Despite the title of India and China At Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History, Vappala Balachandran’s new book mostly discusses internal Indian politics. Other than the first two chapters and the book’s conclusion which deal with the diplomatic and strategic history of Sino-Indian relations, the bulk of Balachandran’s observations are devoted to the “competing visions” of India represented by the conservative Hindu nationalist/populist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) political movement that supports current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Indian National Congress (INC) or Congress Party that ruled India for decades after independence.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate reality. This use of poetry has existed in all cultures, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Pushkin’s compositions for ladies’ album books. Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues, in Occasions for Poetry, that this art form is the most important cultural element by which the Ottomans expressed themselves, more important than architecture, or history writing. Mustering an immense corpus of poetry from the turn of the 16th century, Aguirre-Mandujano successfully makes his case, though sometimes with the mass of citations he loses the forest from the trees.
The 20 years or so after World War Two were a time of rapid development in the publishing industry. For instance, the paperback revolution made books more affordable. Book clubs kept up the momentum of reading, discussions, and curation going to sustain, or even expand reading cultures. The easy availability of books by the roadside, for example, turned borrowers of books into buyers.
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story of how the Chinese writing system was adopted—and adapted—in Japan as well as Korea and Vietnam.
Akha Ghanr is, for Akha communities, a “highly pragmatic system of customary law encompassing an entire way of life”, or it could be better described as “Ancestral ways”, acknowledging the role and leadership of their ancestors, something that is central to Akha identity and culture. How it has changed over time is the subject of Micah F Morton’s new book, Enchanted Modernities which explores the evolving role of Akha Ghanr within Akha societies across China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Akha Ghanr isn’t a religion in itself but rather an intricate set of ancestral cultural practices that shape Akha society. How Akha Ghanr has adapted to modernity and high rates of Christian conversion is a crucial part of this book, as is the role of neo-traditionalists seeking to both preserve Akha Ghanr and adapt it to the realities of modern life.
History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, historian Manan Ahmed Asif shows one evocative way to attempt urban history and narrative for South Asian cities.
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in New York City.
Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin is an epilogue of sorts to his epic global history of the Second World War from 2021, Blood And Ruins. This new work focuses on the final months of the war in Asia, something that has been a topic of other recent books, such as Mark Gallichio’s Unconditional (2020) and the early parts of Judgment at Tokyo by Gary Bass. Overy’s approach is to consider the air war, starting with the conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities, then moving on the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally looking at how this history contributed to Japan’s surrender.
The Northern Wei (386-534) are having a moment. Heritage projects, including large-scale digitization efforts, have brought renewed attention to Northern Wei sites of Buddhist statuary, including the Yungang and Longmen grottoes. The live-action Mulan movie thrust the iconic “Chinese” heroine, believed to originate in the multicultural milieux of the Northern Wei, back into the global spotlight. Ethnic tensions in China have heightened interest in the historical relations between Han and non-Han peoples, including the Taghbach, the Inner Asian people who founded the Northern Wei Dynasty.
Quite a lot of archaeological water, to say nothing of history writing, has flowed under the bridge since Early Southeast Asia’s first edition in 2014.
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