[REVIEWS] Two Books on Indic Cultures
Apr. 12th, 2003 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe Indian Minority of Zambia, Rhodesia, and Malawi, written by Floyd Dotson and Lillian O. Dotson (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968), tells the story of the Indian minority implanted in central Africa under British rule. The story of the Indians' implantation in central Africa is fascinating. Like their counterparts in South and East Africa, the Indians were attracted in the early 20th century to what was then the Rhodesias and Nyasaland by the opportunity to make money in the retail business. A sort of ethnic succession took place: the Indians (together with Greeks in southern Rhodesia, separately elsewhere) replaced Jews by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, and Jews had earlier replaced Scots. The Indian minority was a classical middleman minority, and like almost all middlemen minorities Indians in central Africa were persecuted, with established Indians suffering from laws which limited their political and economic opportunities and further immigration prohibited by white-dominated colonial legislatures as soon as they gained governing authority from London.
The central theme of this book is the Indian minority's fragmentation: numbering barely twenty thousand people at the time of the book's writing, virtually the only trait that the ancestors had in common was their shared origin in Gujarat, particularly in a coastal strip of Gujarat between Ahmedabad and Bombay. In every other respect, they were divided: Malawian Indians tended to be Muslim while their counterparts in modern Zimbabwe and Zambia tended to be Hindu, caste divisions were always present to some informal degree, and sectarian divisions were present. These divisions were critical in limiting the Indian minority's future chances for survival. South Africa's Indian community, now numbering more than a million people and probably the second-largest community in KwaZulu-Natal, was large enough to handle internal diversity, perhaps even needing sectarian and caste and ethnic divisions to thrive, but the central African Indian community was too small to handle these. The Dotsons ended their work by concluding that the community's fate was limited; they saw emigration (to India, to Britian, or to the former British dominions) as far more probable than assimilation into a hostile environment.
Thomas A. Reuter's Custodians of the Sacred Mountains: Culture and Society in the Highlands of Bali. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002) describes Bali, which is perhaps the only area of Indic civilization and Hindu religion outside of South Asia that does not owe its existence to the 19th and 20th century Indian diasporas. Balinese Hinduism can trace its roots back centuries, to the reign of the Mahapajits in the Indonesian archipelago in the 14th century if not earlier to the Indian traders and pilgrims who were active throughout Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Common Era. Bali has, in the Orientalist perspective, traditionally been seen as a sort of last Hindu outpost in the middle of a menacing Muslim sea, but even after Java and the Lesser Sundas were Islamized the cultural distance was never been so vast as that. Regardless of the religions one population or another claimed to profess, all shared in a broadly similar culture that varied as much because of region or ethnicity as nominal religion.
Reuter describes the fascinating trajectory of Balinese Hinduism, which as he so ably describes has been placed under greater pressure to conform to norms of Indian Hinduism. This tendency to Indianize Balinese Hinduism has come in part from Bali's forced integration into the Netherlands East Indies; Bali's Dutch colonizers and many of their supporters looked at Bali and saw a fallen Hindu culture needing to be brought back up to Indian standards. The importance of Bali's own religious reformers, however, who wanted to establish a rationalized Balinese Hinduism looking back to a mythical golden age of Balinese Hinduism also cannot be underestimated, just like the pressure placed on Balinese Hinduism by Indonesia's pancasila policies (requiring at least a nominal monotheism on the part of all religions/ideologies) and the attempts of Balinese to make Hinduism their defining ethnic trait (a failure, since as many Indonesians outside Bali as inside are registered as Hindus). There are also interesting case studies exploring the new mobility of families and entire communities within the Balinese caste system, and the influence of the Hare Krishna and Sai Baba movements on Bali. Reuter's book is a fascinating exploration of just what it means to be Hindu in 21st century Bali
The central theme of this book is the Indian minority's fragmentation: numbering barely twenty thousand people at the time of the book's writing, virtually the only trait that the ancestors had in common was their shared origin in Gujarat, particularly in a coastal strip of Gujarat between Ahmedabad and Bombay. In every other respect, they were divided: Malawian Indians tended to be Muslim while their counterparts in modern Zimbabwe and Zambia tended to be Hindu, caste divisions were always present to some informal degree, and sectarian divisions were present. These divisions were critical in limiting the Indian minority's future chances for survival. South Africa's Indian community, now numbering more than a million people and probably the second-largest community in KwaZulu-Natal, was large enough to handle internal diversity, perhaps even needing sectarian and caste and ethnic divisions to thrive, but the central African Indian community was too small to handle these. The Dotsons ended their work by concluding that the community's fate was limited; they saw emigration (to India, to Britian, or to the former British dominions) as far more probable than assimilation into a hostile environment.
Thomas A. Reuter's Custodians of the Sacred Mountains: Culture and Society in the Highlands of Bali. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002) describes Bali, which is perhaps the only area of Indic civilization and Hindu religion outside of South Asia that does not owe its existence to the 19th and 20th century Indian diasporas. Balinese Hinduism can trace its roots back centuries, to the reign of the Mahapajits in the Indonesian archipelago in the 14th century if not earlier to the Indian traders and pilgrims who were active throughout Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Common Era. Bali has, in the Orientalist perspective, traditionally been seen as a sort of last Hindu outpost in the middle of a menacing Muslim sea, but even after Java and the Lesser Sundas were Islamized the cultural distance was never been so vast as that. Regardless of the religions one population or another claimed to profess, all shared in a broadly similar culture that varied as much because of region or ethnicity as nominal religion.
Reuter describes the fascinating trajectory of Balinese Hinduism, which as he so ably describes has been placed under greater pressure to conform to norms of Indian Hinduism. This tendency to Indianize Balinese Hinduism has come in part from Bali's forced integration into the Netherlands East Indies; Bali's Dutch colonizers and many of their supporters looked at Bali and saw a fallen Hindu culture needing to be brought back up to Indian standards. The importance of Bali's own religious reformers, however, who wanted to establish a rationalized Balinese Hinduism looking back to a mythical golden age of Balinese Hinduism also cannot be underestimated, just like the pressure placed on Balinese Hinduism by Indonesia's pancasila policies (requiring at least a nominal monotheism on the part of all religions/ideologies) and the attempts of Balinese to make Hinduism their defining ethnic trait (a failure, since as many Indonesians outside Bali as inside are registered as Hindus). There are also interesting case studies exploring the new mobility of families and entire communities within the Balinese caste system, and the influence of the Hare Krishna and Sai Baba movements on Bali. Reuter's book is a fascinating exploration of just what it means to be Hindu in 21st century Bali
