South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Who Is A Muslim?: Orientalism And Literary Populisms [Toc], Maryam Wasif Khan

Literature

Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta to its dominant forms in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question—who is a Muslim—is predominant in eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief amongst them, but takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to Pakistan. A ...

Poetic Walking Across Mobile Boundaries: Contemporary Southeast Asian Narratives In The Work Of Trinh T. Minh-Ha And Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Weiying Yu

Master's Projects and Capstones

This research investigates how personal politics, the poetics of cinematic narrative form, and current Southeast Asian landscapes are embodied in the work of filmmakers/artists Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952, Hanoi, Vietnam) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Bangkok, Thailand). Trinh and Apichatpong’s transnational reflections and radical poetics challenge the West as the authoritative domain of modern knowledge, evoking a border rupture that questions hegemonic definitions of culture, history, geography, and society. Synthesizing art and politics, their works create experimental spaces to navigate the multidimensional consciousness associated with the Asia Pacific and global political issues of immigration, refugeeism, military action ...

How Choreometrics Reflects Self-Identity And Self-Concept Through Cultural Dance: A Developing Method, Naowarat Buddee

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Abstract

This arts-based autoethnography research aims to analyze the researcher’s personal reflections of cultural embodied experiences through the connection of Thai cultural dance movements, cultural patterns, and expressive behaviors in Thai cultural contexts. These also reflected the researcher’s personal-identity and self-concept. As cultural dance has impacts on social structures and human behaviors both physically and psychologically in social interactions throughout the developmental lifespan, the researcher was inspired by the concept of Choreometrics to look closely at personal dance experiences in relation to Thai culture. This autoethnography is a case study of the researcher who identifies as Thai and ...

Inequality In Ethnic Representation In Secondary-School Literature Textbooks And National Examination In Vietnam, Anh Nguyen

Honors Projects

This essay studies the dynamic between ethnic minorities and majority in the Vietnamese education system. By examining the appearance and representation of ethnic minorities in national literature curriculum, textbooks, and examinations, the analysis reflects the government's perspectives regarding the “appropriate” portrait of ethnic minorities' heritage and relationship with the majority. The study finds that Vietnamese education framework and content comply with the national construct of a Vietnamese identity across ethnicities. The state determines educational materials and selectively permits only aesthetic, politically benign, and Kinh-like narratives of ethnic minorities’ cultures, many written and/or chosen by Kinh authority rather than ...

“Publishing” And Publics In A World Without Print: Vernacular Manuscripts In Early Modern India, Tyler Williams

Manuscript Studies

How did one make a work ‘public’ in the world of pre-print South Asia? What are the textual and material aspects of manuscripts that alert us to their character as ‘published’ works intended to be circulated among members of an imagined readership removed from the author or scribe in space and time? Can such textual artifacts be systematically distinguished from copies intended primarily for the use of a single individual? This essay explores these questions in the context of literary and religious works and their copies produced in South Asia during the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries in the vernacular language ...

Nectar Or Arrow: Cases Of Missense Textual Mutations In Early Kabīrian Padas, Minyu Zhang

Manuscript Studies

Widespread textual variations feature in the poems transmitted across north India in the name of Kabir, the popular Hindi saint and poet. Kabirian poems, even the early ones, incorporate a variety of traditions due to their appropriation and adaption by different communities, which have generated anthologies that favor works of particular themes or styles. This ever-expanding and transforming corpus serves as a reproducible and mutable coding system that indicates how Kabir was remembered, interpreted and transmitted. Certain types of textual mutations, although posing challenges to philologists, whose aim is to restore the original text, can help us map out how ...

Replication And Innovation In The Folk Narratives Of Telangana: Scroll Paintings Of The Padmasali Purana, 1625–2000, Anais Da Fonseca

Manuscript Studies

In the Southern Indian state of Telangana, itinerant storytellers narrate genealogies of the local castes using a scroll painting on cloth as a visual aid to their performance. These scrolls are the only archive of these otherwise oral narratives; hence key markers of their evolution. Once a scroll commission has been decided, performers bring an old scroll to the painters and request for a ‘copy.’ Considered as such by both performers and painters, a closer look at several scrolls of the same narrative highlights a certain degree of alteration. This paper focuses on the Padmasali Purana that narrate the origin ...

Prefatory Notes On Persian Idioms Of Islamic Jurisprudence: Reasoning And Procedures Of Law-Making In Premodern Islamicate India, Naveen Kanalu

Manuscript Studies

The essay elaborates on the manuscript tradition of transmission, commentary, and glossing of fiqh or “Islamic jurisprudence” texts in medieval and early-modern juridical culture from the Indian sub-continent. Premodern Muslim jurists composed doctrinal treatises primarily in Arabic, the shared theological language of the ‘ulamā’ or “learned scholars”. However, in the Indian context, Persian too had acquired the status of a language of Islamic law. From the fourteenth century, fatāwā compilations were made in Persian. By seventeenth-century Mughal rule in northern India, sharḥ or “commentary” and ḥāshiya or “super-commentary” in Persian were deployed as a mechanism for pedagogical transmission. Analyzing two ...

The Strange Afterlife Of Vidyāpati Thākura (Ca. 1350–1450 Ce): Anthological Manuscripts, Linguistic Confusion, And Religious Appropriation, Christopher L. Diamond

Manuscript Studies

This article examines the difficult aspects of working with anthological manuscripts and printed editions of lyrical vernacular poetry in South Asia by focusing on the textual reception of Vidyāpati Ṭhākura. In his own life, Vidyāpati wrote technical treatises in Sanskrit, historical narratives in Apabhraṃśa, and a corpus of lyrical poems (padas) and two dramas in the vernacular Maithili language. While his technical works remained relatively static and limited in their circulation, Vidyāpati’s lyrical poems had a more enduring and geographically widespread effect on the languages, literatures, and religions of Mithilā and Eastern India (Bengal, Orissa, and Assam). The anthologies ...

Power Permutations In Early Hindi Manuscripts: Who Asks The Questions And Who Gives The Answers, Rāmānand Or Kabīr?, Heide Pauwels

Manuscript Studies

What work do manuscripts perform? How are we to understand their socio-political impact? What happens when we find drastically different permutations of the same dialogical text in multiple manuscripts, where the interlocutors take different positions in different versions? How do we deal with that in the light of existing printed editions that intervene and “freeze” one version and marginalize others? This paper focuses on how old Hindi dialogical texts fare in manuscript and print, with the case study of the dialogue between the famous iconoclastic Kabīr and his purported guru the Rāma-worshiper Rāmānand, as preserved in a fascinating illustrated manuscript ...

Manuscript Variations Of Dabistān-I Mazāhib And Writing Histories Of Religion In Mughal India, Sudev Sheth

Manuscript Studies

A text that has found renewed interest among scholars of early modern India is the Persian compendium of religion called Dabistān-i Maẕāhib. Written between 1645 and 1658, the Dabistān presents a lively ethnographic and historical account of customs and habits of various major and minor religious communities in northern India during the heyday of the Mughal Empire (1526-1707). Written like a travelogue, it moves between various modes of description including mythical revelations, storytelling, ethnographic notes, and authorial commentary. The Dabistān-i Maẕāhib is also valuable because it is the earliest work outside of the Sikh literary tradition that contains first-hand accounts ...

In The Age Of Non-Mechanical Reproduction: Manuscript Variation In Early-Modern South Asia, Arthur Dudney, Neeraja Poddar

Manuscript Studies

No abstract provided.

The Permanent Liminality Of Pakistan's Northern Areas- The Case Of Gilgit-Baltistan, Hamna Tariq

Senior Theses and Projects

Since Pakistan’s inception, Gilgit-Baltistan, a sprawling region in Northern Pakistan, has not been granted provincial status due to its colonial association with the disputed region of Kashmir. Gilgit-Baltistan refutes its forceful integration with Kashmir, an unfortunate remnant of British divide-and-rule strategy, and demands provincial recognition and constitutional rights. Pakistan unfairly claims that it awaits the UN-sanctioned plebiscite in Kashmir to determine the region’s status. However, the likelihood of a plebiscite is little to none, since the Indian government officially annexed Indian-held Kashmir in August 2019, breaching the UN resolution on the plebiscite. A region that has been at ...

Upsurge Of The Bharatiya Janata Party In India, Anthony (Sungho) Choi

Student Publications

This research paper examines the development of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India since its establishment and its governance inside the country. The BJP is influenced by the ideals of Hindu nationalism, and such ideals can be visible through the party’s responses to critical issues, such as the ongoing Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir and Jammu. This research paper reviews three issues that seem to be prominent in India and correlated to the influences of the BJP in the government: The Indo-Pakistani conflict, transformations of India’s economy, and religious discriminations.

Farmer, Priest, And Poet: Knowledge Transmission And Wisdom In Works And Days And Gelimu, Duoduo Xu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper aims at a comparison between a classic poem from ancient Greek literature, the Works and Days by Hesiod, and ancestral records of hemerology from Daba Culture, entitled Gelimu, collected during my fieldwork in South-West China. Both traditions use constellations to mark important dates throughout the year, providing similar instructions on how to deal with daily work in the fields. Moreover, their mnemonic strategies and formulaic verses reflect their origins from oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. Starting from these basic similarities, the author analyzed the roles of Daba priests, the calendars authors, and Hesiod, the poet ...

Resistance Against Assimilation: The Irony Of The Melting Pot, Vismaya Paul Mohindra

Georges Lieber Essay Contest on Resistance

The video on the large, flat-screen T.V. plays and shows a small, brown baby lying helpless in the arms of her mother, concealed in a thick and colorful shawl. Sneeze after sneeze seems to come from the newborn, as the room fills with the strong scent of smoke, the result of a glowing fire set in the middle of the room. The small bell rings and rings until there is ringing in everyone’s ears, the sounds vibrating their skull and very being. The chanting seems to fill the small apartment, and everyone wonders in the back of their ...

How To Be Unfaithful To Eurocentrism: A Spanglish Decolonial Critique To Knowledge Gentrification, Captivity And Storycide In Qualitative Research, Marcela Polanco, Nathan D. Hanson, Camila Hernandez, Tirzah Le Feber, Sonia Medina, Stephanie Old Bucher, Eva I. Rivera, Ione Rodriguez, Elizabeth Vela, Brandi Velasco, Jackolyn Le Feber

The Qualitative Report

From a position of academic activism, we critique the longstanding dominance del production of knowledge that solely implicates fidelity to Eurocentric methodological technologies en qualitative research. Influenced by an Andean decolonial perspective, en Spanglish we problematize métodos of analysis as the dominant research practice, whereby las stories o relatos result en su appropriation, captivity and gentrification, first by researchers’ authorship and later by the publishing industry copyrights. We highlight the racializing and capitalist colonial/modern Eurocentric agenda del current market of knowledge production that displaces to la periphery all knowledge o relatos that do not subscribe to Euro-US American methodological ...

Ancient Wisdom And Future Medicine: A Defense Of The Science Of Ayurveda, Michael Eatmon

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

A growing number of people turn to Ayurveda as a complement or an alternative to conventional Western medicine. What are they turning to—a genuine medical science or a patent pseudoscience? This paper claims that modern Ayurvedic medicine is a genuine science with a promising future.

Digitizing Penn’S Indic Manuscripts, Benjamin J. Fleming

Manuscript Studies

The University of Pennsylvania possesses the largest collection of Sanskrit and vernacular Indian languages in the Western hemisphere. In 2014, UPenn was awarded a three-year Preservation and Access Grant (PW-51547-15) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), entitled “Providing Global Access to Penn’s Indic Manuscripts.” The project was completed in 2017, within the scheduled three-year period for the award. The original terms of the grant stipulated that staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now absorbed by the Kislak Center) at Penn Libraries was to catalog, rehouse and digitize its Indic manuscript collection, building on efforts from ...

Notes Of Exchange: Scribal Practices And Vernacular Religious Scholarship In Early Modern North India, Tyler Williams

Manuscript Studies

What happens when a vernacular language like Hindi begins to be committed to writing, entering the realm of a manuscript culture that was formerly monopolized by ‘cosmopolitan’ languages like Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian? How did the pioneering vernacular intellectuals of Hindi adopt, adapt, combine, or challenge conventions and practices from existing Indic and Islamicate manuscript traditions? This paper examines manuscripts containing works of religious scholarship produced by two Hindu sects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North India in order to map intellectual networks, glean information about the training of religious scholars, reconstruct performative contexts, and refine our understanding of what distinguished ...