Rosinka Chaudhuri’s latest work, India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, is the first book-length study of the Young Bengal movement and the contribution of its members to the history of India’s anti-colonial struggle. In this book, Chaudhuri delves deep into their activism, examines their socio-political agenda and analyses the neglect and misrepresentation…
Embedded within Indian ethos, caste is the idea that people (defined by their social positions) are of four types—scholarly-priestly (Brahmins), warriorhood (Kshatriyas), trade and commerce (Vaishyas), and menial jobs (Shudras)—and these are fixed by birth, with no class and social mobility available, especially to the last group. This is no abstract concept; it takes very…
Anyone who has enjoyed learning a second language knows how productive the exchange between a first and second language can be. Yoko Tawada has published fiction and nonfiction in Japanese and German and demonstrates this principle more than most, having moved to Germany as an adult in 1982. She positions herself not as an immigrant…
Chinese bronzes produced from the latter part of the Song dynasty (12th-13th century) through the end of the Qing dynasty (early 20th century) have long been underappreciated and under-researched. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fine catalogue, Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100-1900 (accompanying the exhibition of the same name running through September…
This epic story centres on an irresistible premise: is the main character “Her Royal Highness, The Begum of Oudh, Shehzadi Wilayat Mahal, Heir to the Last King of Oudh Begum Hazrat Mahal and Wajid Ali Shah” … or just plain old “Mrs Butt”? Satisfyingly, even the latter more prosaic option “Mrs Butt”—horse-loving wife of an…
The Chao Phraya river, which runs through Bangkok, is the subject of Michael Hurley’s Waterways of Bangkok: Memories, Landscape and Twilights. An ethnographical study of the river, the book portrays not just the river itself, but Bangkok’s relationship with it. Split into five chapters—origins, loss, erasure, belonging and trajectory—the book argues that the Chao Phraya…
Nan Z Da has been teaching Shakespeare’s play King Lear, she says, for more than six years. One cannot help but envy her students.
The marketing blurb for Amitav Acharya’s most recent book From Southeast Asia to Indo-Pacific begins, rather portentiously, “Southeast Asia was created by geopolitics, and it might die with it.” The book itself, thank goodness, is a considerably more measured (and clearly-written) overview of how Southeast Asia and ASEAN came to be more or less synonymous…
Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist is a new publication and exhibition organised by the Katonah Museum of Art and the first major museum survey of Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr. Covering twenty years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition and catalogue offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s career across the mediums of painting, drawing and printmaking.
The IT sector seems to be concerned with the flow of information across nations. However, it can also be about the flow of emotions. Labour around technology is not only about programming; it can also be about emotional exhaustion. In The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City, anthropologists Poornima Mankekar…
The noun “Partition” (with a capital “P”) has, in South Asia and perhaps globally, come to mean the 1947 split of India and Pakistan, a climactic event that still roils, if not poison, domestic and international politics.
Aatish Taseer, with roots in England, India, Pakistan, and the USA, appears to be a member of the globalized elite, able to call multiple nations his own. For Taseer, however, there is only one country he calls home. A self-described “Indian writer”, Taseer, for much of his adult life, has distanced himself from his absentee,…
For many middle and high school students across the United States, the book Farewell to Manzanar has been their introduction to one of the darkest times in American history. Jean Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir tells of her childhood years in what was called the Manzanar War Relocation Center but in reality was a concentration camp. From…
Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang documents a seven-week trip to Java and Bali in 1952 by four China-born and Shanghai-trained Singapore artists—Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang—to sketch and paint tropical beauty.
That Before Colonization can be read in several ways is to its favour, but also makes it hard to review. It takes aim at the way international relations (referred to by the field’s formal initials IR) has tended to go about its business; it is also a refreshingly straightforward discussion of, as in the subtitle,…