Brief comments in relation to the following papers will be presented at the Conference. Full papers will not be read. Therefore, all who wish to attend the conference should prepare by reading the papers in advance. These are available by contacting Bernardo Brown at beb66@cornell.edu
Teachers, elders and shehe: Islamization in Rural Tanzania, ca. 1920-50
Felicitas Becker, Simon Fraser UniversityThis paper discusses the why and how of the widespread acceptance of Islam among villagers in what is now Southeast Tanzania during the early to mid-twentieth century. These villagers had known about Islam since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when tenets of Islamic allegiance had formed part of the political practice of the slave-trading ‘big men’ who then dominated the region. Examining narratives concerning the foundation of rural mosques, I argue that by becoming Muslim villagers lay claim to allegiance with the coast, which had earlier been the privilege of these big men. The significance of this claim, though, arose from power relations within the villages: emphasizing the notion of equality and solidarity before God, new Muslims also claimed a stake in the social arena of the village, and curtailed the ambitions of colonial intermediaries. Allegiance with the coast thus translated into the assertion of local, insider status.
Felicitas Becker, Simon Fraser UniversityThis paper discusses the why and how of the widespread acceptance of Islam among villagers in what is now Southeast Tanzania during the early to mid-twentieth century. These villagers had known about Islam since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when tenets of Islamic allegiance had formed part of the political practice of the slave-trading ‘big men’ who then dominated the region. Examining narratives concerning the foundation of rural mosques, I argue that by becoming Muslim villagers lay claim to allegiance with the coast, which had earlier been the privilege of these big men. The significance of this claim, though, arose from power relations within the villages: emphasizing the notion of equality and solidarity before God, new Muslims also claimed a stake in the social arena of the village, and curtailed the ambitions of colonial intermediaries. Allegiance with the coast thus translated into the assertion of local, insider status.
A Restive Sangha and an Absent King: Regional claims to Lineage & Patronage in 19th Century Buddhist Lanka
Anne M. Blackburn, Cornell University
In the early 19th century, Britain removed the last independent Lankan (Sri Lankan) king from his throne in Kandy. Despite initial agreements for British royal patronage of Lankan Buddhist institutions, British support and supervision of Buddhist temples and monastic administrative practices diminished sharply, due in large part to Christian missionary pressures from both the colonies and metropole. The absence of a local Buddhist monarch as patron-in-chief of the Buddhist monastic community (sangha), and intensifying caste-based and regional competition among Lankan Buddhists seeking cultural and economic capital in a new form of colonial economy, spurred the development of new monastic lineages and lay-monastic patronage networks. Such lineages and networks were forged across the water in the first half of the 19th century with support of elite Buddhists in mainland Southeast Asia. The increasingly diverse Lankan Buddhist world was a restive one in the last half of the 19th century, wracked by disagreements over fundamental matters of ritual and discipline. Some leading monastic scholars in Lanka pursued plans for reunification of the Lankan sangha in collaboration with Southeast Asian Buddhist communities. Such plans involved the strategic invocation of pre-colonial regional Buddhist histories and memories to attract patrons and naturalize novel administrative arrangements. Lankan efforts intersected in unexpected ways with the micro-politics of the Southeast Asian sangha and with growing British pressure on Burma and Siam.
Anne M. Blackburn, Cornell University
In the early 19th century, Britain removed the last independent Lankan (Sri Lankan) king from his throne in Kandy. Despite initial agreements for British royal patronage of Lankan Buddhist institutions, British support and supervision of Buddhist temples and monastic administrative practices diminished sharply, due in large part to Christian missionary pressures from both the colonies and metropole. The absence of a local Buddhist monarch as patron-in-chief of the Buddhist monastic community (sangha), and intensifying caste-based and regional competition among Lankan Buddhists seeking cultural and economic capital in a new form of colonial economy, spurred the development of new monastic lineages and lay-monastic patronage networks. Such lineages and networks were forged across the water in the first half of the 19th century with support of elite Buddhists in mainland Southeast Asia. The increasingly diverse Lankan Buddhist world was a restive one in the last half of the 19th century, wracked by disagreements over fundamental matters of ritual and discipline. Some leading monastic scholars in Lanka pursued plans for reunification of the Lankan sangha in collaboration with Southeast Asian Buddhist communities. Such plans involved the strategic invocation of pre-colonial regional Buddhist histories and memories to attract patrons and naturalize novel administrative arrangements. Lankan efforts intersected in unexpected ways with the micro-politics of the Southeast Asian sangha and with growing British pressure on Burma and Siam.
Another Enlightenment? The Theosophical Society in Asia, 1879 to 1919
Mark Ravinder Frost, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
On the one hand, the Theosophical Society represents the epitome of late-imperial cosmopolitanism – an international scholarly and social welfare organization dedicated to the exploration of comparative religion and the promotion of ‘universal brotherhood’. On the other hand, Theosophy rose to prominence on the eve of an explosion of radical Asian nationalism that it was in places directly involved in stimulating and ‘spiritualizing’. How, then, did a movement that espoused cosmopolitan ideals respond to the rise of patriotic movements that often drew on religion for quite different ends? To what extent was the universalism and internationalism of the Theosophists a real alternative to the particularism (even isolationism) that came to characterize popular nationalist discourse? This paper will explore the contradictions and the contributions of Theosophy during a pivotal period both in Asian history and in the movement’s history itself. It will begin by addressing Theosophy’s impact on religious and intellectual life in India, Sri Lanka and further afield and point to how this might affect our understanding of European orientalism. It will then examine the cosmopolitan practice generated by Theosophical literary networks as they spread out across the Indian Ocean from the Society’s headquarters in Madras. Finally, it will approach the question of where the Theosophical Society, with its broader internationalist sensibility, fits into existing narratives of religion, nationalism and communalism in Asia.
Cosmopolitan rituals as technologies of the self in Muslim Southeast Asia, 1800-2000
Thomas Gibson, University of Rochester
When the kings of Island Southeast Asia converted to Islam, they continued to sponsor traditional Austronesian royal rituals. The new Islamic rituals tended to imply the equality of all believers before a transcendent God and the achievement of spiritual excellence by individuals seekers. Austronesian rituals legitimated a system of hereditary social ranking based on the links of the founding royal ancestors to beings that inhabited the Upperworld and the Underworld. These two incommensurable symbolic frameworks have been in a state of creative tension ever since. Their interaction is evident throughout the life cycle rituals of the Makassar people of South Sulawesi, which form the primary examples discussed in this paper. Continual participation in both Islamic and Austronesian rituals inculcates two different models of the self in local actors, corresponding to two different models of the ideal state. The persistence of elaborate rituals of birth, marriage and death for the descendents of noble houses corresponds to the hierarchical, collective nature of the Austronesian self as a member of an organized whole. The idea that the state should be based on shariah law corresponds to the egalitarian, ethical nature of the Islamic self as an individual in a community of the faithful. The demand for an Islamic state formed the basis of the Darul Islam insurgency of the 1950s, a demand that has been revived in South Sulawesi since the fall of the Suharto’s New Order regime in 1997.
Latticed Networks and Cosmopolitan Space: Swahili scholarship on the shores of the Western Indian Ocean (c1880-c1950)
Zulfikar Hirji, York University
Between 1931 and 1935 Alice Werner (d. 1935), a scholar of African languages based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and Sheikh-Sir Mbarak al-Hinawy (d. 1957), the second Liwali (Governor) of the East African Coastal Protectorate based at Mombasa, shared a passionate and detailed correspondence concerning the Swahili language and literature of coastal East Africa. Werner and Hinawy were also members of a wider network of local and regional interlocutors who translated and transported Swahili language materials from East Africa to Britain. Individually, Werner and Hinawy were part of different scholastic, religious, and political networks. Werner, for example, was a leading member of the Brotherhood movement, a Christian inter-denominational organization comprised of supporters from non-conformist churches who promoted ‘practical Christianity’ and whose mission had spread into Africa via individuals such as Solomon Plaatje (d. 1932), the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress. Hinawy, on the other hand, was closely associated with a group of Swahili-Muslim scholars including Sheikh al-Amin bin Ali al-Mazrui (d. 1949), the Chief Qadi of Mombasa, and also had close connections to prominent political and intellectual circles of Egypt, through his close association with the family of Saad Pasha Zaghlul (d. 1927), the leader of Egyptian nationalism. This paper examines the life-histories of Werner and Hinawy with a focus on the networks of which they were a part. Amongst the critical questions this study raises is the extent to which the socio-political context and intellectual milieu wherein Werner and Hinawy lived and worked can be described as a ‘cosmopolitan space’.
Maritime Commerce and the Making of a Red Sea Urban Culture: Massawa, 1557-1885
Fouad Makki, Cornell University
This essay provides a preliminary survey of the culture and history of the island of Massawa located on the African shore of the Red Sea. Its point of departure is an examination of the vast transoceanic commercial circuits of which it was a part. These circuits, whose extent and depth varied over time, represented dense flows of people, goods, and ideas in multiple directions, and contributed to the extraordinary pluralism of the linked societies. The sea was the primary medium of this commercial and cultural interchange and Massawa was the fulcrum of its diffusion into the Northeast African interior. Following these lines of seaborne trade, Northeast Africa can be understood as part of a trans-regional circuit embracing parts of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds.
Fouad Makki, Cornell University
This essay provides a preliminary survey of the culture and history of the island of Massawa located on the African shore of the Red Sea. Its point of departure is an examination of the vast transoceanic commercial circuits of which it was a part. These circuits, whose extent and depth varied over time, represented dense flows of people, goods, and ideas in multiple directions, and contributed to the extraordinary pluralism of the linked societies. The sea was the primary medium of this commercial and cultural interchange and Massawa was the fulcrum of its diffusion into the Northeast African interior. Following these lines of seaborne trade, Northeast Africa can be understood as part of a trans-regional circuit embracing parts of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds.
To "Step on the Spread Cloth" Lightly: Mapping Ritual Transformations of and Local Substitutions for Indian Commodity Textiles in Insular Southeast Asia
Kaja M. McGowan, Cornell University
At Lubo Tuo in Barus, an important coastal center for the gathering of camphor and benzoin from the interior of Sumatra for the international trade, a Tamil stone inscription was unearthed. Dated 1082, it records the decision of an Indian merchant stationed in the area to require anyone engaging in the exchange of goods to pay a nominal fee for being allowed to "step on the spread cloth." No doubt such deals would have been struck, as they are today, in an open market place or pavilion where the seller would have invited clients to sit on textiles while engaging in the business of trade. A greater quantity and assortment of Indian cloths entered insular SE Asia due to the rapid expansion of demand for Indonesian spices. With the growing monopoly of the Dutch VOC on the supply of Indian textiles, and the inflated prices that resulted, consumers increasingly resorted to "treading lightly" on the spread cloth, enticed instead to purchase regional products distributed by an older trading network in which Javanese, Balinese, and Makassarese played key roles. This paper explores the ritual transformations of some of these commercial textiles and their local substitutions in the court cultures of Java and Bali as divined through 18th century textual sources combined with more recent accounts. Commodity cloths produced explicitly for Indonesian markets in workshops in Gujarat and the Coromandel Coast will be explored, not only as lavish ritual objects for the elite in their own right, but as influential patterned prototypes whose very power reside in their ability to be conceived as an assemblage of separate pieces -- literally "stepping stones" to the bridgelike substitutions of locally manufactured textiles.
Sri Lankan Buddhism in Malaysia: K Sri Dhammananda and the Creation of Tradition
Jeffrey Samuels, Western Kentucky University
This paper examines the history of the Sri Lankan Sangha in Malaysia. Of particular interest is the role that Kirinde Sri Dhammananda played in expanding the reach of the Theravāda Sangha from serving the ritual needs of the Sri Lankan diasporic community to spreading the “true” teachings of the Buddha to Chinese Buddhists. In assessing the events that contributed to the creation of a translocal Theravāda Sangha in Malaysia, I will pay special attention to the degree to which language and political ties have affected Theravāda monastic patronage during the mid to late 1900s.
The Anthropology of the Foreshore: Debating Sovereignty in colonial India, the case of the Gulf of Kutch
Edward Simpson, School of Oriental and African Studies
This paper is about the nature and structure of the claims to sovereignty over the Gulf of Kutch made by the allied but rival Hindu-Rajput rulers of two ‘princely states’ in western India. The dispute between Kutch and Morvi was lengthy in all aspects of its character, gaining momentum in the 1830s, when the British began to consolidate their position, and dying out in the 1940s, when the British departed. On the surface, the nub of contention was Kutch’s claim to sovereign rights over the entire Gulf of Kutch, up to the Kathiawad shore; claims Morvi denied and energetically countered. Kutch’s claim was unusual, if not to say anomalous, and had far reaching implications for relations between the states, as well as for patterns of trade and commerce between western India and the ports of the Indian Ocean. The Kutch claim denied Morvi access to the sea, curtailing possible revenues for the state from trade and disrupting communication with the colonial government in Bombay. Conversely, Kutch was able to protect and promote the trade of its own ports, rights claimed by Kutch on the basis of ancient Rajput prerogatives. The dispute was initially played out through the colonial administration and in the law courts; later it moved to London as the rulers began to personally lobby the government. The vast and sceptical colonial record of the dispute examines the evidence of flotsam and jetsam, stray buffaloes, dubious accounts, and the peculiar feeding habits of certain fish. The colonial record is thus very good on the visible tokens of the disputed sovereignty, but has much less to say on the ideas of galactic Hindu-Rajput polity and cosmology that clearly underpinned the argument. The paper thus reconstructs the lost religious and cultural dimensions of this dispute, and explores the consequences of this for the analysis of the Indian Ocean during and beyond the colonial period.
Invisibility and Monumentality: Religious Spaces in Mocha, Yemen, 17th and 18th Centuries
Nancy Um, Binghamton University
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Yemeni port city of Mocha thrived in its strategic location on the Red Sea coast where the extended world of the Indian Ocean met the Arabian Peninsula and the periphery of the Mediterranean. Renowned for the trade of coffee, the port city hosted a multireligious and multiethnic transient community of merchants, pilgrims, and religious scholars. In this paper, I examine the diverse religious makeup of Mocha, with its local Sunni community, Shi’i Zaydi officials and religious scholars from the Yemeni interior, shipowning Bohra merchants from the Indian port city of Surat, Dutch, English and French company traders and Hindu and Jain Baniyan brokers. I use the landscape of spaces of worship as the lens to examine the texture of religious multiplicity in this urban community, which included many mosques, tombs, and even a Hindu temple. The examination rests on the understanding that the monumental landscape both highlights and occludes aspects of communal faith and identity and hence serves as a complex index of religious diversity. This paper explores the uneven ways in which architectural spaces and built monuments may point to, delineate or even conceal the presence of particular communities and the ways in which religious identity was interwoven with social position and economic preeminence in this trading port.
Global Gurus in Motion: "Cosmopolitan" Communities in Two Modes- Singapore and Chennai
Joanne Waghorne, Syracuse University
The circulation of new guru-centered spiritual organizations (the term religious is openly eschewed), between South India and Singapore becomes more intense each year. Organization like Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev’s ISHA and Sri Sri Ravishankar’s AOL (Art of Living) are growing in both areas. Both organization enjoin a universalistic approach and claim to be open to all ethnic and religious heritages. In a recent address in Singapore, Sri Sri Ravishankar claimed that his unique yogic practice, Sudarshan Kriya, did not affect anyone’s religion, “The kriya (practice) did not make someone Hindu any more than eating Chinese food turned someone Chinese.” AOL and more recently ISHA does draw diverse adherents in Singapore—with Chinese as well as European heritage people mixing with the admittedly more numerous Indians in group celebrations, lectures, and practices. In South India, with its arguably increasingly less diverse and more Tamil-focused society, cosmopolitanism appears to have a different face. In the main Isha ashram near Coimbatore, many Euro-American and Indian-American join Lebanese and others in an Anglophone world, and I am told the same is true of the AOL center in Bangalore. But at the local ISHA centers, the language is Tamil and “universalism” appears more a matter of policy than pragmatics. Or is it? What constitutes a cosmopolitan practice, how connected is this to ethnic diversity?
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice in Malaysia
Andrew Willford, Cornell University
This paper examines the cultural, historical, and psychological forces that contributed to a dramatic and unprecedented public demonstration of up to 40,000 Malaysian Tamils directed against the Malaysian government, as spearheaded by the so-called Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) in November, 2007. It is argued here that only in an excess in and of the law, or in its relative transgression, a notion of justice is being made explicable to Tamils who perceive themselves to be victims, betrayed by an emergent force of Islamization wedded to ethnic politics. This is understood in terms of an emergent sense of historicity and through the incalculable demands for recognition that blur, and thereby, confound, legalistic definitions of identification in Malaysia.