{"title":"The Mughal Self and the Jain Other in Siddhicandra’s Bhanucandraganicarita","authors":"A. Truschke","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987801","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Siddhicandra’s Bhanucandraganicarita (Biography of Bhanucandra, ca. 1620s) enacts a stunning development in Sanskrit historiography. The text’s title bills it as a biography of a Jain mendicant, a standard genre of Jain-authored works. But, in fact, the text treats cross-cultural relations between Jain ascetics and Mughal elites as its main subject. It is arguably the first Sanskrit text to focus specifically and exclusively on Mughal contexts. This literary and historiographical choice is allthe more noteworthy because of the text’s carefully delineated approach to negotiating between Sanskrit, Jain, and Mughal cultural norms. Throughout the work Siddhicandra depicts the Mughals as steeped in Sanskrit literary culture while showing himself to be fluent in a Persianate cultural zone. In the tradition of Sanskrit writing on Indo-Persian political figures, which was several hundred years old by the early seventeenth century, the Bhanucandraganicarita marks a moment when the Mughals ceased to be other in any identifiable way, except as offering a new cultural context for Jain self-expression.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"341 - 347"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44030403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties","authors":"Cynthia Talbot","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987775","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In tribute to Allison Busch, who did so much to restore the reputation of vernacular literature not just as poetry but also as history, Talbot offers an account of an obscure Rajput warrior from Bikaner who decided it would be better to die. In asking why Ramsingh Kalyanmalot sought death in 1577, we must address the larger issue of the changes wrought on the Rajput world by the expanding power of the Mughal empire, one of the main questions that Busch probed in her research. Vernacular texts composed at Rajput courts not only provide a valuable alternate perspective on the power dynamics of the Mughal era, as Busch repeatedly pointed out, but can also cast light on the lives of locally powerful men who hardly figure in imperially sponsored Persian histories. In Dalpat Vilas, a prose biography composed in Marwari, we witness the dilemma of Ramsingh, a second son who was caught between his older brother, the Bikaner Raja and obedient Mughal servant, and his younger brothers, occasional bandits who wandered freely. Their story illustrates how competing loyalties and priorities could strain brotherly bonds, especially in times of political turmoil.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46461230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for Nyabongo","authors":"Caitlin C. Monroe","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987879","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the unconventional life of Ugandan Akiki Nyabongo, an “intellectual misfit” whose career and legacy reveal some of the limitations of global intellectual history. Nyabongo led a remarkably global life: he lived and worked with George Padmore, collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois, and introduced civil rights activist Eslanda Goode Robeson to Uganda during her trip to the African continent in 1936. He conducted research for his doctorate degree at Oxford University, and he pursued additional projects in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and numerous universities across the United States. Thus far, though, Nyabongo has remained at the margins of stories about pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, or African anti-colonialism. This article argues that conventional global frameworks—often determined by scholarly priorities and interests that originated outside the African continent—have confined Nyabongo's relevance and importance. This scholarly and international invisibility is worth correcting, in part because he remains an important figure in western Uganda. And, his importance there reveals the limitations of conventional scholarly categories and sheds light on how western Ugandans, using oral traditions and long-standing idioms of power and prestige, understood global mobility and international importance in the midst of an increasingly globally connected world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44985079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Listen O King","authors":"Christine Marrewa-Karwoski","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987788","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars of the Hindavi Nath sampraday have placed particular importance on the two largest and most comprehensive works attributed to Guru Gorakhnath: the Sabadi and the Pada. Engaging with Allison Busch's research, this essay investigates the significance of the lesser-known texts of the Gorakhbani, often called granths, and examines how they were composed to address specific audiences and topics. In particular, Marrewa-Karwoski considers the Narvai Bodh (Instructions to the King) and explore how the Nath sampraday negotiates power and sovereignty in a text that specifically addresses ruling elites.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43383027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defining a Tradition","authors":"Dalpat S. Rajpurohit","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987866","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Allison Busch's seminal work on the classical Hindi literature of Mughal India demonstrated how the composition of works of poetic theory (ritigranths) became a defining literary enterprise of vernacular court poets in the Mughal-Rajput milieu. Though firmly based in a Sanskrit worldview, Hindi intellectuals exhibited newness in their theorization of the art of poetic craft. Engaging with Busch's work on the ritigranth genre, this article demonstrates how the poet-scholars of Rajasthan who were experts in Brajbhasha and Marwari—or Hindi and Rajasthani, respectively, as they are largely understood today—theorized and created new knowledge systems to define their four-hundred-year-old Marwari literary culture. Keeping up with the theoreticians of Brajbhasha who blended Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) with poetic theory, the Rajasthani scholars placed their work in a multilingual literary culture that was increasingly expanding as India came under the knowledge regimes of colonialism.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48769689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Azoulay, Sohail Daulatzai, A. Davari, Mamadou Diallo, Bouchra Khalili, E. Zeleke
{"title":"Revolution and Rehearsal in the Global South","authors":"A. Azoulay, Sohail Daulatzai, A. Davari, Mamadou Diallo, Bouchra Khalili, E. Zeleke","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987996","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators working between Asia, Africa, and the West, each of whom address the relationship between revolutions and archives in their own practice. What does it mean, in practice, to unlearn the archive? What does it mean to do so from the global periphery, the still present specter of a third world?","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42565201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cruel Optimism of Decolonization","authors":"Christopher J. Lee","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9988035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9988035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This roundtable intervention applies the concept of cruel optimism, as formulated by Lauren Berlant, to situations of decolonization with the purpose of understanding the myths and fantasies of political self-determination. It also examines the idea of a Jacobin spirit, as explored by C. L. R. James, as a counterpoint to the limits of cruel optimism. This intervention subsequently concludes that interpretations of decolonization that assert either tragic or utopian outcomes must be redrawn to accommodate these competing perspectives. Decolonization and revolution, as mutual political phenomena of the “Third World Historical,” inhabit temporalities of incompletion, of unsustained dialectics, that require the continuation of political struggle by other means.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"541 - 545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44386438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alternative Histories of Global Sovereignty","authors":"J. Shipley","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9988009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9988009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Between 1979 and 1983 soldiers, workers, and students in Ghana launched a revolution to destroy the neo-imperial order. In the Ghanaian historical imagination that era is not remembered for its radical populism but as a time of violent chaos before the nation-state followed the road to purported neoliberal stability. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and the control of representational practices. In the contemporary moment, it is hard to theorize alternate ideas of freedom and political difference. If we start a study of twentieth-century revolution with a coup d’état in 1979 Accra, Ghana—rather than student upheavals in 1968 Paris, for example—it reorients our understanding of power by showing how young radicals sought an African-grounded sovereignty, an alternate future now forgotten.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46893005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolution qua Restoration","authors":"Massimiliano Tomba","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9988061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9988061","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Revolution and restoration are usually understood as opposite terms. This article aims to disarticulate this binary. Suppose the modern concept of revolution can be defined as a project of social reorganization led by the state or by a constituent power that aims to become the state. In that case, the restoration is a defense of society, institutions, traditions, and customs from the state. However, restoration is also an expression of a different political orientation of the revolutionary trajectory. The temporality of revolution is mainly future oriented, whereas the restorative temporality implies continuity, the reactivation of institutions from the past, and their experimentation in everyday life. These two temporal dimensions are intertwined. They can either combine in new political configurations or oppose each other in progress and regress, forward and backward. This article examines the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas as an example that combines the two temporal dimensions.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"551 - 554"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Demystifying the Image","authors":"Amsale Alemu","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9987931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9987931","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While opposition to the Ethiopian monarchy was an immediate imperative of the Ethiopian revolutionary movement, self-professed “anti-feudalism” was but one part of the political-economic object of revolutionary critique. Originating from a country famous for its legacy of African independence, and against a monarch who was a global pan-African icon, Ethiopian revolutionary opposition to Haile Selassie would require not only a politics of dissent, but also an anti-colonial framing. This article centers anti-imperialism—specifically challenges to US neo-imperialism in Ethiopia—among Ethiopian student revolutionaries in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining organizational writing and direct action, as well as editorials in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther, this article argues that US-based Ethiopian students employed demystification as a signature revolutionary tactic. They attempted to reframe Ethiopian exceptionalist narratives as currency of US neo-imperialism, drawing on arguments strengthened by engaging Black Power concepts and thinkers. Demystification, while rooted in narrative modes and historical tropes specific to Ethiopian students' location in the United States, offers a concept to think through other oppositional movements as generative of global theoretical critique. Ethiopian students not only demanded the overthrow of the monarchy, but also joined anti-colonial appeals for the structural transformation of the world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46836980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}