Susan Bayly

Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode

This article explores both Western and Asian imaginings of national histories beyond the boundaries of the nation. It seeks to contribute to the history of Asian modernities, and to the anthropological study of nationalism. Its focus is on thinkers and political actors whose visions of both the colonising and decolonising processes were translocal, rather than narrowly territorial in scope.

Vietnamese intellectuals in revolutionary and postcolonial times

This article is concerned with cultural capital and its deployment in pre- and post-independence Vietnam. Its focus is transnational career and family life as experienced by multilingual women and men from Hanoi intelligentsia families who have negotiated a remarkable array of divergent socialist and post-colonial modernities over the past 40 to 50 years. The personal narratives explored here include recollections of francophone education during the 1946-54 Independence War, as well as work and training in the Soviet Union, and morally testing encounters with Western goods and entrepreneurial opportunities during employment as development experts in former French and Portuguese colonies in Africa. These accounts are seen as the reflective imaginings of people whose sense of a strong and active moral life has been constructed through and from both material and intellectual possessions and acquisitions.

Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community: Religion, State and Society in Kerala, 1750–1850

Until recently the Malayalam-speaking region of southern India—once known as the Malabar coast and now the state of Kerala—was portrayed as a bastion of orthodox high Hinduism. The regions caste system was famous for its intricacy and supposed rigidity; its temples were rich, numerous and heavily patronized by Malayali rulers; and there was a general sense of the area as a picturesque backwater hidden away behind the western Ghats, untouched by the turbulent forces at work elsewhere in south Indian society. According to this view Kerala was a static society, ‘pure’ in culture and religious tradition, and ripe for drastic modernization once British suzerainty was established during the nineteenth century.

Islam in Southern India: ‘Purist’ or ‘Syncretic’?

In this introduction to the influential collection of essays Conversion to Islam,1 Nehemia Levtzion sets out his view of the way Islam took root over many centuries in Africa and the further Islamic lands of southern and eastern Asia. He describes a process of gradual Islamization in which whole societies were ‘drawn into the orbit of Islam’ and states: In Africa and Indonesia Islam challenged syncretistic and latitudinarian religions and infiltrated into the religion of the politically dominating group in a process which eventually led to the Islamization of the state and its society.2 Islam developed in the urban milieu of Mecca where . . . ‘trade and religion were inseparable.’ . . . In Islam, migration to the town is considered meritorious because it is in the urban milieu that one can fully practice the Muslim way of life. Also, the mobility of the traders stands in stark contrast to the stability of the peasants. The latter are more strongly attached to local spirits and to the deities of nature, whereas traders are more susceptible to the adoption of a universal and abstract religion. One may even say that, in the non-Christian fringes of the Muslim world, traders are almost universally indentified as Muslims . . . Trade, therefore, contributes not only to the spread of Islam but also to the development of religious conformity.3

How to Forge a Creative Student-Citizen: Achieving the Positive in Today's Vietnam

The exaltation of achievement as a measure of collective and individual worth and moral agency has been one of the defining features of Asian developmentalism. Yet in today’s age of globalized neoliberal attainment monitoring, the question of who and what an achiever actually is within an achievement-conscious society is far from straightforward or uncomplicated. In Vietnam, the notion of doing well and creditably for self and nation can be deeply problematic for those called on, either officially or by living and ancestral kin, to embody qualities of attainment and creditable life-course functioning in ways recognisable to those who reward and monitor aspiring achievers. Building on recent fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper explores the ways young Hanoians have engaged with a rapidly changing set of ideas about how the country’s tightly regulated schooling and examination system can both unleash and constrain the potential for new and ‘creative’ forms of attainment on the part of the nation’s most promising and productive citizen-achievers.