New Books In South Asian Studies

Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them. Now here comes a fantastic new book on the much touted ‘cosmopolitan culture,’ as the natives call it, of colonial Bombay- with a twist. Nile Green‘s well received Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) masterfully weaves together the dizzying varieties of Islams current in this port city -Islams that grew up as the Deccan, the Konkan, Gujurat, East Africa, Central, West and Southeast Asia all converged upon the crowded lanes and workshops of Bhendi bazaar, Haji Ali, Mazgaon, Chira Bazaar, Dongri. These neighbourhoods in turn exported systems of belief and practice wherever their denizens went beliefs that were themselves shaped and modified by the time they had spent, and the adherents

The Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph when they took over the port of Melaka in 1641, effectively replacing the Portuguese as the masters of maritime Asia. The famed ‘Dutch spirit of commerce’ was, as Robert Parthesius’s fine book Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660 (Amsterdam UP, 2010) demonstrates, a very tangible and concrete network of ships and ports. Between Yedo and Galle and Bandar Abbas, the Dutch East India Company maintained a fleet of often purpose built, extraordinarily well-maintained, and staggeringly well-organised ships, boats, and divers other vessels, each performing a specific function that formed a link in the web of their Asian holdings and ports of call. While for other European powers with aspirations to Asian dominions the most important sea-route was that linking Europe to Asia,

Nugroho Notosusanto (1930-1985) never pursued a military career; but all the same he did his bit for the Indonesian armed forces. He was co-opted into the Armed Forces History Centre as a young academic, and dedicated the greater part of his life to writing official histories of post-colonial Indonesia in the format prescribed by the Centre of which he was an integral part ever since its inception. Katharine E. McGregor‘s book, History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past (NUS Press, 2007), examines the historiographic projects undertaken by the Indonesian military as they fought to check threats–perceived or otherwise–to their influence from a diverse array of opponents: political society, civil society, religious groups, communist groups, the global political situation. They produced official histories and textbooks- a good many of which were authored by Nugroho- built monuments, memorials, and museums, all to ensure that their version of an Indonesi

The many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, however, very keen to enrich themselves. And, by wheeling and dealing in the markets and courts of the subcontinent, a good number of them did just that, going, as we say, from rags to riches. This class of imperial nouveau riche might have gone unnoticed if, like their successors in the Indian Civil Service, they had stayed in India and, at the end of their careers, returned to modest retirements in Cheltenham. But they did nothing of the sort. As Tillman Nechtman‘s new book Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2010) demonstrates, as often as not they waddled back to the British Isles dripping diamonds and proceeded to exchange their new found wealth for positions of power in the British socio-political system. The press dubbed them the “nabobs”

Borneo is an island where three very different nation-states meet: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The Indonesian province of Kalimantan occupies most of the island; of the rest, all except one percent is taken up by the Malaysian provinces of Sabah and Sarawak. The tiny but wealthy Sultanate of Brunei occupies that one percent. So, people living in the northern parts of the island have lots of borders to cross. It’s almost like having your own mini-continent; and one that the outside world doesn’t really think of in terms of barbed wire and immigration check points- such imagery being reserved for the more famous borders of India and Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, or even Thailand and Cambodia. Borneo to most of us out here is all about orangutans, long houses, and tropical rainforest. But Noboru Ishikawa‘s magnificent, trail-blazing book, Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a South East Asian Borderland (NUS Press, 2010) is all about the borders and frontiers tha

Bollywood, the Hindustani film genre based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), has long been known for its lavish costumes and sets. Now comes a sumptuous book from a master costume designer, and the first ever Indian to win an Oscar, Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya. Her The Art of Costume Design (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2010), explores in lavish detail all the components that make a Bollywood movie so visually arresting–the clothes, the fabrics, the make up, even the jewellery without which no Indian outfit is ever complete. It is impossible, in this book, to tell where the personal leaves off and the professional begins, because Bhanu Athaiya’s life and career have been intertwined with the Indian film industry from the early colour movies of the 1950s, down to Gandhi (1982) and Lagaan (2001). In this richly illustrated work she profiles some of the most challenging films she has worked on, giving the reader a superb insight into the work that goes into creating an authentic ‘look’ to a film,

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large,