Modern Nepali Oral Transmissions of Vetālapañcaviṃśati Stories to Europe

This article presents three recitation versions of two tales from the famous Vetālapañcaviṃśati (VP; the “Twenty-Five Tales of an Animated Corpse”, a medieval Sanskrit anthology of riddle-tales) that made their way orally from South Asia to Europe. The original work is one of the rare Sanskrit texts to have been disseminated widely and over a long period of time. It is a work that has thrived in oral, manuscript and printed versions. The stories in question, recorded in Germany as retold by three Nepali prisoners of war during World War I, show how this pre-modern Indian textual tradition was received into modern vernaculars and recounted in modern settings. It documents the fluidity of texts as dependent on the reciter’s, scribe’s or publisher’s own outlook, as well as on differing times and circumstances. In addition to the text’s long history of transmission, colonialism and print capitalism were further factors that influenced the retelling of the VP.

Sindh Before Partition

This chapter examines the origins of Sindhi nationalism during the colonial period. To understand the construction of modern Sindhi identity, the author focuses on landmark developments of this period, such as the introduction of Sindhi as the language of administration, which precipitated the growth of print capitalism—a crucial factor in the emergence of nationalist consciousness in the province. The chapter also analyzes key British policies such as canal colonization and the settlement of Punjabis in Sindh, which provoked negative sentiments against the outsiders. It discusses the first political movement of Sindh, i.e., the demand for a separate Sindh province, which was realized in 1936, as well as the impact of pirs in the province’s politics and the shifting Hindu-Muslim relations. The chapter concludes by examining party politics inside and outside the electoral arena in the decade prior to partition in Sindh.

Print Capitalism

Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as in the colonies. Print capitalism and nationalism shared a similar relationship in the Indian subcontinent too that remained a British colony for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. Employing Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s novel, Mir’āt al-‘Urūs (1869), I argue that the introduction of print capitalism proved crucial to the rise of Muslim national consciousness and for Muslim women’s education to redefine their sociopolitical role in the new Muslim imagined community under British colonization. Print capitalism, via the possibility of mass-produced books like Mir’āt al-‘Urūs, transformed the Muslim national imagination by making Indian Muslims a community in anonymity. I offer this new reading of Mir’āt al-‘Urūs to trace the interaction of print capitalism, Muslim national consciousness, and new roles for Muslim women in colonial India.

Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee's Commonplace Book

This essay examines a handwritten refugee ballad in a handmade codex, using both to illuminate some of the lingering blind spots in national philology and world literature. The ballad, printed in full after the essay, belongs to the Karamanli Christians of Anatolia, who spoke Turkish but wrote it in the Greek alphabet. Uprooted from Turkey by the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923, Karamanli refugees were scattered across Greece and North America, where they were often excluded from publishing. Poets like the author of the present ballad, Agathangelos, turned instead to more accessible manuscript formats. I interpret Agathangelos's ballad and codex as a catalog, documenting and preserving his lost homeland, where multiple scriptworlds, languages, and confessions coexisted. I conclude by calling for a people’s history of the book to decentralize and democratize world literature’s political economy (tacitly accepted as print capitalism), foregrounding textual networks that have remained illegible to our discipline.

Market Segmentation and Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humor

Shirley Jackson’s essays in popular women’s magazines negotiate the gendered tensions and commercial contradictions of postwar print culture. This essay shows how the women in Jackson’s essays are figures of the fraught convergence of women’s public affiliation and the restrained politics of gender critique. These female figures are also representative of broader issues in US print culture after the Second World War. In particular, Jackson’s essays represent how a certain strain of feminist writing—sometimes known as “domestic humor”—was absorbed within the market forces of print capitalism. To explain this absorption, I draw on mid-century theories of market segmentation.

Macau martyr or Portuguese traitor? The Macanese communities of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai and the Portuguese nation

This article rethinks a Luso-Asian community that existing literature has termed ‘Portuguese’ or ‘Macanese’ by exploring the differences between the Macanese communities of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai. It examines inter-port debates between 1926 and 1929 that triggered wide discussion in Portuguese and English-language newspapers regarding the political loyalty of the Macanese. Set against the framework of a burgeoning print capitalism and vibrant associational culture in Asia’s port-cities, the article argues that varying urban circumstances and political structures influenced the negotiation of the Macanese between imperial, civic and colonial identities to eventually construct three new imagined communities.