South Asia Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/16313

Browse

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Refracted Images: India’s Self-Image and the Influence of China on Indian foreign policy (1950-1975)
(2019-08-14) Pal, Deep; Kale, Sunila S
While visiting India from Lhasa in 1956—57, the Dalai Lama indicated that he would consider not returning to China-occupied Tibet should India offer him political asylum. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was not enthusiastic and suggested that the best way forward for the Tibetan people was for the Dalai Lama to stay in Lhasa. Less than two years later, in March 1959, India reversed this policy, deciding to grant political asylum to the Dalai Lama even before he requested it. What explains such inconsistencies or abrupt policy reversals? To answer this question, I analyze the role that cognitive predispositions play in determining policy. I use a modified framework of refracted images to investigate how three crucial aspects of India's self-image – civilizational conviction, territorial anxiety, and development – impact Indian foreign policy. I hypothesize that the apparent abrupt reversals or sudden discrepancies in Indian policy become intelligible when examined through aspects of India's self-image vis-Ã -vis China as refracted through India’s interactions with other actors in the region. Using primary source documents from three major archives and detailed interviews with 52 foreign policy decision-makers, I conduct an intertemporal analysis of India's policy towards Tibet in 1950—1959, and a paired comparison of India's policies towards Bhutan and Sikkim in 1968—1975. I conclude that the relationship between Asia’s two comparably sized powers—China and India—can be understood with reference to other smaller actors in the region. In this case, India’s foreign policy choices are shaped by its self-image and the desire that others respect this image, as evidenced in its relations with its Himalayan neighbors.
Legitimating Visions: The Nanyang Imaginary in Contemporary Southeast Asian Cinemas
(2018-07-31) Alarilla, Adrian Ellis Jaranilla; Sears, Laurie
The Asian Financial Crisis was a tumultuous international event that also resulted in a crisis of faith in the nation and the state in the region, the most dramatic result of which were the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java in 1998. For the Chinese in Nanyang, or the “South Seas,” who had always occupied an ambivalent space in their adopted homelands, it was only one of the more recent key moments in a long timeline of historical trauma. But just as 危机 (Wei Ji), the Chinese term for “crisis,” consists of two characters that signify ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, Nanyang Chinese filmmakers found this crisis as an opportunity to critically re-examine the nation, bending time and expanding space in order to reimagine home, family, belonging and nationhood. After a historical survey of the Chinese in Insular Southeast Asia, this study looks at the ideation of a unique Nanyang Chinese culture through a textual analysis of two contemporary semi-autobiographical melodrama films commemorating the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its after-effects in the years after. Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008), an Indonesian-language film, revolves around the emotionally disconnected members of a Chinese-Indonesian family making sense of the anti-Chinese riots. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家, 2013), an English, Tagalog, and Mandarin-language film, explores the relationship between a Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny whose maternal nature provokes the jealousy of the child’s real mother. This Intra-Asian study will examine the intersections of nationalism and diaspora, as well as of Southeast Asian Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. Despite the differences in style, treatment, and language, these films seem to have a common goal, not as much countering as transcending the nation’s “empty, homogeneous time (and space)” in order to accommodate the Chinese Diasporic Imaginary.
Theurgy and the Snake: The Yoga Kalandar and Bengali Sufism
(2015-09-29) Cantú, Keith Edward; Novetzke, Christian L
A radically alternative vision of the fakir is given in surviving medieval (Bng. madhya-ẏug, “Middle Age”) and pre-modern textual sources that predate and coincide with the colonial period in Bengal, such as the widely influential 17th century Yoga Kalandar text as well as Bāul oral traditions deeply influenced by this text’s cosmology. This book aims therefore to fulfill three key objectives: 1) to historically situate the Yoga Kalandar text and its practitioners; 2) to describe the distinctly yogic and tantric aspects of its theology, with specific reference to the way the text harmonizes Sufi and Neoplatonic hypostases and ritual theurgy with Sāṃkhya cosmology; and 3) to describe how the text’s cosmology was integrated in later colonial and modern forms of indigenous Bengali mystical poetry, especially the Bāul songs of Lālan Fakir that make numerous creative references to the practices outlined in the Yoga Kalandar and, in a sense, even transcend the text’s limitations. As an appendix for reference, a new English translation of this text (from Bengali and French critical editions) is provided.
Politics of ports: China’s investments in Pakistan, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh
(2015-09-29) Kahandawaarachchi, Thilini; Kale, Sunila
Over the last decade China has heavily invested in deep-water ports in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Many scholars explain these investments in light of China’s economic expansion and long-term strategic goals. However, scholars have not paid enough attention to the rationale for recipient countries to encourage and even actively seek Chinese investments. This thesis will examine the rationale behind the governments of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh for involving China to build their maritime infrastructure. Firstly, I argue that these countries consider China to be a favourable alternative to funding from international financial institutions and Western donors that usually have numerous conditionalities when extending development loans. Secondly, I argue that South Asian countries around India perceive China as a counter balance against the regional hegemony of India. Further, China is also a useful friend to these South Asian countries to resist the influence of external powers and international organizations such as the UN. Thirdly, I argue that Chinese funding for these projects is used to achieve local development agendas and to increase regional connectivity in South Asia. Relying on these three arguments, I point out that these South Asian governments exercise their agency based on their own reasons and domestic political concerns when they reach out to China to fund large port projects in their countries.
Occupying Bangkok-Mobile Vendors and Democratic Attitudes
(2015-05-11) Rubin, Joseph Mark; Curran, Sara R.
This thesis analyzes the status, activity, and relations of mobile vendors in the abstract and reproduced spaces of Bangkok. The flotation of people from Northeast Thailand is located within Bangkok and the process of the development of modern Thai political economy, a process that has been heavily influenced by neo-liberalism. In the capitalist city mobile vendors and others who do not part take in the formal economy are marginalized socially, economically, and spatially leaving a conceptual void in terms of their political identity. Drawing from Purcell's ideas concerning radical democracy and the urban environment that is its' natural site of emergence, I explain the political agency of this particular group. The paper offers two arguments, first, that the abstract and physical borderlines that mark vendors off from the formal economy and its conceived city are spaces where vendors, in seeking to meet their own needs, become a nascent line of democratic action. And second, mobile vendors' role in creating Bangkok as an urban habitat emphasizing the use value of the city informalizes and delegitimizes the Bangkok Municipal Authority in its goal to prioritize the exchange valued city. In their occupation of the city vendors exhibit, and inspire democratic attitudes in their patrons through the relationships that take place in the contested, diverse, and dense Bangkok environment.
Screening Subjects: Humanitarian Government and the Politics of Asylum at Palawan
(2014-10-14) Pangilinan, James; Bonus, Enrique
Contemporary humanitarian government of refugee resettlement entails a formative politics of asylum that legally assesses the truth of persecution and thus claims to "refugee" identity. In the Palawan First-Asylum Camp from the early 1980's until 1997, forces of sovereign violence and compassion manifested how international refugee law translated through concrete humanitarian practices of camp education, emergency care, and legal contention. These multi-scalar discursive processes served the basis for resettlement of Vietnamese American. For the latter diasporic Vietnamese community, legal determination of refugee status encountered a limit in the form of hospitality that reconfigured the borders of the Philippines and Vietnam in light of cosmopolitan visions of sanctuary and pastoral care. By highlighting overlapping conditions of refuge, this thesis offers an analysis of refugee narratives and conditional recognition of refugee "identity" in relation to a selective regime of truth addressing "refugees" in contrast to other migrant subjects. A genealogy of Vietnamese-Filipino asylum-seekers underscores the mixed history of humanitarianism delivered by different stakeholders in light of militarized conflict as well as the emergence of peace, a "neoliberal" politics of immigration, welfare reform and market liberalization in the US, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Screening Subjects: Humanitarian Government and the Politics of Asylum at Palawan
(2014-10-13) Pangilinan, James; Bonus, Enrique
Contemporary humanitarian government of refugee resettlement entails a formative politics of asylum that legally assesses the truth of persecution and thus claims to "refugee" identity. In the Palawan First-Asylum Camp from the early 1980's until 1997, forces of sovereign violence and compassion manifested how international refugee law translated through concrete humanitarian practices of camp education, emergency care, and legal contention. These multi-scalar discursive processes served the basis for resettlement of Vietnamese American. For the latter diasporic Vietnamese community, legal determination of refugee status encountered a limit in the form of hospitality that reconfigured the borders of the Philippines and Vietnam in light of cosmopolitan visions of sanctuary and pastoral care. By highlighting overlapping conditions of refuge, this thesis offers an analysis of refugee narratives and conditional recognition of refugee "identity" in relation to a selective regime of truth addressing "refugees" in contrast to other migrant subjects. A genealogy of Vietnamese-Filipino asylum-seekers underscores the mixed history of humanitarianism delivered by different stakeholders in light of militarized conflict as well as the emergence of peace, a "neoliberal" politics of immigration, welfare reform and market liberalization in the US, Vietnam and the Philippines.
The HMEC: An American Hindutva
(2013-04-17) Wiker, James McCallum; Kale, Sunila
Over the past 20 years the Hindutva movement, both in the United States and India, has grown increasingly assertive. Often the American Hindutva movement is dismissed as insignificant or treated as simple extension of its Indian counterpart. While American Hindutva does share deep ideological and organizational linkages with the Indian Hindutva movement, it has also demonstrated a significant capacity for innovation and adaptation. These innovations in the American Hindutva strategy are the result of the movement's utilization of and disciplining by the dominant discourse of American multiculturalism. This study focuses on one particular American Hindutva organization, the Hindu Mandir Executives' Conference, in and effort to understand the role American multiculturalist discourse plays in the expanding American Hindutva movement and its potential consequences.

Browse

Recent Submissions