Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987762
Andrew Ollett
Dhanapāla's hymn to the image of Mahāvīra at Sanchore, composed in Apabhramsha around the beginning of the eleventh century, has been recognized to contain the earliest reference in an Indian language to Maḥmūd of Ghazna's raids in northwestern India in 1024, culminating in his destruction of the temple of Shiva at Somnath, in Gujarat. This hymn has been read as referring to another act of iconoclasm—or rather attempted iconoclasm, since it was ultimately unsuccessful—by Maḥmūd of Ghazna. This article shows that the attempted iconoclasm in question is not Maḥmūd's, but rather that of an earlier king. These earlier events, together with the geography of conquest and pilgrimage provided by Dhanapāla, suggest a political subtext for the hymn; namely, a veiled critique of the inability of the Cauḷukya kings of Gujarat to protect the religious landscape, and a veiled praise of Dhanapāla's friend and patron, the Paramāra king Bhōja.
Dhanapāla对Mahāvīra at Sanchore形象的赞美诗，大约在11世纪初在Apabhramsha创作，被认为包含了印度语言中最早的关于Ghazna在1024年袭击印度西北部的记载，最终他摧毁了古吉拉特邦Somnath的湿婆神庙。这首赞美诗被解读为另一种反圣像的行为——或者更确切地说是试图反圣像的行为，因为它最终没有成功——是由加兹那的Maḥmūd所做的。这篇文章表明，试图打破圣像的问题不是Maḥmūd的，而是一个更早的国王。这些早期的事件，连同Dhanapāla提供的征服和朝圣的地理，暗示了赞美诗的政治潜台词;也就是说，对Cauḷukya古吉拉特邦国王无力保护宗教景观的隐晦批评，以及对Dhanapāla的朋友和赞助人Paramāra国王Bhōja的隐晦赞扬。
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987918
P. Chigumadzi, Imraan Coovadia, A. Davari, Bongani Kona, E. Zeleke
This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from the perspective of Southern Africa. The interlocutors discuss the question of violence and nonviolence in revolutionary change across generational divides. It centers the enduring place of spirit and ancestral voices in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987814
Samya Ghosh
This article situates the court of the Tungkhungia kings of Brahmaputra Valley (1680–1830), in present day Assam, in the space of courtly convergence and response in eighteenth-century South Asia. It studies a particular moment in the Tungkhungia royal court (1714–44) when a unique political arrangement (“two kings”) was expressed by courtiers, chroniclers, and poets in the language of a stylized fiction of love. The article tries to make meaning of the “two kings” problem by looking at a set of textual and visual materials and situates them within a context of “multilayered cultural semiotics” at work in borderland courts in eighteenth-century South Asia, loosely held within the crumbling edifice of Mughal Hindustan. Toward this end, the article uses its research findings to add fresh insights on the ongoing discussion on courtly culture in early eighteenth-century South Asia and highlights the importance of studying emotions towards understanding political practice.
{"title":"“Two Kings” in the Tungkhungia Court?","authors":"Samya Ghosh","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987814","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article situates the court of the Tungkhungia kings of Brahmaputra Valley (1680–1830), in present day Assam, in the space of courtly convergence and response in eighteenth-century South Asia. It studies a particular moment in the Tungkhungia royal court (1714–44) when a unique political arrangement (“two kings”) was expressed by courtiers, chroniclers, and poets in the language of a stylized fiction of love. The article tries to make meaning of the “two kings” problem by looking at a set of textual and visual materials and situates them within a context of “multilayered cultural semiotics” at work in borderland courts in eighteenth-century South Asia, loosely held within the crumbling edifice of Mughal Hindustan. Toward this end, the article uses its research findings to add fresh insights on the ongoing discussion on courtly culture in early eighteenth-century South Asia and highlights the importance of studying emotions towards understanding political practice.","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":"49378005","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-9988048
N. Sohrabi
Abstract:Women took part in revolutions and appear in their historical sources with more frequency than our interpretations of revolutions-as-revolutions reflect. Sources are replete with women who both moved through spaces of revolution and shaped these spaces through their movements, spaces without which revolutions as movements of people—and not just production and consumption of ideas—would be impossible. This article argues that writing revolutions as if women mattered not only is about the inclusion of women but also is the gateway into a more capacious understanding of revolutions. To do so requires an analytical shift away from revolution as intellectual work to revolution as political work. Using Iran’s armed struggle movement in the lead up to the 1979 revolution, this article demonstrates how this distinction brings into focus aspects of revolutions that were formed in the ephemerality of action and, at times, inaction, thus expanding what counts as revolutionary history, valid methods for historical inquiry, sources, and interpretation.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9987892
Rishad Choudhury
Abstract:This article offers a new interpretation of the “Indian Wahhabi” beyond an ostensibly religious identity. Examining encounters between a centralizing state and decentralized circulatory regimes, the study thus illuminates an overlooked sociolegal genealogy of the jihadi militant in colonial India. From 1818, the East India Company secured its sovereignty by designating as deviant or permissible a host of itinerant figures in and around South Asia. In police records, court transcripts, and legislative archives, pilgrims with links to Arabia accordingly began appearing as suspected Wahhabis. Yet, in then seeking to distinguish “faqirs” from “fanatics,” colonial law used logics and exceptions with two important implications. First, as the “Wahhabi” came to imply a violent counterclaim to sovereignty, it also became a juridical formulation more political than religious. The faqir pilgrim here supplied the conceit of religion. Second, the complex question of jihad produced a deeper paradox, as grappling with a “religious” problem without “religion” stretched secular jurisprudence to breaking points. Until 1857, around South Asia, states of emergency hence dominated official responses to Wahhabis. Ultimately, colonial law’s gestures not only rendered unexceptional its regimes of exception. Ironically, they also reified religion, such that Islam and violence became culturally consubstantial in colonial thought.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9698033
Meredith Terretta
This article analyzes the way that political actors, advocate lawyers, and European administrators leveraged the designations political prisoner, political refugee, and prohibited immigrant to claim rights for inhabitants of the UN trust territories of French Cameroon and British Cameroons in the 1950s. Incarcerated activists identified themselves as political prisoners as they claimed that their human rights were upheld by international legal norms outlined in UN documents such as the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Trusteeship Agreements, which bound administering authorities to uphold these principles. Having imposed politics onto the prison, Cameroonian nationalists who escaped repression in French Cameroon by fleeing to British territory politicized their exile as they claimed refugee status in British Cameroons, a territory they viewed as belonging to the nation they envisioned. In so doing, Cameroonian nationalists revealed embryonic refugee law to be more aspirational than universally applicable—but nonetheless laid claim to its protections in ways that did, in some cases, sway the courts. The focus on the legal cases of political prisoners and refugees shows how Cameroonian nationalists viewed the rights that international law established or promised as legitimizing their anti-colonial revolutionary state-building project. With the advocate lawyers who represented them, legally minded Cameroonian nationalists acted, defended, and claimed as though the trusteeship system had universalized a decolonized international law. Contributing to emerging scholarship on the relation of international law to global inequality in the decolonizing age, this article gives an account of a decolonizing worldmaking at the grassroots, where, through discrete legal cases, actors practiced articulating anti-colonial revolution with international law, contesting it and shaping it to their aspirations.
{"title":"Decolonizing International Law?","authors":"Meredith Terretta","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9698033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9698033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyzes the way that political actors, advocate lawyers, and European administrators leveraged the designations political prisoner, political refugee, and prohibited immigrant to claim rights for inhabitants of the UN trust territories of French Cameroon and British Cameroons in the 1950s. Incarcerated activists identified themselves as political prisoners as they claimed that their human rights were upheld by international legal norms outlined in UN documents such as the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Trusteeship Agreements, which bound administering authorities to uphold these principles. Having imposed politics onto the prison, Cameroonian nationalists who escaped repression in French Cameroon by fleeing to British territory politicized their exile as they claimed refugee status in British Cameroons, a territory they viewed as belonging to the nation they envisioned. In so doing, Cameroonian nationalists revealed embryonic refugee law to be more aspirational than universally applicable—but nonetheless laid claim to its protections in ways that did, in some cases, sway the courts. The focus on the legal cases of political prisoners and refugees shows how Cameroonian nationalists viewed the rights that international law established or promised as legitimizing their anti-colonial revolutionary state-building project. With the advocate lawyers who represented them, legally minded Cameroonian nationalists acted, defended, and claimed as though the trusteeship system had universalized a decolonized international law. Contributing to emerging scholarship on the relation of international law to global inequality in the decolonizing age, this article gives an account of a decolonizing worldmaking at the grassroots, where, through discrete legal cases, actors practiced articulating anti-colonial revolution with international law, contesting it and shaping it to their aspirations.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46317613","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9698125
J. Mathew
This article outlines a process of enclosing private property on the Arabian Sea through the colonial imposition of secure property rights during the nineteenth century. The article proceeds in two paralleled sections. The first section explores the violence of the natural world through the lens of shipwrecks. It traces a shift in the right to shipwrecked property from littoral communities to the merchants who owned the cargo before it was seized by the waves. The second section traces the shift from merchants who deployed violence as an essential tool in commercial competition, to relying on the British Empire for the security of their property and the strategic use of force. On the one hand, both these transitions involve the imposition of classical political economy and the colonial seizure of protection rents obtained by merchants. However, they also reflect the ways in which maritime potentates and influential merchants were able to co-opt imperial policies and profit from this transition. Over the course of the nineteenth century, violent coercion was expunged from the skillset of Arabian Sea merchants, but only after compensating merchants and coastal communities for relinquishing the profits of protection.
{"title":"Enclosing the Seas","authors":"J. Mathew","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9698125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9698125","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article outlines a process of enclosing private property on the Arabian Sea through the colonial imposition of secure property rights during the nineteenth century. The article proceeds in two paralleled sections. The first section explores the violence of the natural world through the lens of shipwrecks. It traces a shift in the right to shipwrecked property from littoral communities to the merchants who owned the cargo before it was seized by the waves. The second section traces the shift from merchants who deployed violence as an essential tool in commercial competition, to relying on the British Empire for the security of their property and the strategic use of force. On the one hand, both these transitions involve the imposition of classical political economy and the colonial seizure of protection rents obtained by merchants. However, they also reflect the ways in which maritime potentates and influential merchants were able to co-opt imperial policies and profit from this transition. Over the course of the nineteenth century, violent coercion was expunged from the skillset of Arabian Sea merchants, but only after compensating merchants and coastal communities for relinquishing the profits of protection.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48229303","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9407806
Dwaipayan Banerjee
The steady rollout of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a human right? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global South behind in a global queue? These questions are not new; the world struggled with these ethical dilemmas during the HIV-AIDS pandemic at the end of the twentieth century, when global South governments led by Nelson Mandela fought multinational pharmaceutical corporations for the right to essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This article demonstrates a technological and geopolitical shift in the last two decades that hinder global South solidarities actualized during the HIV-AIDS pandemic. Instead, Banerjee argues that in the present, multinational corporations and Euro-American governments are trying to reverse some of the key political visions and victories of HIV-AIDS internationalism, exploiting the urgency of the Covid-19 crisis to put in place a new vaccine apartheid.
{"title":"From Internationalism to Nationalism","authors":"Dwaipayan Banerjee","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9407806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9407806","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The steady rollout of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a human right? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global South behind in a global queue? These questions are not new; the world struggled with these ethical dilemmas during the HIV-AIDS pandemic at the end of the twentieth century, when global South governments led by Nelson Mandela fought multinational pharmaceutical corporations for the right to essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This article demonstrates a technological and geopolitical shift in the last two decades that hinder global South solidarities actualized during the HIV-AIDS pandemic. Instead, Banerjee argues that in the present, multinational corporations and Euro-American governments are trying to reverse some of the key political visions and victories of HIV-AIDS internationalism, exploiting the urgency of the Covid-19 crisis to put in place a new vaccine apartheid.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41748046","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9407949
O. Bashkin
Abstract:This essay considers accounts of the Dreyfus Affair published in the newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (founded 1875) during 1898 to demonstrate how Arab writers addressed the rights of minorities in Europe and examined failed emancipatory projects. Writing about the Dreyfus Affair allowed intellectuals in the Levant to reverse the power relationship between themselves and Europe and to comment on the kinds of politics that would ensure the equality before the law of the Jewish minority in Europe. These debates further illustrate that even before the shift to electoral politics in the Ottoman Empire (after 1908) and in postwar Arab nation-states, Arab writers were preoccupied with the relationship between statecraft and majority-minority relations. They argued that democratic institutions such as parliaments and courts of law were the best venues to safeguard the rights of religious communities whose mere existence was defined as a problem. Bashkin shows how Thamarat al-Funun pointed to phenomena that endangered religious communities, such as fanaticism, racism, abuse of power by the police and the military, and mob politics.
{"title":"The Fruit of the Arts and the Mob: Global Minorities during the Dreyfus Affair","authors":"O. Bashkin","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9407949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9407949","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers accounts of the Dreyfus Affair published in the newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (founded 1875) during 1898 to demonstrate how Arab writers addressed the rights of minorities in Europe and examined failed emancipatory projects. Writing about the Dreyfus Affair allowed intellectuals in the Levant to reverse the power relationship between themselves and Europe and to comment on the kinds of politics that would ensure the equality before the law of the Jewish minority in Europe. These debates further illustrate that even before the shift to electoral politics in the Ottoman Empire (after 1908) and in postwar Arab nation-states, Arab writers were preoccupied with the relationship between statecraft and majority-minority relations. They argued that democratic institutions such as parliaments and courts of law were the best venues to safeguard the rights of religious communities whose mere existence was defined as a problem. Bashkin shows how Thamarat al-Funun pointed to phenomena that endangered religious communities, such as fanaticism, racism, abuse of power by the police and the military, and mob politics.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"404 - 412"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46183735","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9407923
Shaunna Rodrigues
This article argues that Abul Kalam Azad, one of India's most prominent anticolonial thinkers, was critical of nationalism because of its emphasis on circumscribing a political community with territorial borders. Instead, he conceived of India as a place, and he used this conception of place as the grounds for an alternative frame of the political. For Azad, place indicated a point of equilibrium between conceptions of nationalism, particularly as a form of anticolonialism, and universal ideas of humanity (insāniyyat), and the earth as its common inheritance (arẓiyyat). Connecting the idea of place to that of self-knowledge, this article examines how Azad laid the grounds for membership in a locality where particular identities gathered to form a general consciousness of common life. In doing so, it argues that he developed a potent normative idea that remains relevant to repetitive contentions of the political membership of Muslims in India and elsewhere.
{"title":"The Place of Political Membership","authors":"Shaunna Rodrigues","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9407923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9407923","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that Abul Kalam Azad, one of India's most prominent anticolonial thinkers, was critical of nationalism because of its emphasis on circumscribing a political community with territorial borders. Instead, he conceived of India as a place, and he used this conception of place as the grounds for an alternative frame of the political. For Azad, place indicated a point of equilibrium between conceptions of nationalism, particularly as a form of anticolonialism, and universal ideas of humanity (insāniyyat), and the earth as its common inheritance (arẓiyyat). Connecting the idea of place to that of self-knowledge, this article examines how Azad laid the grounds for membership in a locality where particular identities gathered to form a general consciousness of common life. In doing so, it argues that he developed a potent normative idea that remains relevant to repetitive contentions of the political membership of Muslims in India and elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47044621","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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