The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia

313 Pages·2018·5.63 MB·English

by  Gyan Prakash

The Postcolonial Moment
in South and Southeast Asia

The Postcolonial Moment
in South and Southeast Asia
Edited by
Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, and Nikhil Menon
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published 2018
© Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, Nikhil Menon and Contributors, 2018
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3863-9
ePDF: 978-1-3500-3864-6
ePUB: 978-1-3500-3865-3
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Cover image: April 1955: People jostling in the street during the Bandung Conference
held at Bandung in Indonesia. (© Ernst Haas/Getty Images)
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Contents
Illustrations vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Postcolonial Moment
Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, Nikhil Menon 1
1 “False Truth”: Disillusionment and Hope in the Decade after
Independence
Rotem Geva 11
2 The Enemy Within: Communism and the New Pakistani
State
Kamran Asdar Ali 31
3 Contested Meanings of Postcolonialism and Independence in Burma
Mandy Sadan 49
4 The Marginal State: Practicing Islamic Statehood in Independent
Indonesia
Chiara Formichi 67
5 Evacuee Property and the Management of Economic Life in
Postcolonial India
Rohit De 87
6 Struggles for Citizenship around the Bay of Bengal
Sunil Amrith 107
7 The Postwar “Returnee,” Tamil Culture, and the Bay of Bengal
Bhavani Raman 121
8 Anxious Constitution-Making
Gyan Prakash 141
9 Making Universal Franchise and Democratic Citizenship in the
Postcolonial Moment
Ornit Shani 163
10 Toward Mass Education or an “Aristocracy of Talents”: Nonalignment
and the Making of a Strong India
Neeti Nair 183
vi Contents
11 “The World Has Changed”: Development, Land Reform, and the
Ethical Work of India’s Independence
Benjamin Siegel 201
12 “Help the Plan—Help Yourself”: Making Indians Plan-Conscious
Nikhil Menon 221
13 The Past and Future of the Muslim Postcolonial Moment: Islamic
Economy and Social Justice in South Asia
Julia Stephens 243
14 Straight from Mecca: Medan, Hamka, and the Coming
of Islam to Indonesia
Michael Laffan 265
Index 284
Illustrations
12.1 The Plan is an obstinate ass that won’t budge in the direction of
prosperity. Unmoved by pulling, pushing, and not tempted by the
carrot of foreign aid, it makes progress only when people run with it
on their backs. Yojana (Hindi), Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1957, p. 5 224
12.2 Field publicity bullock cart—Central Region, 1956. Photo Number
55614, Photo Division of India 226
12.3 The ballet “Indra puja,” depicting the Five-Year Plan, presented by The
Bhartiya Lok Sabha Kala Mandal of Udaipur. New Delhi, December 3,
1956. Photo Number 55879, Photo Division of India 228
12.4 Bharat Sewak Samaj trainees going to the project site to build an
approach road near Badarpur (a village a near Delhi) in December
1955. Photo Number 49959, Photo Division of India 233
12.5 Women social workers of the Bharat Sewak Samaj trainees camp
at Badarpur explaining “how to follow clean and sanitary ways.”
December 1955. Photo Number 49960, Photo Division of India 234
12.6 A tiny balding man, branded “slacker,” stands on his toes atop a ladder
and tries to blow out the lamp of the Plan. The cartoon simultaneously
conveys how the Five-Year Plans are threatened by public apathy and,
conversely, that it is nourished by mass participation. Yojana (Hindi),
Vol. I, No. 19, October 6, 1957, p. 1 238
14.1 The cover of the first edition of Risalah Seminar Sedjarah Masuknya
Islam ke Indonesia 266
Notes on Contributors
Kamran Asdar Ali is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.
He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press,
2002) and the coeditor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and
Africa (Palgrave 2008), Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (Oxford, 2009),
and Gender, Politics, and Performance in South Asia (Oxford, 2015). He has published
several articles on issues of health and gender in Egypt and on ethnicity, class politics,
sexuality, and popular culture in Pakistan. His more recent book is Communism in
Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947–72 (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Sunil Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard
University. His research is on the transregional movement of people, ideas, and
institutions. Areas of particular interest include the history of public health and poverty,
the history of migration, and environmental history. He is the author of Crossing the
Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University
Press, 2013), Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press,
2011), and Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930–1965
(Palgrave, 2006).
Rohit De is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University and Research Scholar in
Law at the Yale Law School. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between law and
everyday life in South Asia and the British Empire. His book The People’s Constitution
explores how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents,
came to permeate everyday life and imagination in India during its transition from
a colonial state to a democratic republic. Mapping the use and appropriation of
constitutional language and procedure by diverse groups such as butchers and sex
workers, street vendors and petty businessmen, journalists and women social workers,
it offers a constitutional history from below. He is currently working on a project on
the transnational history of rebellious lawyering in the twentieth century supported by
the Social Science Research Council.
Chiara Formichi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her
research focuses on Islam as a lived religion and as a political ideology in twentieth-
century Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly. Her current research has two foci:
first, a comparative study of the historical genesis and contemporary status of minorities
in Southeast Asia (Burma/Myanmar, Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore). The second
is a study of the disciplinary relation between Asian Studies and Islamic Studies.
Rotem Geva is a lecturer (assistant professor) in the Department of Asian Studies and
the Department of History at the Hebrew University. She is a historian of modern
Notes on Contributors ix
South Asia, concentrating on twentieth-century India. She is writing a book about
the history of Delhi during the transition from colonial rule to independence. It
explores the city’s transformation under the pressures of the Second World War and
the partition of India.
Michael Laffan is a professor of history at Princeton University, specializing in the
history of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. His first book was Islamic Nationhood
and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds (Routledge, 2003). His most
recent sole-authored book is The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the
Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Nikhil Menon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. A
historian of modern South Asia, his research focuses on economic planning and on
democratic state building and its global connections in independent India.
Neeti Nair is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the
author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard
University Press and Permanent Black, 2011, paperback 2016). Following on her
previous research on the politics of Hindu minorities in undivided Punjab, she is now
working on the relationship between religion, the laws, and minority rights in South
Asia, c. 1860–the present.
Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University
and specializes in South Asian history, colonial and postcolonial studies, and urban
history. He was a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective until its dissolution in
2006, and has been a recipient of fellowships by the National Science Foundation,
the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment of Humanities. He
has written Bonded Histories (1990) and Another Reason (1999), and edited several
volumes of essays, including The Spaces of the Modern City (2009), and Noir Urbanisms
(2010). His most recent book is Mumbai Fables (2010), which was adapted for the film
Bombay Velvet (2015), for which he wrote the story and cowrote the screenplay. He is
currently writing a book on the history of emergency in India.
Bhavani Raman is Associate Professor, Department of History, University of
Toronto. Her first book, Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South
India (Chicago University Press, 2012, and Permanent Black, India, 2015), was about
paperwork. She is currently researching the jurisprudence of security in South and
Southeast Asia. She has also begun to research how ideas concerning Tamil culture
were shaped in the context of transnational migration.
Mandy Sadan is Reader in the History of South East Asia at SOAS, University of
London. She has been researching the social and cultural history of the Kachin
region of northern Myanmar since the mid–1990s and has written extensively
on the region. Her book Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State
in the Borderworlds of Burma (British Academy & Oxford University Press, 2013)
was awarded the EuroSEAS prize for Best Book in the Humanities in 2015. Sadan