Organizer and Chair: Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College
Sue Gunawardena, The University of Texas, Austin
India’s internal and external political relations have been and still are strongly influenced by her emigrant communities. The recent turmoil in India’s Punjab and the influence and reactions by overseas Sikhs is indicative of the extent to which expatriates can exert leverage on and be influenced by the political conditions in their home countries. As international travel and communications become more efficient, the migrant factor has become increasingly salient in the domestic and international political arenas of both the sending and receiving countries. Beginning with the early twentieth century and emigrant efforts to drive the British out of India (Ghadar) to the present agitation for a separate state of Khalistan, the Sikh diaspora has played a pivotal role in shaping the politics back home. Although a number of similarities exists between the two movements, there is one stark difference: while Ghadar was a pan-Indian nationalist movement, Khalistan is one that is supported exclusively by Sikh nationalists. Employing these two cases, the main issue that this study explores are the causes of diasporas’ greater involvement in international politics. In addressing this central theme I focus on three questions in this paper: (1) Why do diaspora groups, many of whose members have resided outside for generations, have a vested interest in gaining political autonomy in their homeland? (2) What kinds of institutions sustain/heighten ethnic identity formation and provide group cohesion in their host countries? (3) What kinds of strategies do diasporan groups adopt in order to attain their political objectives?
Robert Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
In the fifty years after the 1849 British annexation of the Punjab, a particular balance was achieved in the Peshawar valley between the colonial state and the Pakhtun clans dominating society in this trans-Indus region.
Colonial desire to control a problematic frontier led to a large, coercive military presence. Strategies to establish and reward a class of local, collaborating intermediaries and to expand irrigation-based commercial agriculture led to the consolidation of the most productive lands in the hands of favored clan elites.
Though by 1900 this political and economic domination was of a high order compared to other colonial districts, the strength of Pakhtun cultural institutions and social organization and a porous border meant that a broader strategy to define and subordinate Punjab "agricultural tribes" into imperial hierarchies was heavily compromised. As in the broader Punjab, lineage land and inheritance "custom" was codified in Peshawar. But Pakhtun moral and jural standards were also acknowledged in Frontier Crime Regulations that symbolized the failure of the colonizers to fully enforce or legitimate the Indian Penal Code. Policies, including revenue remissions, land grants, and military employment, were used to extend influence, if not hegemony, over valley residents.
I argue that, by 1900, local-imperial interaction had produced a particular "limited Raj" of circumscribed legitimacy and cultural impact, but one that, within core irrigated tracts, continued to unbalance the local agrarian "moral economy." Resultant economic inequalities and social divisions generated stresses that would fuel the militancy of NWFP nationalist movements after 1919.
Michael Laffan, University of Sydney
To argue, as Benedict Anderson does in his Imagined Communities, that nationalism in the Netherlands Indies was largely a product of Western ideas, formulated by a largely Western-educated elite, down-plays the role of other, older, communities living in the Middle East and their intellectual influence in Southeast Asia.
By the late 19th century, the essential unity in the archipelago had come to be expressed in Islamic terms. The fact that the "nationalist", "communist" and "reformist" leadership of the pergerakan movement were closely connected and formulated their ideals in Islamic terms in the early part of this century indicates the need to reinvestigate the role of Islam in creating the "imagined community" of the new Indonesia.
This paper will examine the growth of the idea of the "nation" in the Indies and of Southeast Asia as an Islamic domain, or umma, in terms of the relations between this region and the Middle East. It also speculates on the role of the Jawah (Southeast Asian Muslims) of Mecca as an external community representative of its own umma and distinguished by close ties of language and daily life.
If the Jawah were identifiable as a distinct community abroad, how was this image interpreted back in the Colonial Malay States and the Netherlands Indies? How was this umma to be described in the modern age? To pose such questions will be of use in reviewing the growth of both secular and Islamic ideologies in the early 20th century and in examining how the concept of the nation came to overlay that of the umma.
Philippe Le Failler, Institut de Recherche sur le Sud-Est Asiatique, Aix-en-Provence
By the turn of the century, the French colonial administration had launched a new system of taxes to collect revenues directly from the peasants without the collaboration of local Vietnamese officials. Taxes on alcohol, salt and opium were the heaviest and the most unpopular in Vietnamese villages which had led to regular uprisings in the Red River Delta. But rebellions were not the only forms of resistance to the colonial power. The smuggling of alcohol, salt and opium, encouraged and often supported by local mandarins flourished as a parallel economy. At the local Vietnamese market, buying smuggled alcohol, salt and opium became an act of resistance. This paper discusses how smuggling became a political instrument in the struggle for independence and shows how it indirectly corrupted and destroyed the principles of the French colonial rules.
Magnus Fiskesjo, University of Chicago
In this paper I return to the topic of the central role of sacrificial rituals of upland societies in the borderlands between China and the Southeast Asian state societies. I present a discussion of what might be called an "extreme" case, or (in Jonathan Friedman’s phrase), "the end of the road": a brief account of the characteristics, history, and demise of headhunting, during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, among the Wa people of the China-Burma border area, traditionally regarded as the most fearsome and barbarian of the region. This account builds on Chinese, British, and other outsider’s accounts, as well as on indigenous recollections gathered during recent field investigations in Wa areas. I will then present an analysis of historical Wa headhunting as a form of human sacrifice, part of a system of practices developed within the context of the inter-ethnic relations of the region and of local ecological/economic constraints, themselves conditioned by the nature of Wa external relations. Drawing on this and on studies of other upland societies of this region, I will discuss in what ways the pro-reform Wa sacrificial system can be regarded as a function of those external relations, and how we might understand the history of Wa sacrifice and its legacies in the present.