After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.
Politics
Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a world without such works as Sun Tzu’s classic Art of War or Mao Zedong’s modern On Protracted War. While Asian literature is relatively well represented in English translation, from Murasaki Shikibu’s ancient Tale of Genji to Murakami Haruki’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translations of their non-fiction equivalents are comparatively rare.
India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that pose a challenge: internal borders too are at play. The Indian government for decades has had a complex, often tumultuous relationship with its northeastern states. The inherent complexity of the region means a wider, more expansive approach to political analysis is needed. This is precisely what Avinash Paliwal’s new book seeks to do.
“For the first time in my life, I experienced the terror of international limbo, unable to enter any country. What would happen to me? Would I be trapped forever in an airport?” Japan’s 1972 termination of diplomatic ties with the Republic of China left 9,200 Chinese residents stateless. Author Chen Tienshi Lara was one of them, born to Chinese parents in Yokohama’s Chinatown.
For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting—with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship—even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Empire or nation-state? This question has driven much argument in Chinese academic circles. These arguments take more than one form, however. The political view of China as a nation-state has focused very much on the question of sovereignty and international relations. But there is also a claim about Chinese culture and national identity: the question of what China is vis-à-vis what it means to be Chinese.
South Asia is bound by a strong cultural currency. It is not uncommon to find restaurants run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the diaspora marketed as serving “Indian” cuisine, freely expressing shared roots and ways of life. It is also not uncommon to find citizens of the three nations to welcome each other into their homes and endear them with great hospitality. Given this healthy cultural exchange, what is unusual is their common perception of each other’s political orientation as antithetical to theirs. In Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Century, historian Joya Chatterji investigates whether the region’s nation building practices are really all that different from each other’s.