In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcutta. These were the Young Bengal, the proteges of Henry Derozio of Hindu College. These thinkers, according to Rosinka Chaudhuri, were India’s first radicals, trying to reshape Indian politics as it came under the sway of the East India Company and the British Empire.
A new book offers what many readers will find surprising insights into the circulation of texts in the Cold War among three neighbouring countries at odds with one another: North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
Just around the founding of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews were forced out or pressured to leave their countries of birth; one of these was Yemen. These Mizrahi Jews have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens in Israel.
A Cure for Chaos is one of the recent titles in Princeton University Press’s book series “Illustrated Library of Chinese Classics,” aimed at showcasing the Chinese classics in Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and more, in graphic form. With illustrations by the renowned illustrator CC Tsai, translation and introductory commentaries by philosophy professor Brian Bruya of Eastern Michigan University, the books in this series visualize the ideas that characterize Chinese philosophy.
The recent documentary, The Sea is Our Home immerses viewers in the vibrant yet precarious world of the Bajau Laut, whose stilt houses rise above the turquoise waters of Sabah’s east coast. While this film is centered on the sea nomads of Malaysia, the Bajau Laut can also be found in aquatic settlements across coastal Philippines and Indonesia.
Mani Rao, who counts acclaimed translations of Kalidasa and Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit among her accomplishments, has long been a quiet force in South Asian poetry circles. Her latest extensive collection of original poems, So That You Know, is a work of poise and clarity of thought. The poems engage with diverse themes and resist straightjacketing, yet broadly they explore conversations, relationships, nature, life and death, and mythologies that flow into each other.
While Taiwan continues to be in the news due to its geopolitical ambiguities, a lesser-known aspect of its short recorded history is the establishment of a Dutch colony in its southern part in the 17th century. A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa describes this Dutch settlement and its interactions with local indigenous people and its heroic but futile resistance against invading Chinese loyalist warlord Koxinga.
Today’s international system is made up of states: Territorial entities with defined borders, with exclusive control within those borders, diplomatic recognition by other states outside of them and usually (though not always) tied to some idea of the “nation”. But how many states have existed throughout history, such as during the 19th century? Some early counts put the number at just a few dozen—a measure that international relations professors Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D Griffiths thought was far too low, missing polities throughout the non-Western world.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union combed the intelligence agencies and scientific institutes of their defeated enemies to find and enlist skilled personnel to, in author Stephen Mercado’s words, “work in the shadows of the Cold War.” While much has been written about the postwar recruitment of German spies and scientists, Mercado’s new book, Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons, focuses on Japan’s Noborito Research Institute—its origins, its work for Imperial Japan during the war, and America’s use of the Noborito’s veterans in the early Cold War years.
“There are only two limitless things in this world: the human soul and its sins.” This grim declaration captures the essence of Sultan Raev’s Castigation, a dense and allegorical novel that draws as much from biblical prophecy as it does from the tragedies of Shakespeare and the myths of antiquity.
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