Description

The history of classical and medieval Indian philology is all-but unexplored, especially in comparison to other civilizational culture-areas like the Mediterranean and the Sinitic world. In part this arises from thorny technical and terminological problems—most notably, the absence of any lexical counterpart to ‘philology’ in any early South Asian language—but ample materials are available to begin to reconstruct the social, material, and institutional conditions for the practice of premodern Indic textual studies. In this talk, I will present just such a preliminary reconstruction, set in the Tamil south in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. I argue that a very large new corpus of anonymous Sanskrit texts—which present themselves as instances of the long-extant genres of purāṇa and tantra—can be profitably understood as a variety or mode of philological scholarship. These works in turn supplied both authoritative models and interpretative challenges to authors working in more conventional scholarly genres. The two examples I will discuss here—a work on dramatic and literary theory, and an essay on the scriptural authority of the Srivaisnava religion—are especially noteworthy for their connections to parallel but distinct transformations in scholarship composed in Tamil.

Whitney Cox is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at SOAS, University of London. His primary research interests are in the fields of literary, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval Indian subcontinent, with a special concentration on the Tamil country in the far south. Proficient in both Sanskrit and Tamil, his current work charts the multiple transformations of society, polity, and textual culture during the course of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries of the Common Era. Cox is currently completing two book-length studies: a preliminary survey of the changing habits of textual scholarship in thirteenth century India, and a re-interpretation of a crucial event in the history of the imperial Cōḻa polity; the second of these is supported for the 2012-13 academic year by a fellowship from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cox also recently completed a year as a Visiting Associate Professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Description

Whereas it is well-known that the Jaina tradition adopted, to a large extent, text genres and characters from the epics and Purāṇas of the Hindu tradition and reworked them according to their own view of world history, there has been little discussion of Jaina figures or narrative devices that may have conversely entered some texts of the Hindu tradition. This lecture will be dedicated to the following tasks: (a) exploring the prehistory of the Buddha avatāra in the Viṣṇupurāṇa; (b) investigating the stories of Ṛṣabha and his son Bharata in three Hindu Purāṇas (Viṣṇupurāṇa, Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa, Bhāgavatapurāṇa) and in the oldest Jina biographies (especially the Jambūdvīpaprajñapti); (c) considering other figures or devices in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa that may be due to Jaina influence.

Renate Söhnen-Thieme studied Indian languages and literatures, Iranian studies and Musicology in Mainz. Her thesis “Untersuchungen zur Komposiiton von Reden und Gesprächen im Rāmāyaṇa” earned her a doctorate in 1979 and was published in 1980. 1980-81 she conducted field research in Baltistan (North-East Pakistan), collecting and studying oral traditions of Balti epic and folk literature. 1982-86 she was a member of the Tübingen Purāṇa Research Project, where among other things she completed an edition of the Brahmapurāṇa, with a detailed summary and indexes. Since 1989 she has been Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Professor Söhnen-Thieme’s research interests comprise Old Indian literature, especially texts in the classical religious traditions. Her latest publication is titled ‘Buddhist Tales in the Mahābhārata?’

Description

In premodern East Asia, the Confucian and also deeply Buddhist and shamanist — countries of Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China rarely experienced anything like the type of religious violence that existed for centuries in historical Europe. How do we explain a region in which religion was generally not a part of the explanation for war, terrorism, and other violence? I argue that the dominant inclusivist religions of historical East Asia that were syncretic and polytheistic Buddhism, Confucianism, and shamanism — did not easily lend themselves to appropriation by political entrepreneurs as a means of differentiating groups or justifying violence. Directly addressing the paucity of religious war in historical East Asia is theoretically important: widening the empirical scope of scholarship to include a focus on the major foundational religions of East Asia addresses a potentially serious issue of selection bias.

David C. Kang is Professor of International Relations and Business, and Director of the Korean Studies Institute, at USC. Kang’s latest book is East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (Columbia University Press, 2010). He received an A.B. with honors from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Berkeley.

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Please join us for some delicious food and refreshing beverages as we usher in the new academic school year at the Pan Asia Student Society’s Welcome Back Party. Come meet other members and learn about this year’s new and exciting events!

Description

THIS EVENT IS RESTRICTED TO UofT FACULTY AND STUDENTS.

The Centre for South Asian Studies is proud to present

Back from the Field and Archives: CSAS Graduate Students on their Research

Featuring our graduate students:

Victoria Sheldon, Department of Anthropology
“A Study of the Linguistic Basis and Colloquial Language of Malayalam in Kozhikode, Kerala”

Victoria Sheldon is a new PhD student, interested in the Malayalam language, folklore and medical practices in Kerala, the social and political history of Northern Kerala, and phenomenological and performative approaches in Anthropology and Philosophy.

Candis Haak, Department of Anthropology
“The Perception, Experience, and Imagining of Sacred Landscapes: A Spatial Analysis of the Pilgrimage Routes of Vijayanagara”

Candis Haak is a third year doctoral student studying the experiences that constitute sacred geographies. She examines the medieval Hindu empire of Vijaynagara, India to investigate how the institution of pilgrimage engenders these social and sacred processes.

Arun Brahmbhatt, Department of Religion
“Pandits, Temple Libraries, and Archives – Reflections on an Ahmedabadi Autumn”

Arun Brahmbhatt is a fourth year doctoral student in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His research interests include Sanskrit textual practices, Vedanta, hermeneutics, intellectual history, historiography, print culture.

Description

Please come and join Centre’s faculty and academic community for great food, conversation, and updates about CSAS’ Undergraduate Minor Program in South Asian Studies, its Graduate Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies, and its exciting planned event programming for the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year.

Description

This day long interdisciplinary workshop on the subject of “Genocidal Massacre in Early Modern Europe, Asia, and the Americas” is being held in connection with a planned new volume of essays under that name and edited by Bindu Malieckal and Pablo Garcia Loeza. Four of the volume’s ten authors (Pablo García Loeza, Bindu Malieckal, Su Fang Ng, & Amrita Sen) will be coming to Toronto in order to present their findings in a workshop setting. Three members of the University of Toronto History Department (Heidi Bohaker, Melanie Newton, and Nhung Tran) will also make presentations on related themes in their own research.

This will be an interdisciplinary and cross cultural discussion of genocide which deliberately moves the discussion out of the twentieth century and European/Western contexts that shape so much of current research. We plan the presentation of papers in two morning sessions, and then a couple of panel discussions in the afternoon to consider comparatively both historical and theoretical issues. The first panel will aim to identify comparative themes between different papers, and the second panel will take a step back in order to consider the language that is and can be used around genocide in the pre-modern period and in contexts that may be either distinct from or only indirectly related to European and/or colonial powers.

Confirmed Presenters (in alphabetical order):

1. “The Elimination of the Huron Wendat and the Language of Genocidal Massacre”
Heidi Bohaker, University of Toronto

Heidi Bohaker is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in North American Aboriginal history, pre-Confederation Canada and ethnohistorical research methodologies. She has published on the significance of kinship networks to Anishinaabe people in the Great Lakes region and methods for reading pictographic expressions of Aboriginal identity on treaty documents. Current projects include a book about the political history of Anishinaabe peoples in the eastern Great lakes from 1600 to 1840.

2. “Discourses of Violence: Writing the Massacre at the Templo Mayor”
Pablo García Loaeza, West Virginia University

Pablo García Loaeza is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.at West Virginia University. His research interests include the manipulation of history and identity formation, especially in the early-modern literature of Spanish America. He has published on these topics in Pegaso, the Colonial Latin American Review,and the Colonial Latin American Historical Review.

3. “Genocide and Gendercide in Sixteenth Century Portuguese Goa”
Bindu Malieckal, Saint Anselm College

Bindu Malieckal is Associate Professor of English at Saint Anselm College and specializes in the representation of Muslims, Jews, and women, with specific reference to India, in early-modern narratives. She has additional interests in post-colonial literature. Her publications appear in Papers in Language and Literature, The Muslim World, Essays in Arts and Sciences, The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, Shakespeare Yearbook, and Atenea, and in the volumes The Mysterious and The Foreign in Early Modern England and The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Presently, she is completing a book on English and European trade with India.

4. “The narrative of ‘aboriginal absence’ in the Caribbean”
Melanie Newton, University of Toronto

Melanie Newton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the Caribbean and the history of slavery, gender and emancipation in the Atlantic World, and recently published The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Her current research project is entitled _This Island’s Mine: Indigeneity in the Caribbean Atlantic World.

5. “Massacre Victims into War Casualties in Sja’ir Kompeni Welanda Berperang Dengan Tjina: Race and Representation in the 1740 Chinese Massacre in Dutch Batavia”
Su Fang Ng, University of Oklahoma

Su Fang Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in the early modern period with a secondary interest in postcolonialism. She has published Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and articles on various topics. She is currently working on a comparative study of English and Malay appropriations of the legends of Alexander the Great, titled Reviving Alexander’s Empire: Early Modern Classicism from the British Isles to Islamic Southeast Asia, and researching Anglo-Dutch interactions in the East Indies, using sources in European languages and in classical Malay (written in Arabic script).

6. “Chiattorer Monnontor: Taxation, Mortality and the Bengal Famine of 1770”
Amrita Sen, Michigan State University

Amrita Sen is currently completing her dissertation “Trading India: Commerce, Spectacle, and Otherness, in Early Modern England” at Michigan State University. She has published on “Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions” in Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation, and helped edit the online proceedings of the Newberry Library for Renaissance Studies 2010 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference,“Intersecting Disciplines: Approaching Medieval and Early Modern Cultures.”

7. “Anti-Catholic Violence in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Vietnam?””
Nhung Tran, University of Toronto

Nhung Tuyet Tran is Canada Research Chair in Southeast Asian History at the University of Toronto. Her intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religious practice in Vietnamese society. She is completing a social history of gender, entitled, Vietnamese Women at the Crossroads of Southeast Asia: Gender, State & Society in the Early Modern Period. She has published in the Journal of Asian Studies and is the co-editor of Viêt Nam: Borderless Histories (2006), a collection of revisionist essays on Vietnamese histories. She is currently researching the cultural history of Vietnamese Catholicism, using sources written in classical Chinese, the Vietnamese demotic script (chũ nôm), and European languages.

Description

Southeast Asia represents a profound puzzle for students of democracy and democratization. Democracy is weak or absent in the region’s wealthiest states – Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia – but present, to varying degrees, in three of its poorest ones, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and the Philippines. Democracy also appears to be unrelated to human development such as educational levels, literacy, maternal health and other public goods, given the standout performance of quasi-authoritarian Singapore and Malaysia, and the rapid development of Indochina. All of this challenges the key tenets of democratic theory, and indeed modernization theory more generally. In this paper, I present an alternative explanation for the presence or absence of democracy across Southeast Asia that is based not on domestic social or even political factors but rather on international influence, geography and history – in particular, a country’s proximity to and history of relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Benjamin Reilly is Professor of Political Science in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is the author of six books and over 70 journal articles and book chapters on issues of democratization, constitutional reform, party politics, electoral system design and conflict management, and has advised governments and international organisations on these subjects. His latest books are a study of democratization and political reform in Asia and the Pacific, Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific (Oxford University Press, 2006), and an edited volume, Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies (United Nations University Press, 2008). He is currently a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), in Washington DC.

Description

This study investigates how particular configurations of institutional conditions cause high rate of non-standard employment rate in the Republic of Korea. We investigate how employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit and statutory minimum wages are associated with non-standard employment. Then, we focus on the female non-standard workers and examine the re-entrance of female workers in the Korean labour market. We highlight that women in their 40s has the highest rate of employment among all female worker and that a large proportion of these women are entering into non-standard employment. In approaching to this question, we examine the political economy of this phenomenon by first discussing the demand side of the Korean labour market with gendering of the varieties of capitalism argument and then the supply side with the work-life balance argument. When examining the re-entrance of the labour market, women with general skills with lower education and high education both found it more feasible to re-enter to the labour market as non-standard workers. While work and life balance is a prominent reason for women’s choice of opting out of the labour market, work and life balance choice mattered less for women re-entering the labour market as non-standard workers in their 40s and 50s but instead the firm based skill formation mattered more. In addition, the retail service industry is suggested to absorb a large number of female works with lower skill level who would have had difficulties in re-entering into other male oriented companies.

Sophia Seung-yoon Lee obtained her doctorate degree in social policy at the University of Oxford in 2011 and is now an assistant professor of social policy at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Before joining Ewha, she also worked at Kyoto University as a GCOE assistant professor.

Description

An initial attempt to explore Taiwanese identity politics in the context of cross-strait relations with China would almost always lead to the following categorization of Taiwan’s two dominant parties: Kuomingtang (KMT)/blue represents unification with China, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)/green represents Taiwan independence. However, when five University of Toronto student delegates travelled to Taipei to witness the election in January 2012, their preconceived notions about the two political parties and their supporters quickly broke down.

In the week leading up to election day, Betty Xie, Aaron Wilson, Melinda Jacobs, Mimi Liu, and Remi Kanji conducted interviews with scholars, students, and other voters. They eagerly observed the political debate between incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou from KMT and DPP Chairman Tsai Ing-Wen. Their conversations revealed that the divide between unification and independence did not necessarily dictate voters’ decision about which party to support. While “deep-blue” and “deep-green” supporters stood firmly in their positions, there was also a wide spectrum of opinions that fell between the two extremes, revealing the complexity of cross-strait relations.

In their documentary film, Untag Taiwan 2012, the student delegates interrogate whether the long-presumed association between Taiwanese voters’ political affiliation (KMT or DPP) and cultural identity (Chinese or Taiwanese) still persists. “Blue,” “Green,” “ROC,” “Taiwan” – do these tags still bear the categorical significance that international observers of Taiwan assume? The film offers its audience an invitation: “before you tag Taiwan again, untag it first.”

*Note: A rough cut version of the film will be screened.

Film Credits:
Directed by: Betty Xie
Produced by: Betty Xie, Aaron Wilson, Melinda Jacobs, Mimi Liu, Remi Kanji
Editing and Postproduction: Betty Xie, Jessie Lau, Zhiying Zhang　
Original Music Scores: Charles Wong

Description

This seminar showcases graduate and undergraduate student fieldwork and findings from the 2012 interdisciplinary field course in Indonesia. Students from the University of Toronto who participated in the course will present their work and reflect on their experiences. The course took place in the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia and was taught in affiliation with the Bandung Institute of Technology. Prospective participants in the course, as well as those with interest in Contemporary Asian Studies and field courses in other parts of Asia, are especially encouraged to attendt. Student travel for the course was generously supported by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies, the Asian Institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Department of Geography and Program in Planning.

The presenters are graduate and undergraduate students at U of T: James Michelson (Political Science), Korryn Bodner (Political Science), Sean Major (Planning), Leah Nosal (International Relations and Political Science), Michelle Berquist (Planning), Emma Cohlmeyer (Planning), and Daniel Girard (Planning).

Description

1. Welcome Remarks
Larry Alford, Chief Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
Paul Crowe, Co-Chair, Chinese Canadian History Project Council

2. Opening remarks
The Honourable Vivienne Poy, Honorary Patron, Chancellor Emerita of the University of Toronto
G. Raymond Chang, Chancellor Emeritus of Ryerson University

3. Acknowledgement of Sponsors
David Choi, Co-Chair, Chinese Canadian History Project Council

4. Media interviews/photos/coffee break

5. Conference – Chinese Canadians: Mobility, Culture and Community

Chair: The Honourable Vivienne Poy

Speakers:
David Chuenyan Lai, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Victoria
“Toronto Chinatowns: Past and Present”

Jan Walls, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Simon Fraser University
“Cantonese and English: Cross-Cultural Reflections on Naming and Transliteration”

Jack H.T. Leong, Director, Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong-Library, University of Toronto
“Chinese or Canadian: Challenges of Social Integration for contemporary Chinese Immigrants”

Paul Crowe, Director, David Lam Centre & Associate Professor of Humanities, Simon Fraser University
“Chinese Canadian Religious Communities and the Transformation of Multiculturalism”

Jessica Li, Faculty Associate, York Centre for Asian Research, York University
“A Passage to Canada: Translation, Transnation, and Transfiguration in Iron Road”

Questions & comments

6. Refreshment & networking

Description

This paper is an attempt to understand an environmental movement, specifically the Appiko Chaluvali of Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, India. This movement played an important role in saving the forests of the Western Ghats, one of the biodiversity hotspots of the country in the 1980s. The Appiko Chaluvali was a spontaneous movement started by the local communities who struggled collectively against all odds to regain control over productive natural resources and to defend their livelihoods and lifestyles. Some of the larger questions that are raised through this paper are -whether this movement is different from other environmental movements? What does this movement tell us about environmental movements in general?

Manisha Rao is an Assistant Professor at the University Department of Sociology, S.N.D.T. Women’s University, Mumbai, India. After completing a Masters in Sociology at University of Pune and an M. Phil. From Dept. of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India, she went on to complete her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pune. Her research was on the study of an Environmental Movement –Appiko Movement in Southern India, which is forthcoming as a book. Her areas of interest include Environment, Gender & Development Studies. She has presented papers at national and International conferences & published articles in various journals and books. She lives with her family in Mumbai, India.

Description

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. and Canadian Immigration Services worked deliberately and collaboratively to suppress South Asian revolutionary nationalism and white labor radicalism in the Pacific Northwest borderlands. This talk examines how these counterinsurgency measures were built upon the foundations of Asian exclusion and a product of intercolonial cooperation and exchange. In doing so, this presentation seeks to reinterpret Asian exclusion from being strictly about national protection (and keeping out undesirable foreigners) to consider how its legal precedents, statutory provisions, and enforcement mechanisms were reworked as a strategy of U.S. and British imperial rule.

Kornel Chang is an Assistant Professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, State University of New Jersey. He is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, which is a study of the western U.S.-Canadian borderlands in the Pacific world, examining how the region arose simultaneously from frontier expansion, the globalizing forces of capital and empire, and the territorializing processes of state formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His articles on race and empire and migration and border controls in the Pacific world have been published in the Journal of American History and the American Quarterly. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the MacMillian Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

Description

Opening ceremony officiated by: Mrs. Good Meng Chan Wong, Mr. Leo Ma, Mr. Stephen Siu, Professor Meng Yue, Professor Jessica Li, Dr. Jack Leong

Presentations:

Remembering Shu Xiangcheng
by Leo Ma, Head, New Asia College Ch’ien Mu Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Eileen Chang and Hong Kong Women Writers
by Jessica Li, Faculty Associate, York Centre for Asian Research, York University

Bitter melon, Rice, and Humanity: Writing Connections
by Meng Yue, Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Exhibition: October 19, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; October 20, 12 noon – 5 p.m.; October 22-24, 10 a.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the question of comparison as well as notions of world history and world literature. Their efforts both on the question of comparison and on the broader scale of writing about history and literature have largely run parallel with each other. This lecture will explore the possibility of considering the two sets of efforts together as a means to elaborate on a new method of comparison.

Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001), Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007) and the co-editor of Minor Transnationalism (2005), The Creolization of Theory (2011), and the forthcoming Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2012). She also edited a special issue of PMLA (Publication of Modern Language Association) on the special topic, “Comparative Racialization” (2008), among other publications.

Description

This Lecture is Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph O’Connell, Scholar, Teacher, Community Builder and Friend to the Centre for South Asian Studies.

Stotras – hymns of praise – are part of the religious culture of all Jains in their daily life. But they are a world in themselves, so different they may be in language, style and purposes. Sung in worship, improvised by enthusiastic devotees on the spot, conceived as literary feats where all linguistic resources are made use of, chanting episodes in the lives of the Jinas, or Jinahood, as it were, they are able to reach different of audiences and appeal to all tastes. With the help of representative exemples, this lecture intends to explore this vast world and underline the fundamental role of hymns in the transmission of values to generations of Jains. Numerous anthologies of Jain hymns are available in India; efforts have been made in the West to draw attention to Hindu hymns through studies and translations. Why not join efforts to make Jain hymns even better known than they are to Western audiences in publications that would be reliable and attractive?

Of Franco-Indian origin, Nalini Balbir is professor of Indology at University of Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Section Sciences historiques et philologiques), where she teaches Sanskrit, Middle-Indian languages and Hindi. Her fields of research are primarily Jainism in all its aspects (philological and contemporary), Theravada Buddhism, as well as Pali and Prakrit languages and literature. In recent years she has been engaged in cataloguing of Jain manuscripts in various European countries. She is at present the chief editor of the JAINpedia website, an educational resource containing descriptions of digitized manuscripts and a multi-handed encyclopedia of Jainism online.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

This talk presents material from a forthcoming book. Using spatial ethnography fieldwork, rehabilitated theories about property rights in public space, and critical cartography, her research group creates experimental maps to reconsider the sidewalk as an important but overlooked public space. The research agenda considers how our systems of representation privilege and foreclose perception and knowledge. She dwells on the case of Ho Chi Minh City as a remarkable example of fluid and vibrant sidewalk life that can be informative to cities around the globe that are in the midst of reconstructing their public space paradigms in the face of rapid migration.

Annette M. Kim is an associate professor of international urban development in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Dr. Kim directs an inter-disciplinary research group SLAB, sidewalk laboratory: http://mit.edu/slab . She teaches courses on housing and land use, property rights, public finance, and project appraisal in developing countries. Her publications include Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press 2008). She received her Ph.D. in city and regional planning and her M.A. in visual studies from the University of California-Berkeley, her M.P.P. from Harvard University, and her B.A. from Wellesley College.

Description

This paper discusses the historical relevance of an overlooked archive of special trials and courts martial of state prisoners to the genealogy of the modern security state. It examines the taxonomy of detention developed by the British East India Company at its colonial frontier through the prism of martial law and preventive arrest. The trials of rebels captured in insurrections and wars at the Company’s frontiers in the early nineteenth century in Southern Asia invariably provoked comment on the necessity of martial law, the applicability of military law to non-combatants, the classification of enemies and subjects, and the elaboration of statutory provisions for preventive arrest. As this paper will make clear, extraordinary laws derived from colonial wartime measures operated beyond the notion of exception and the suspension of habeas corpus. They were woven into the very fabric of colonial jurisprudence. By examining the ways in which military and civil law were breached and policed by invoking arguments of necessity, this paper will explore how the Company’s assertion of territorial sovereignty turned on the assertion of its sovereignty over life.

Bhavani Raman is assistant professor at the History Department, Princeton University where she teaches South Asian History. Her book on colonial practices of paperwork entitled, Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South India is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press as part of the South Asia Across the Disciplines series. She is currently researching frontier jurisdiction in South and South East Asia in the early nineteenth century.