India and China share a physical border. Indeed, that is the element of their proximity that stands out the most thanks to the 1962 war, briefly revisited in the form of border skirmishes in 2020. But the two great nations also share common ground in veneration of the Buddha and trade exchanges that span centuries. The Chinese learned about the message of the Buddha from India and, to their immense credit, they also preserved it through translations of the ancient Buddhist texts whose records did not survive in India. This history of healthy spiritual and commercial exchange has more recently been shadowed by increasing distrust and even contempt. Politics and commerce is not however the only way in which two countries have interacted.
New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia examines the increasingly dire state of academic freedom in Asia. Using cross-national data and in-depth case studies, the authors shed light on the multifaceted nature of academic censorship and provide reference points to those working in restrictive academic environments.
South Korea might be a wealthy nation with some of the world’s most well-known tech firms and pop culture, but its success did not occur overnight or without considerable hardship. Covering everything from war, elections, coups, uprisings, global conglomerates, a football World Cup, Olympics and K-Pop, Ramon Pacheco Pardo’s Shrimp to Whale is a brisk modern history of the East Asian nation’s tumultuous rise from the ashes of colonialism, war, and poverty in the 20th century.
The characters in Oindrila Mukherjee’s debut novel, The Dream Builders, all take a turn in telling their points of view, with a chapter apiece, an allocation that extends to the fictional high-tech city in which the story takes place, Hrishipur, a character in its own right. Mukherjee’s structure allows all socioeconomic sectors to have a say in the narrative.
Yamuna’s Journey is the English translation of Baba Padmanji’s 1857 Marathi novel Yamunaparyatan. “Yamuna” is both the name of the female protagonist of this novel as well as a reference to the river Yamuna in India; “paryatan” means journey or travel. “Yamunaparyatan” (“Journey to the Yamuna”) can be interpreted as travel to Vrindaban, a holy city on the banks of the river Yamuna, where Hindu widows were sent to live a life of spirituality and—widowhood being considered a curse—penance in homes set aside for them. Most of them were however in fact abandoned by their relatives and forced to live in abject poverty and isolation. The title, thereby, is suggestive of the trials and tribulations of widowhood in 19th century Hindu society.
“Kopi Dulu” means “coffee first” in Indonesian—a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with anyone. At least, that was Mark Eveleigh’s experience, as a travel writer and reporter, traveling across the country’s many islands.
It’s perhaps best to start by noting that the title of Xin Wen’s new study, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road, is considerably more expansive than the book itself, which restricts itself to the late first millennium (ca 850-1000 CE) and is centered on Dunhuang; Khotan is as far as west as it goes. The book’s tight focus is however fortuitous, for it allows Xin Wen to go into illuminating—and very readable—detail.
Several times a year, the narrator of Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller boards a Transpacific flight to care for her elderly Japanese parents. She ferries her mother to and from the doctor. She keeps her father company. She buys him a dog. She reflects on her childhood.
Phoolan Devi was an Indian parliamentarian in the 1990s, but only after she achieved fame for becoming a modern day Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. She also, perhaps more importantly, sought revenge on the many men who sexually assaulted her, before and after she was married off at the age of eleven. She became known as the Bandit Queen and was assassinated at the young age of thirty-seven. Devi serves as a source of strength for the main character in Parini Shroff’s debut novel, The Bandit Queens, a dark yet uplifting story of village women who fight domestic violence and caste discrimination.
As improbable as it may sound, an illuminating way to understand today’s China and how it views the West is to look at the astonishing ways Chinese intellectuals are interpreting—or is it misinterpreting?—the Greek classics. In Plato Goes to China, Shadi Bartsch offers a provocative look at Chinese politics and ideology by exploring Chinese readings of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and other ancient writers. She shows how Chinese thinkers have dramatically recast the Greek classics to support China’s political agenda, diagnose the ills of the West, and assert the superiority of China’s own Confucian classical tradition.
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