The “Great Game” is the name commonly assigned to the 19th-century’s strategic rivalry between Great Britain and Russia for predominance in Central Asia. It was a geopolitical clash between two expansionist empires–the world’s greatest sea power versus its largest land power. Riaz Dean’s Mapping the Great Game is about one aspect of that struggle: the…
Contrary to what may be implied by the term “contemporary Indian literature”, India is not a geographic or political monolith. Rather, India is a composite of very strong regional identities cultivated by and among its provinces. Indian fiction is only now increasingly exploring these regional stories that have somewhat been eclipsed by the larger grand…
“To this day the monument remains nearly unscathed—a meager consolation in the face of such suffering.” The monument in question is the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, erected in about 705 by the young and energetic Umayyad (the dynasty began in 661) caliph al-Walid I (705-15) on the site of a Christian church which he had…
Few families have had as much success shaping history as the Abbasids. Descended from one of the Prophet Muhammad’s four uncles, they used their reputation for probity and piety to take over and rule the Arab Empire for 37 reigns. Deftly managing family feuds, they enjoyed a century of unimaginable splendor, followed by four centuries…
Shiv Kunal Verma, an acclaimed historian and filmmaker, has written an encyclopedic history of the 1965 India-Pakistan War, which began when Pakistan attacked Indian forces in the Rann of Kutch in April 1965, stalled as a result of a temporary ceasefire brokered by the British, and restarted in August when Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar by…
At the beginning of More Than One Child, Shen Yang writes, “I broke a law simply by being born.” She was her parents’ second daughter, and she is referring to the family planning laws which until recently saw China’s One-Child Policy strictly enforced. Her childhood was thus essentially intertwined with politics, but her memoir of…
Unlike most memoirs about the immigrant experience that center around overcoming hurdles to build a new life, Jolie Phuong Hoang instead structures Three Funerals For My Father: Love, Loss and Escape from Vietnam around her father’s death as he tries to escape Vietnam by boat in 1985. Her younger sister also drowned on that journey….
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s mother became separated from her sister back in 1950 and has not seen her since. Her mother is one of more than 130,000 people who have applied through the Red Cross to locate a missing sibling, child, or spouse left behind in North Korea. Stories of these separations are the subjects of…
The ubiquity of Portuguese surnames in Hong Kong, including as they do quite a few people who don’t look particularly European, can come as something of a surprise. Some of these, as Catherine S Chan points out in her new book Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting, date literally from…
Historian RG Collingwood once wrote that “We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.” Few people see US-China relations with greater clarity than Cheng Li, who worked as a physician during the Cultural Revolution before earning his PhD in Political Science at Princeton….
Kashmir, or more accurately, Jammu & Kashmir (JK), is host to a long running conflict dating back to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Ever since the majority Muslim JK, ruled by a Hindu leader Hari Singh, acceded to India, instead of Pakistan or declaring Independence, a conflict has raged in over the…
The Indian epic Mahabharata is a complicated story of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fighting over property. The five Pandavas, the sons of King Pandu, want their share of the kingdom but the Kauravas, the sons of Dhritarashtra, don’t want to share anything of the kingdom they see as entirely their…
Graphic novels are taken more seriously in Europe than in the English-speaking world, and so it is perhaps not surprising that The King of Bangkok, a socio-political-historical narrative based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti, first appeared in Italian. Although a “novel” in the sense it’s fictionalized, the elements (say the…
In the history of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Chinese temples play a pivotal role in serving the spiritual and social needs of the immigrant community. Wak Hai Cheng Bio, the oldest Teochew temple in Singapore, is a rare surviving example of traditional Teochew architecture in Southeast…
Back in the early 1990s, when I was trying to pitch the idea of including Vladivostok-listed stocks in Asian emerging markets funds, I was told by one Hong Kong fund manager that “Asia stops at the Amur River.” Three decades or so on, that aphorism might still serve to summarize the findings contained in Franck…