Violent events involving female students symbolized the rise and fall of the New Left in Japan, from the death of Kanba Michiko in a mass demonstration of 1960 to the 1972 deaths ordered by Nagata Hiroko in a sectarian purge. This study traces how shifting definitions of violence associated with the student movement map onto changes in popular representations of the female student activist, with broad implications for the role women could play in postwar politics and society. In considering how gender and violence figured in the formation and dissolution of the New Left in Japan, I trace three phases of the postwar Japanese student movement. The first (1957-1960), which I treat in chapters one and two, was one of idealism, witnessing the emergence of the New Left in 1957 and, within only a few years, some of its largest public demonstrations. Young women became new political actors in the postwar period, their enfranchisement commonly represented as a break from and a bulwark against "male" wartime violence. Chapter two traces the processes by which Kanba Michiko became an icon of New Left sacrifice and the fragility of postwar democracy. It introduces Kanba's own writings to underscore the ironic discrepancy between her public significance as a "maiden sacrifice" and her personal relationship to radical politics. A phase of backlash (1960-1967) followed the explosive rise of Japan's New Left. Chapter three introduces some key tabloid debates that suggested female presence in social institutions such as universities held the potential to "ruin the nation." The powerful influence of these frequently sarcastic but damaging debates, echoed in government policies re-linking young women to domestic labor, confirmed mass media's importance in interpreting the social role of the female student. Although the student movement imagined itself as immune to the logic of the state and the mass media, the practices of the late-1960s campus-based student movement, examined in chapter four, illustrate how larger societal assumptions about gender roles undergirded the gendered hierarchy of labor that emerged in the barricades. The final phase (1969-1972) of the student New Left was dominated by two imaginary rather than real female figures, and is best emblematized by the notion of "Gewalt." I use the German term for violence, Gewalt, because of its peculiar resonances within the student movement of the late 1960s. Japanese students employed a transliteration--gebaruto--to distinguish their "counter-violence" from the violence employed by the state. However, the mass media soon picked up on the term and reversed its polarities in order to disparage the students' actions. It was in this late-1960s moment that women, once considered particularly vulnerable to violence, became deeply associated with active incitement to violence. I explore this dynamic, and the New Left's culture of masculinity, in chapters five and six.

In its Constitution, postcolonial India acknowledges the caste-based practice of "untouchability" as a social and historical wrong, and seeks to redress the effects of this wrong through compensatory discrimination. Dalits are recognized by the state as having suffered the effects of untouchability, and thus as eligible for statutory protections and remedial measures, on the condition that they profess no religion "different from the Hindu religion" (a condition later expanded to include Sikhism and Buddhism as well). The present work charts the career of the idea underlying this condition of recognition - the idea that the "untouchable," insofar as she has not converted to Islam, Christianity, or another "world religion," must be Hindu - and its consequences, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Historically and ethnographically grounded in the community life of the sanitation labor castes - those Dalits castes that perform the vast majority of South Asia's sanitation work - in the north Indian city of Lucknow, the study tracks the idea from its ruptive colonial beginnings to its propagation by Hindu nationalists, induction into mainstream nationalism and installation in the edifice of postcolonial law. This is also an account of the everyday effects of postcolonial India's regime of recognition in the present: what it confers, what it transforms, what hides in its shadows.

Representing the first comprehensive study of Tibetan medical institutions, this dissertation argues that medicine played a crucial role in the development of Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), while Tibetan Buddhism played a vital role in the governance of the northern and western borderlands of the Qing Empire. During the same period remembered today for the rise of science along mercantile-colonialist sea routes, an inland network of Tibetan Buddhist monastic medical colleges (gso rig or sman pa grwa tshang) proliferated in tandem with the expansion of the Qing Empire over Inner Asia. My study examines these developments from a regional rather than an anachronistic nation-state perspective, historicizing both the "Tibetan" medical system and its community of practitioners within the context of Qing imperial expansion and decline. Combining the approaches of intellectual and institutional history, I argue that the medical colleges of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries bridged the realms of ritual and materiality that we understand as separate today, providing a key site for the display of benevolent governance, and serving as a vital forum for intellectual and material exchange between the Qing court and peoples of the Tibetan Buddhist frontiers. The "monastic guidelines" (bca' yig) of Tibetan medical colleges provide a window into these institutions' ritual and medical curricula, as well as debates over medical orthodoxy that took place within and between them. Historical narratives within monastic guidelines served as frameworks of legitimacy and templates for ritual practice, and the boundaries of medicine as a discipline were negotiated through the selective incorporation of various medical lineages and traditions. I explore the relationship between ritual debates, doctrinal debates, and ideas about how to both encourage and circumscribe experience within the monastic guidelines of medical colleges. One of the major issues at stake was the relationship between innovation and revelation, as physicians could claim a special insight into the experience of their predecessors in a medical lineage. While innovation was necessary for expertise in healing, revelation was potentially dangerous to the state. Such medical debates give us insight into ideas about the relationship between social and epistemic order taught within Tibetan Buddhist institutions as they spread within the Qing Empire. With the advent of new ways of defining territorial and disciplinary boundaries in the early twentieth century, ritual technologies for defining social and epistemic order were replaced by new institutional structures. I consider why the greater circulation of medical knowledge within the Qing Empire was followed by a fragmentation of medical nationalisms. While Han Chinese nationalists embraced the culture of science as a defensive strategy against Western powers and as a political strategy to distance themselves from the Qing formation, Tibetan Buddhists did not seek such a radical break. Similar and connected medical reforms in Lhasa, Eastern Tibet, Mongolia, and Buryatia reveal the continuity of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge networks and early cooperation among their separate nationalist projects. In the broader context of the history of science, the example of Tibetan Buddhist medical institutions points to the centrality of early modern networks of knowledge in determining modern political configurations.

“Ordering Subjects” argues that the merchants of Marwar led efforts to demarcate a new, exclusive community of elites, one that they conceptualized of as self-consciously ‘Hindu’ and forged through the application of state power. This early modern Hindu community defined itself in opposition not to the figure of the Muslim but to that of the ‘Untouchable,’ a category that included but was not limited to the Muslim. The early modern Hindu identity was thus deeply imagined in caste terms. This elite community organized around Krishna devotion, especially the Vallabh Sampraday, and demarcated itself through cultural markers such as the practice of vegetarianism, teetotalism, and austerity. Merchants, often joined by brāhmaṇs, waged their battles for the demarcation of this new community by petitioning the crown and by successfully deploying the control that they had gained in prior centuries over the state apparatus as bureaucrats. State power, consisting of its judicial, fiscal, recordkeeping, and surveillance mechanisms, played a central role in the implementation of laws and regulations, including spatial, economic, social, and ritual segregation, enforced vegetarianism, and the moral policing of elite subjects’ lives. Most of these petitions and state responses were legitimized with reference to ethics, marking a departure from the until-then prevalent emphasis on custom as the basis for legislating society. “Ordering Subjects” suggests that this marked a shift towards a more universal law and that the turn to ethical principles made possible the disregard for the force of custom that these departures marked. Further, the dissertation demonstrates that these processes enabled the ascendance of a mercantile ethos as the preeminent cultural code of the region, displacing that of the warrior and modifying that of the brāhmaṇ. Lastly, it shows the extent to which the state in eighteenth century Marwar had penetrated society and was capable of intervening in it using surveillance and judicial methods. The dissertation challenges the current scholarly framing of the debate over the existence of religious identities in pre-colonial South Asia, suggesting that it casts modern, binary (‘Hindu-Muslim’) conceptions of religion, as distinct from politics, upon pre-modern history. Instead, “Ordering Subjects” points to the role of caste, as a field of politics, in determining the contours and imagination of early modern Hindu identity. It offers a political and social history of Krishna devotion, extending scholarship on this field beyond the focus on its literary, theological, and cultural aspects that currently dominate the field. In tracing the local effects of the global processes of economic circulation and integration that characterized early modernity upon social and political life of a landlocked kingdom, the dissertation offers a perspective upon the history of early modern South Asia as it unfolded away from, but in connection with, the ports and court cities of the region.

Language of the Snakes is a biography of Prakrit, one of premodern India’s most important and most neglected literary languages. Prakrit was the language of a literary tradition that flourished roughly from the 1st to the 12th century. During this period, it served as a counterpart to Sanskrit, the preeminent language of literature and learning in India. Together, Sanskrit and Prakrit were the foundation for an enduring “language order” that governed the way that people thought of and used language. Language of the Snakes traces the history of this language order through the historical articulations of Prakrit, which are set out here for the first time: its invention and cultivation among the royal courts of central India around the 1st century, its representation in classical Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, the ways it is made into an object of systematic knowledge, and ultimately its displacement from the language practices of literature. Prakrit is shown to have played a critical role in the establishment of the cultural-political formation now called the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” as shown through a genealogy of its two key practices, courtly literature (kāvya-) and royal eulogy (praśasti-). It played a similarly critical role in the emergence of vernacular textuality, as it provided a model for language practices that diverged from Sanskrit but nevertheless possessed an identity and regularity of their own. Language of the Snakes thus offers a cultural history of Prakrit in contrast to the natural-history framework of previous studies of the language. It uses Prakrit to formulate a theory of literary language as embedded in an ordered set of cultural practices rather than by contrast to spoken language.

Following several successful military expeditions against the Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Manchu rulers of Qing China (1644-1911) met an unprecedented challenge as they incorporated culturally different subjects into their growing empire. After doubling in territory and tripling in population, how did the multicultural Qing operate? How did the new imperial subjects receive and reinterpret Qing state policies? What have been the ramifications of the eighteenth-century political innovations in modern China? In this dissertation, I address these questions by examining the encounters of the expanding Qing empire with Tibetans and Mongols in Inner Asia. Central to the analysis is Tibetan Buddhism, to which Mongols and Tibetans have adhered for centuries. Recent decades have seen a growing volume of research attending to Tibetan Buddhism within the context of the Qing’s imperial policies, but key questions still remain with regards to the perspective of these Inner Asian communities and the reasons for their participation in the imperial enterprise. The inadequate understanding of the Qing’s interaction with Tibetan Buddhism is predicated upon the assumption that Qing emperors propitiated the belligerent Mongols by patronizing their religion. While this premise acknowledges Tibetan Buddhism’s importance in the Qing’s imperial formation, it simultaneously deprives those practicing the religion of agency. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how the empire was ruled from the viewpoint of the governed. The project draws evidence from Tibetan-language biographies and monastic chronicles, letters in the Mongolian language, as well as local gazetteers, artisanal manuals, and court statutes in Chinese and Manchu, the two official languages in the Qing era. These textual sources are supplemented by Tibetan Buddhist artifacts housed in museums and libraries in North America and Asia. Through an examination of the wide array of source materials, I argue that the Qing imperial rulers capitalized on the religious culture of Inner Asian communities, which in turn gave rise to a transnational religious network that was centered on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology. The religious knowledge system remained strong well past the formative eighteenth century. Its enduring impact on Qing political and social history was felt even as the empire worked towards creating a distinctive cosmopolitan Qing culture. The dissertation consists of four chapters, each of which locates a space within the context of the symbiotic growth of the Qing and the Tibetan Buddhist knowledge network. This dissertation revolves around Tibetan Buddhist scholars, institutions, rituals, and objects, as they traveled from Tibet to Qing China’s capital and eastern Mongolia, and finally entered the literary realm of intellectuals in eighteenth-century China. Chapter One brings into focus Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation—a dynamic practice that redefined the institutional genealogy of individual prestige—as the Qing imperial power increased its contact with Inner Asian communities from the 1720s in the strategic border region of Amdo between Tibet and Qing China. I discuss how local hereditary headmen refashioned themselves into religious leaders whose enduring influence could transcend even death so as to preserve their prestige. Yet, their impact reached beyond the imperial margin. Chapter Two traces the role of these religious leaders in transforming an imperial private space into the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Qing’s imperial capital. This monastery—Beijing’s Lama Temple (Yonghegong 雍和宮)—not only became a site that manifested Qing imperial devotion to Tibetan Buddhism, but also served as an institutional outpost for the increasingly transnational Tibetan Buddhist network to the east. The Lama Temple was not the only outpost of the growing religious network, and Chapter Three explores another major nodal point within this network at a contact zone in southern Mongolia. It was here that two massive Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were constructed, owing to the mutual efforts undertaken by the imperial household and Tibetan Buddhists from Inner Asia. The final chapter returns to the imperial center but shifts its focus to a discursive space formed by Tibetan Buddhist laity who also occupied official posts in the imperial court. Two Manchu princes and one Mongolian Buddhist composed or were commissioned to compile texts in multiple languages on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology. Their writings reveal the fluidity and extent of the religious network, as well as its symbiotic growth with the imperial enterprise as the Qing empire took shape territorially and culturally. This dissertation concludes by addressing the nature of the Qing’s governance and that of the transnational power of the Tibetan Buddhist network, and it aims to deconstruct the dominant discourse associated with imperial policies in the Inner Asian frontier. My findings offer insight into how Tibetan Buddhism had a lasting impact on the Qing’s imperial imagination, during and after the formative eighteenth century.

This dissertation sheds new light on the Purātan Janamsākhī, the earliest available account on the founder and most important figure of the Sikh tradition – Gurū Nānak (d. 1539 CE). Scholarship on Gurū Nānak has largely dismissed the significance of this text and has overlooked the fact that, after its composition in 1588 CE, the Purātan Janamsākhī remained the most widely circulated account of Gurū Nānak’s life for two centuries. This thesis engages with the manuscripts and studies of the text to provide a life-history of the Purātan Janamsākhī, and, in arguing for a reclamation of this account, takes on a close reading of the Purātan Janamsākhī to identify how, within decades of his death, followers of Gurū Nānak remembered his life and message. This thesis situates the Purātan Janamsākhī within its historical context and compares it with some of its closest North Indian contemporaries, including other janamsākhīs composed on the life of Gurū Nānak and hagiographical writings written about religious figures from different North Indian communities. Our comparative approach allows us to identify some basic commonalities in hagiographical writing and glean aspects that distinguish the Purātan Janamsākhī from its counterparts, including Gurū Nānak’s unique interest in political critique and building a new community. This thesis, therefore, contributes significantly to our understandings of identity and community formation, to studies on hagiographical writing, and to our foundational understandings of Sikh history.

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the cultural formations of moral and political community among Tamils displaced and dispersed by three decades of war and political violence in Sri Lanka. Drawing on twenty months of field research among Tamils living in Toronto, Canada and Tamil Nadu, India, I inquire into the histories, discourses, and practices of diasporic activism at the end of war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tamils abroad were mobilized to protest the war, culminating in months of spectacular mass demonstrations in metropolitan cities around the world. Participant-observation among activists and their families in diaspora neighborhoods and refugee camps, and their public events and actions, as well as semi-structured interviews, media analysis and archival work, reveal how “diaspora” has become a capacious site of political becoming for the identification and mobilization of Tamils within, across, and beyond-nation states and their borders. Part One of this study considers how migration and militancy have historically transformed Tamil society, giving rise to a diasporic politics with competing ethical obligations for Tamils living outside Sri Lanka. Chapters One and Two describe and analyze how distinct trajectories of migration and settlement led to diverse forms of social and political action among diaspora Tamils during Sri Lanka’s 2002 ceasefire and peace process. Chapter Three turns to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka to contrast narratives about the emergence of Tamil politics, nationalism and militancy with diaspora narratives developed through life history interviews with activists. Taken together, these chapters provide a layered social and historical context for the ethnography of Tamil diaspora life and activism. Part Two of the dissertation ethnographically explores how and why Tamils in Canada and India protested the recent war, soliciting their states, national and transnational publics, and each other to “take immediate action” on behalf of suffering civilians. Chapter Four examines diaspora community formation and activism in Toronto, a city with the largest population of Sri Lankan Tamils outside Asia, in the wake of Canada’s ban on the LTTE. Chapter Five turns to refugee camps in Tamil Nadu, India, to discuss how camp life shaped refugee politics and activism, while Chapter Six follows the narratives of two migrants waiting and preparing to migrate from India to the West. Chapter Seven examines how Tamil activists in Toronto and Tamil Nadu publicly invoked, represented, and performed suffering to mobilize action against the war. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the modes of Tamil migration, asylum-seeking, and diaspora activism that emerged in response to the war’s end and its aftermaths. In their actions of protest and dissent, I argue that Tamils from Sri Lanka create new modes of belonging and citizenship out of transnational lives forged from wartime migration and resettlement in multicultural and pluralist states. A political subject of “Tamil diaspora” has thus emerged, and continues to shape Sri Lanka’s post-war futures. This ethnography contributes to scholarly debates on violence, subjectivity and agency; the nation-state and citizenship; and the politics of human rights and humanitarianism at the intersections of diaspora, refugee and South Asian studies.

This dissertation tracks the effects of state recognition across a series of vanishing and emerging social worlds in post-Fukushima Japan. Based upon two years of fieldwork, the dissertation focuses on ethnographic sites at which the failure of state subjectivization activates both a reinvigoration of state discourse, and the formation of counter-discourses within the temporality of Japan’s endless “postwar” (sengo). In so doing, the dissertation seeks to disclose the social violence and iteration of shame as it is mobilized by the state to produce an obedient subject – willing to die for the nation in war – and as the failure to conform precipitates alternate socialities that may be either opposed to or complicit with state interests. The ethnographic sites of which I write concentrate on: the compulsory enactment of propriety in public school ceremonies, and the refusal by teachers to stand for, bow to the “national flag” (kokki), and sing the “national anthem” (kokka), the self-same imperial symbols under which Japan conducted World War II; a group of Okinawan construction workers in the old day laborer district of Tokyo, Sanya; the stigmatized “radical” (kageki) leftist student organization, the Zengakuren; the “internet right-wing” (netto uyoku) group, the Zaittokai, whose street protests are performed live before a camera; and “Fukushima,” where the charge of guilt has short-circuited memories of the Japanese state sacrificing its citizens during World War II. As a foil for the remaining ethnographic sites, the obviousness of giving “respect” (sonchō) to state symbols in public school ceremonies discloses the formation of subjects in a constitutive misrecognition that eliminates – or kills – difference in the enactment of social totality. A veritable stain on which the Japanese state drive to war was dependent, the singular figure of the sitting teacher formed part and parcel of what rightist politicians referred to as the “negative legacy” (fu no rekishi) of World War II. S/he constituted the object of an overcoming that – alongside the Okinawan construction worker, the “radical” (kageki) leftist, the “resident foreigner” (zainichi) as object of Zaittokai hate speech, and “Fukushima” – at once marked the ground of intensification and failure of state discourse. For the graduation ceremony of March, 2012, the official number of teachers who refused to stand and sing fell to “1” in Tokyo, where the state employs 63,000 teachers. With neither family ties, romantic involvements, nor social recognition that would confirm their masculinity, the vanishing day laborers of Sanya made all the more insistent reference to the trope of otoko or ‘man.’ Closely articulated with the mobster world of the yakuza with which many workers had connections, the repetition of masculinity in work, gambling, and fighting constituted a discourse that repulsed the shaming gaze of general society. Thus, the excessive life-style of the otoko was located at the constitutive margins of the social bond of propriety, where he also provided a dying reserve army of labor that could be mobilized to undertake the most undesirable tasks, such as work at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Echoing the death of Sanya, the Zengakuren numbered in the tens of thousands in the 1960s and 1970s, but had dwindled to under 100 active members in 2012. While the anti-war “strike” (sutoraiki) constituted the apotheosis of the Zengakuren discourse, their espousal and shameless mandate of “violent” (bōryoku) revolution subverted the origins of the Zengakuren into a prohibitive discourse which replicated the form of state rhetoric, and demanded the eradication of the Stalinist from within their own ranks. No less shameless than the Zengakuren, the emergent hate speech of the “internet right-wing” (netto uyoku) iterated state discourse among the working poor. Having grown from 500 to 10,000 members within only four years, the Zaittokai’s notorious hate speech aspired to the instantaneous effect of “killing” (korosu) another legacy of World War II: the “resident foreigner” (zainichi). Yet, replicating online forms of writing, the iterability of their performative triggered repetition, and in a shamelessness specific to cyberspace – in which the reciprocity of the gaze and shame were lacking – the Zaittokai directed their paranoid speech at the state, whose representatives were said to be controlled by zainichi. Lastly, “Fukushima” marked the apogee of the effectivity and failures of the state in containing both the excesses of capitalism, and the “negative legacy” (fu no rekishi) of World War II, the memories of which were short-circuited by radioactive outpour.

My dissertation explores the formative stages of European interest in, engagement with and consumption of Indian pictorial art over a period of one hundred and fifty years, from the mid-16th century up to the early 18th century. During this period, European cabinets of curiosities witnessed the arrival of increasing numbers of a previously unknown class of collectible: Indian paintings on paper. Interest in these paintings was spurred by a growing curiosity about the East, combined with a general re-orientation of the European system of knowledge towards a more “scientific” methodology of inquiry, which encouraged a revision of the stereotypes that had informed medieval European conceptions of India through engagement with original sources. The relevance of this phenomenon to the history of early modern exchanges between India and Europe can hardly be overstated. Yet, modern scholarship has tended to ignore it, focusing instead on the Indian fascination with and reception of European artistic forms and techniques. This dissertation seeks to develop a more exhaustive picture of the early modern artistic encounter between India and the West, one in which European consumption of Indian paintings is dutifully represented and India plays an active role in the emerging system of knowledge. The starting and central point of my investigation consists of the vast and diversified collection of Indian paintings gathered by a Venetian traveler to India, Niccolò Manucci (1638-ca. 1720), as a visual accompaniment to his travel account, the so-called Storia do Mogor. This collection, which has remained largely ignored, makes a crucial case-study for approaching issues relative to the nature of European interest in Indian paintings in early modernity, the contexts and modalities through which this interest was articulated, as well as its relevance to processes of knowledge making and identity construction that were prompted by European encounters with alterities. The first part of my study provides an in-depth analysis of Manucci’s collection performed through a careful examination of the paintings it comprises along with contemporary textual sources, including the original manuscripts of the Storia do Mogor. My analysis exposes the interrelatedness of Manucci’s collecting enterprise with his authorial project, as well as assessing its broader scope and intended aims. The second part of the dissertation situates this collecting enterprise within its broader historical context by examining other European collections of Indian paintings dating from the 16th and 17th centuries and characterized by comparable subject matter: portraits of historical and living personages associated with Indo-Muslim dynasties, depictions of native Indian peoples and socio-religious customs, and representations of deities of the Hindu pantheon. Besides delving into the specifics of these collections, I explore their dialogic relation to one another and to descriptive practices and interpretative discourses that gained shape in European travel writing and print culture. In doing so, I highlight their participation in broader cultural trends and their contribution to evolving European approaches towards the Orient. This corpus of largely neglected works offers precious insights into the complex dynamics of cross-cultural encounter, as well as exposing the pivotal role played by early modernity in shaping later trends in Indo-European artistic interactions. Offering a direct antecedent to “Company painting,” a 19th-century Indian pictorial genre for European consumption, these works call for a revision of traditional understandings of the latter as an artistic development prompted by the rise of British colonial interests and agendas, and invite a broader reassessment of a unique historical era – the early modern one – that is key to understanding the roots of institutionalized Orientalism.