published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

A Dissertation submitted to the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Political Science by research. Johannesburg, January 2016 / A Tale of Two Temples: An Exploration of Caste addresses the notion of caste in South Africa, specifically among the Gujarati community in Cape Town. Caste within this community has been discussed with regard to the Indian diaspora in general and Natal in South Africa, but there is not a vast amount of literature regarding this phenomenon among Indians in Cape Town. Through the description of a dispute between a caste-based organisation of mochis –those of a leatherworking and cobbler caste- and a non-caste-based organisation predominantly of agricultural patidars over control of the space of worship, the recreation, dynamics and interplay of the caste system are discussed. Louis Dumont’s influential synoptic theory of caste serves as the frame of reference when addressing the system. Dumont focuses on the idea of purity and hierarchy. The system includes four varnas or classes, which are positioned along a pure-to-impure hierarchy. In Cape Town, this hierarchy is not entirely recreated; all four varnas are not represented. Instead patidars or agriculturalists have claimed to be of high status, which is normally attributed to a Brahmin or clerical caste, and have asserted themselves as the reference group for other castes. They perceive the mochis to be of low caste. The mochis have not accepted this and through the influence of the Arya Samaj, they have recreated a new historical narrative classifying themselves as high caste. This new narrative and the empowerment of the mochis created a conflict that escalated as a result of apartheid’s Group Areas Act, which legally enforced racially segregated residential areas. This conflict provides insight into the recreation of caste in Cape Town. Keywords and Terms Cape Town, Caste, Diaspora, Dumont, Durban, Fiji, Gujarati, Indenture, Indian Diaspora, Johannesburg, Migration, South Africa, Trinidad / MT2016

This dissertation is about an anti-caste movement among Dalits (the oppressed as untouchable) in South India, the Parayar. Since the late 19th century, members of this caste, and a few others from Tamil-speaking areas, have been choosing to convert to Buddhism based on conscience and conviction. This phenomenon of religious conversion-social transformation is this study's focus. By combining archival research of Parayar's writings among Tamil Buddhists, as these Parayar, settled in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, are called, I have attempted to understand this movement ethno-historically. In pre-colonial times, though the sub-continent's societies were hierarchical, the hierarchies were fluid and varied: i.e., the high-low or self-other dichotomies were neither fixed nor based on a single principle. The most significant effect of the encounter of British Colonialism and India was to precipitate an unprecedented master-dichotomy of singular and absolute form of self and other, as colonizer and the colonized. This had three consequences. (a) India was itself seen as singular and served as the Self to the colonial Other in an absolute dichotomy; (b) the role of essentializing the Indian Self was assumed by the brahmin; (c) this in turn resulted in an internal dichotomy between the brahmin-essential self and the non-brahmin-non-essential other. The means chosen to fix this dichotomy was to nominate the non-essential other's paradigmatic representation, the Dalit. I intend to read against the grain of the binary logic that was inaugurated at the moment of the colonial encounter by means of Tamil Buddhists' oppositional, reconstructional, and representationaldiscursive practices.

This dissertation focuses on a seventeenth-century (so-called) Malwa manuscript that illustrates the story of Krishna, and the copy manuscripts that were produced after it. It explores how the story is transformed in its incarnations as the vernacular text inscribed on the manuscript, the cycle of illustrations depicting that text, and then the copies made from what appear to be the initial illustrations. The claim is that narrative variations which find their way into these different embodiments should almost never be considered "mistakes," even when an act of misunderstanding seems to be clearly implied. Rather they are moments when the artist's or author's engagement with contemporary sectarian concerns, literary trends, artistic strategies and popular culture is manifest. The first three chapters of the dissertation are devoted to an analysis of text, illustration and copy illustration respectively, while the fourth presents the broader context in which such Krishna manuscripts were circulating.The underlying objective is to re-evaluate the conventional narrative of North Indian illustrated manuscripts. This is cast as the teleology of court styles where political history is used to decide important and influential ateliers. Visually compelling and historically important illustrated manuscripts such as the ones I study, but whose patronizing court is undecided, are largely ignored. This dissertation showcases an alternative, interdisciplinary approach that undertakes thorough visual and textual analyses alongside an examination of the broader socio-religious trends that impacted artistic production. It advocates that every illustrated manuscript should be studied individually, rather than as just a member of a predetermined stylistic group.

The aim of this dissertation is to understand how worries over nature’s degradation, ensuing securitization practices, and emergent norms intersect in environmental protected areas. It concerns the Nilgiri Biosphere in Kerala, South India, and how regimes of nature protection effect the lives of its human inhabitants, the Kurumba, a so-called primitive adivasi tribe. Combining ethnography with archival research, it asserts that the labors and logics of nature protection, present and past, participate in a distinctly liberal problematic of competing securities, manifest in the tension between sovereign discretions and the freedoms of legal rights and market interests. This study makes two overarching claims. First, that during the colonial era, nature’s inessential character allowed for flexibilities in legal interpretation that furthered imperial ambitions. In the silence of the law, norms mediated by colonialist pejoratives operated to satisfy those ambitions, while supplementing the knowledge necessary for government. Second, analysis of recent environmental movements and ecological projects surrounding the Nilgiri Biosphere shows how norms derived from civil society are produced to intervene between security prerogatives and social freedoms. The upshot of these normative practices, I argue, is to depoliticize natures and agencies, while extending and intensifying security’s command of unruly natures. While ensuring lives lived in accordance to it, this normativity endangers those who fall short of or otherwise elude it. To understand this endangerment, I provide an interpretation of adivasi resistances and rejections, in particular the Kurumba turn to illicit cultivation of ganja in the Biosphere’s core area. I contextualize this turn within the history of forest-adivasi relations, recent adivasi actions elsewhere within the Nilgiri Biosphere, and the global discourses of indigenous peoples and the environment. I argue that by operating not through a putative politics of rights and interest, but through counter-conducts and illegalities, the Kurumba present a challenge to the political as such.

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.

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.

This thesis analyses the Tamil minority problem in Sri Lanka in the light of self-determination and state sovereignty. State practice with respect to self-determination is discussed, in particular cases of Aaland Island, Katanga, Biafra and Bangladesh. Historical background, location and composition, as it relates to the Tamil minority problem in the country, are described, and the specific issue of self-determination in the Sri Lankan context of secession is dealt with. The research attempts to ascertain the legal conditions which would warrant secession. / Master of Laws (Hons.)

Thesis--Agra University. / Bibliography: p. 408-432.

Thesis (D. Miss.)--Western Seminary, Portland, Or., 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-212).