of cruel optimism. This intervention subsequently concludes that interpretations of decolonization that assert either tragic or utopian outcomes must be redrawn to accommodate these competing perspectives. Decolonization and revolution, as mutual political phenomena of the “Third World Historical,” inhabit temporalities of incompletion, of unsustained dialectics, that require the continuation of political struggle by other means.
摘要:本次圆桌讨论将劳伦·伯兰特(Lauren Berlant)提出的残酷乐观主义概念应用于非殖民化情境，目的是理解政治自决的神话和幻想。它还考察了詹姆斯(C. L. R. James)所探索的雅各宾精神，将其作为残酷乐观主义局限性的对应物。这种干预随后得出的结论是，必须重新制定对非殖民化的解释，以适应这些相互竞争的观点，这些解释要么是悲剧性的，要么是乌托邦式的。非殖民化和革命作为“第三世界历史”的相互政治现象，存在着不完整的、不持续的辩证法的暂时性，这需要通过其他方式继续进行政治斗争。
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9988009
J. Shipley
Between 1979 and 1983 soldiers, workers, and students in Ghana launched a revolution to destroy the neo-imperial order. In the Ghanaian historical imagination that era is not remembered for its radical populism but as a time of violent chaos before the nation-state followed the road to purported neoliberal stability. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and the control of representational practices. In the contemporary moment, it is hard to theorize alternate ideas of freedom and political difference. If we start a study of twentieth-century revolution with a coup d’état in 1979 Accra, Ghana—rather than student upheavals in 1968 Paris, for example—it reorients our understanding of power by showing how young radicals sought an African-grounded sovereignty, an alternate future now forgotten.
{"title":"Alternative Histories of Global Sovereignty","authors":"J. Shipley","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9988009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9988009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Between 1979 and 1983 soldiers, workers, and students in Ghana launched a revolution to destroy the neo-imperial order. In the Ghanaian historical imagination that era is not remembered for its radical populism but as a time of violent chaos before the nation-state followed the road to purported neoliberal stability. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and the control of representational practices. In the contemporary moment, it is hard to theorize alternate ideas of freedom and political difference. If we start a study of twentieth-century revolution with a coup d’état in 1979 Accra, Ghana—rather than student upheavals in 1968 Paris, for example—it reorients our understanding of power by showing how young radicals sought an African-grounded sovereignty, an alternate future now forgotten.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46893005","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9988061
Massimiliano Tomba
Abstract:Revolution and restoration are usually understood as opposite terms. This article aims to disarticulate this binary. Suppose the modern concept of revolution can be defined as a project of social reorganization led by the state or by a constituent power that aims to become the state. In that case, the restoration is a defense of society, institutions, traditions, and customs from the state. However, restoration is also an expression of a different political orientation of the revolutionary trajectory. The temporality of revolution is mainly future oriented, whereas the restorative temporality implies continuity, the reactivation of institutions from the past, and their experimentation in everyday life. These two temporal dimensions are intertwined. They can either combine in new political configurations or oppose each other in progress and regress, forward and backward. This article examines the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas as an example that combines the two temporal dimensions.
{"title":"Revolution qua Restoration","authors":"Massimiliano Tomba","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9988061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9988061","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Revolution and restoration are usually understood as opposite terms. This article aims to disarticulate this binary. Suppose the modern concept of revolution can be defined as a project of social reorganization led by the state or by a constituent power that aims to become the state. In that case, the restoration is a defense of society, institutions, traditions, and customs from the state. However, restoration is also an expression of a different political orientation of the revolutionary trajectory. The temporality of revolution is mainly future oriented, whereas the restorative temporality implies continuity, the reactivation of institutions from the past, and their experimentation in everyday life. These two temporal dimensions are intertwined. They can either combine in new political configurations or oppose each other in progress and regress, forward and backward. This article examines the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas as an example that combines the two temporal dimensions.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"551 - 554"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420319","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987931
Amsale Alemu
While opposition to the Ethiopian monarchy was an immediate imperative of the Ethiopian revolutionary movement, self-professed “anti-feudalism” was but one part of the political-economic object of revolutionary critique. Originating from a country famous for its legacy of African independence, and against a monarch who was a global pan-African icon, Ethiopian revolutionary opposition to Haile Selassie would require not only a politics of dissent, but also an anti-colonial framing. This article centers anti-imperialism—specifically challenges to US neo-imperialism in Ethiopia—among Ethiopian student revolutionaries in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining organizational writing and direct action, as well as editorials in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther, this article argues that US-based Ethiopian students employed demystification as a signature revolutionary tactic. They attempted to reframe Ethiopian exceptionalist narratives as currency of US neo-imperialism, drawing on arguments strengthened by engaging Black Power concepts and thinkers. Demystification, while rooted in narrative modes and historical tropes specific to Ethiopian students' location in the United States, offers a concept to think through other oppositional movements as generative of global theoretical critique. Ethiopian students not only demanded the overthrow of the monarchy, but also joined anti-colonial appeals for the structural transformation of the world.
{"title":"Demystifying the Image","authors":"Amsale Alemu","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987931","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While opposition to the Ethiopian monarchy was an immediate imperative of the Ethiopian revolutionary movement, self-professed “anti-feudalism” was but one part of the political-economic object of revolutionary critique. Originating from a country famous for its legacy of African independence, and against a monarch who was a global pan-African icon, Ethiopian revolutionary opposition to Haile Selassie would require not only a politics of dissent, but also an anti-colonial framing. This article centers anti-imperialism—specifically challenges to US neo-imperialism in Ethiopia—among Ethiopian student revolutionaries in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining organizational writing and direct action, as well as editorials in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther, this article argues that US-based Ethiopian students employed demystification as a signature revolutionary tactic. They attempted to reframe Ethiopian exceptionalist narratives as currency of US neo-imperialism, drawing on arguments strengthened by engaging Black Power concepts and thinkers. Demystification, while rooted in narrative modes and historical tropes specific to Ethiopian students' location in the United States, offers a concept to think through other oppositional movements as generative of global theoretical critique. Ethiopian students not only demanded the overthrow of the monarchy, but also joined anti-colonial appeals for the structural transformation of the world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46836980","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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