Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India by Stuart BlackburnReview by: Bernard BateThe Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov., 2004), pp. 1163-1165Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4133253 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTH ASIA 1163

to local government elections, but presents a jaundiced view of its impacts (p. 168). This view is not shared by most independent observers who see this initiative as one of the most far reaching of all political changes brought about by Musharraf's regime.

Chapter 8, by Tariq Rahman, glumly describes the shattered landscape of education in Pakistan, where the very poor have access only to free-of-cost religious mosque schools, the elite are educated in expensive English-language schools, and a sizeable part of the population has access to Urdu-medium state-run schools. Although informative, the article is littered with extraneous information and some pomposity- the author quotes himself eight times (pp. 172, 175, 184-85, 187) but fails to refer to such state-of-the-art work as Jamal Malik's brilliant and incisive analysis of Pakistan's religious schools (Colonialization of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan [New Delhi: Manohar; Lahore: Vanguard, 19961). The section on universities omits the considerable academic achievements of state-run engineering and medical schools.

Chapter 9 is the joker in the pack-Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and Richard H. Meadow's piece on archaeological research in Pakistan has no link to the common theme of Pakistan's sociopolitical present and future. Nevertheless, it is the only comprehensive article which provides an American overview of what is happening in Pakistani archaeology today. The tailpiece chronology, compiled by Scott Kofmehl, is a time line of recent events which convincingly shows that General Musharraf was

already moving to contain terrorist activity before the 9/11 disaster (p. 230). Despite some formatting, grammatical, and typographical errors and the patchy

nature of some of its contributions, this book is adequately indexed and may function as a primer for political scientists and development planners unfamiliar with the current state of affairs in Pakistan.

ADAM NAYYAR

National Institute of Folk Heritage, Pakistan

Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India. By STUART BLACKBURN. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. vii, 247 pp. Rs 550/$42.95 (cloth).

Stuart Blackburn's fine new book offers a cultural history of Tamil print and a

prehistory of Tamil nationalism, and foregrounds the centrality of folklore to both. The book demonstrates how changing notions of communicative practice always lie at the heart of transformations in culture and politics-far more so than most will

recognize. It is also a richly peopled narrative of missionaries, pundits, literary scholars, language reformers, and to some extent nationalists, covering a range from the very first book printed in a non-Roman metallic type (the Tamil catechism Doctrina Christam, Tampiran Vanakkam, published in Goa in 1577) to the late nineteenth

century and the beginnings of Tamil nationalism. The book's six chapters, including a theoretical and orienting introduction and a

synthesizing conclusion, might be divided into two halves. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a cultural history-and biography-of print and printers from the 1550s to the 1850s.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal more specifically with folklore, its development, and its

relationship to the production of Tamil nationalism, ending in the 1880s or so. In the first part, Blackburn outlines the beginning of printing in Tamil first by

Jesuit and later by Lutheran missionaries. During this period, South Asian languages

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1164 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

were utterly transformed in a number of respects. Missionaries created the first

interlingual dictionaries and grammars, they began to make translations of texts from one language to another, scripts were rationalized and systematized to allow for

printing and easier reading, and finally several key Jesuit figures almost single- handedly created Tamil discursive prose. By 1800 the centers of literary activity moved to Madras from earlier royal and missionary centers. In this larger metropolis, pundits, munshis, and others, groups of whom had been involved in printing since the sixteenth century, became publishers in their own right. Not coincidentally, such

printers provided the means for the publication and propagation of an antimissionary campaign in the 1840s, involving perhaps the Tamil land's first "public" gatherings and protests. In general, the first part of Blackburn's book neatly demonstrates how Tamil, like other south Asian languages, became an object of new kinds of knowledge production and a focus for new kinds of social organization and political mobilization.

In the second part of the book, Blackburn shifts focus to the printing of folklore and its role in the beginnings of Tamil nationalism. Strikingly, folklore anthologies dominated early nineteenth-century publications by and for both Tamil and European audiences. Like other elements of the nationalist project described by Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 19931), folklore was a part of the reformulation of "tradition" for a new Indian culture. But contrary to Chatterjee's famous paradigm, Blackburn argues, folklore was not confined to the domestic sphere. Rather, it was

published, made public and exterior, where it came under a new kind of scrutiny and

inspired a new kind of ambivalence. On the one hand, it was the expression of "the vernacular mind," of the vanishing village, and of the loss of a precolonial culture. On the other hand, it represented backwardness, primitiveness, anathema to the modernist production of the nation. In the end, whereas folklore was used to great effect in the nationalist projects of Finland, Scotland, Germany, and so on, Tamil folklore was trumped by Tamil literature, which could be deployed as a sign of the

greatness and antiquity of Dravidian civilization not only in opposition to Europeans but to Sanskritic Brahmanism as well.

Throughout the account, Blackburn foregrounds print not as an autonomous

technology that brings with it its own logic, but as a practice mediated by the sociocultural contexts of its production. Print in the Tamil country tended to bridge the oral and written channels just as writing practices had always been highly interactive with orality in Tamil letters. As far as we know, for some two thousand

years, there was never a "primary oral culture" in Tamil that was not interacting with

writing. One of the first books published by Tamils outside missionary control, the Pancatantra, a collection of folk tales, contained stories first written down in 200 CE. Likewise, stories that Blackburn collected in the 1990s were read in collections first

printed in the nineteenth century (p. 188). Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India should enjoy a wide

readership in courses on the cultural history of print, communication, and politics. It breaks new ground in many respects as it covers a period that ends precisely when the history of Tamil nationalism usually begins (ca. 1880). It is also, not incidentally, elegantly structured and engaging: Blackburn does a splendid job of telling the stories of key figures in the transformation and publication of Tamil, grounding his history in serial biography, as it were. The book is specific enough to satisfy the area specialist, and its theoretical sophistication makes it appropriate for those working generally on

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BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTH ASIA 1165

the centrality of communicative practice and ideology to the formation of contem-

porary social movements. BERNARD BATE

Yale University

Nuclear Stability in Southern Asia. Edited by P. R. CHARI, SONIKA GUPTA, and ARPIT RAJAIN. New Delhi: Manohar, 2003. 221 pp. Rs 450 (cloth).

Nuclear Stability in Southern Asia is a collection of papers that were part of an Indo-German collaborative conference sponsored by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in New Delhi in 2002. New Delhi's

strategic and diplomatic community actively participated in this event inaugurated by Ashley J. Tellis, who at the time was special advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to India.

Two of the editors, Sonika Gupta and Arpit Rajain, rightly claim that China, India, and Pakistan have adopted different political approaches to arms control and nuclear disarmament (p. 9). The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998 have altered the strategic landscape in Asia, and there is an urgent need for India, Pakistan, and China to stabilize their relationship. The domestic dynamics of these three countries are different, as India is a democracy, a military dictator rules Pakistan, and China is controlled by the Communists. These varying regimes make establishing an arrangement for command and control over the nuclear holdings a difficult and

complex task, which is evident in the interview with India's General V. P. Malik (p. 155). The conference and text would have benefited from the inclusion of some key members from the Chinese and Pakistani security community.

The book contains eight papers written mainly from an Indian perspective and an interview with the former general of India's Armed Forces. The long and valuable

appendix is a compilation of some of the key post-1998 official documents, including the paper presented in India's Parliament on the evolution of India's nuclear policy (p. 167) and the Lahore Declaration (p.199).

Jasjit Singh, in chapter 3, suggests that the key players in the region are not India, Pakistan, and China; rather, the significant actors are the United States, China, and India. Pakistan, Russia, and the European Union are secondary actors in southern Asia. The view that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is India-centric and that there is a need for a U.S.-China-India nuclear equation is not new: several scholars have made similar arguments recently.

Also, in chapter 3, Rajen Harshe rightly points out that future prospects for peace and stability in South Asia depend on confidence- and security-building measures

among India, Pakistan, and China. Not only is Kashmir going to pose a major challenge in this direction but so too will Pakistan and China's strategic alliance. India's foreign policy, as well as strategic thinking, has long relied on a measured

pragmatism rather than on realism. As a result, India was unable to have an active nuclear program. Rajesh M. Basrur, in chapter 5, points out that nuclear stability cannot be maintained by nuclear minimalism. Based on cold war experience, he argues that the nuclear operational dynamics need to be factored into the policy of minimum deterrence.

The problem with the concept of minimum deterrence is that it cannot ensure disarmament in the context of India-Pakistan nuclear relations. Actually, it will exacerbate the arms race, proven by the numerous explosions in South Asia in 1998.

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