Abstract This article examines the striking marginality of Lord Rama in Bengali-language folk songs and performance-based devotional repertoires, reading this absence not as a simple omission but as a culturally patterned silence shaped by regional aesthetics, vernacular religiosity, and historical power formations. Rather than presuming a uniform pan-Indian bhakti field, the article focuses on Hindu devotional song-worlds in Bengal—especially Vaishnava-inflected oral and performative contexts—where Krishna emerges as the dominant affective deity: intimate, plural, and theatrically adaptable. Rama, by contrast, appears as comparatively distant, associated with moral restraint and epic discipline that often resist the emotional grammar of folk performance. Drawing on folkloristics, performance theory, and critical approaches to discourse and cultural hegemony, the article argues that devotional absence can function as a mode of cultural agency: what is not sung may still carry ideological weight. Concepts such as devapolitik, mythopoetic dissonance, bhakti federalism, performative abstention, and scriptural decentring are deployed as interpretive tools to illuminate how regional devotional cultures selectively remember, transform, or sideline divine figures, thereby producing a distinctive devotional geography within Bengal’s plural religious landscape.
Abstract Drawing on English, Chinese, and Malay newspapers, this article examines the ‘oily man’, a figure who shifted between sexual assailant, ghost, and intruder across twentieth-century Singapore and urban and semi-urban peninsular Malaya/Malaysia. It situates him not as a timeless ‘Malay’ entity but as an elastic label and repertoire, assembled and reassembled through rumours, retellings, and recurring events. Departing from most studies of Malay-world monsters, which reduce such figures to allegories or cinematic symbols of gender, modernity, or social change, this article demonstrates how the oily man’s historical force lay in intrusions, panics, and community responses—events mediated, disputed, and reworked across time and place. His history is framed through three registers: experience, person, and myth, which trace how this elastic label took shape through encounter, attribution, and retelling. Experience captures sightings, rumours, and assaults that animated fear; person traces how individuals were accused or apprehended as oily men; myth designates the narratives and repertoires that amplified these encounters in film, fiction, and folklore. Across these registers, the article shows how monsters emerge through lived circulations of testimony, attribution, and storytelling. It highlights the value of historical research that privileges experience and offers a framework for future scholarship: monsters as unstable, context-specific composites of encounter, narrative, and transmission that illuminate the entanglements of state, society, culture, and religion in post-colonial Malaysia and Singapore, with resonance for the study of rumour and monstrosity elsewhere in Asia.
If music's place remains ideologically contested in the national cultural formation of post-colonial Pakistan, what are the terms, if any, by which the state engages with this art form? Answering this question, along with others, this article advances the term 'logic of managing culture' to explore the Pakistani state's relationship with music. Through contesting India-centric scholarship on music and cultural politics in the South Asian context and relying on an eclectic array of empirical evidence, I argue that the post-colonial state's engagement with music is marked by a set of priorities that entails a logic of managing music rather than reproducing it. This orchestration plays out at two major levels: the international, involving strategically projecting selected elements of Pakistan's musical-cultural identity internationally, and the national, relying on language (Urdu) and religion (Islam) for national integration, while bypassing the role of music. I suggest that this amounts to a logic of cultural management, wherein the state, through a set of cultural institutions, 'conducts' music and its practitioners while presupposing the ideologically contested place of this art form in the national cultural formation of Pakistan.
From late sixteenth century, Bijapur's sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580-1627 ce), used nauras-a polyvalent term used extensively within the Sanskrit aesthetic realm-on his kingdom's cultural artefacts as well as political and administrative insignia. An avid music lover, he is renowned for his Dakani work on music titled Kit & amacr;b-i Nauras (circa 1580s). Portrayed by previous scholars as religiously unorthodox, Ibrahim Adil II and nauras are located chiefly within narratives of Bijapur's political instability and the sultan's indulgence in leisure over statecraft. Recent scholarship has challenged such notions but no study focuses on the reasons for nauras' crossover to the political domain or its appearance on state insignia. This article offers new insights by locating the sultan within a matrix of Indic, Turco-Mongol, and Islamicate sovereignty practices. In doing so, it argues that Ibrahim Adil II strategically employed the corporeal, religious, aesthetic, and polyvalent dimensions of nauras to forge a uniquely personalized embodied cosmic kingship practice to govern a multicultural populace. In particular, this article elucidates that the realms of art, aesthetics, and kingship were not mutually exclusive in the Indic or Islamicate worlds and that nauras was a rational manoeuvre to elevate the ruler above courtly factions and religious differences.
This article examines three rare early twentieth-century Tibetan autobiographies composed by Karma Sumdhon Paul, Trin Chen, and Ph & uuml;ntsok Lungtok. They worked as mission teachers in the regions of Darjeeling and Kalimpong at a time when Protestant missionaries were barred from entering Tibet and were eagerly waiting for the forbidden city of Lhasa to be opened up to the Christian faith. All three men served as cultural and linguistic intermediaries, teaching Tibetan to missionaries as well as in mission schools, hereby contributing to the dissemination of Christianity among Tibetans. Their life writings constitute several of the earliest Tibetan-language sources which document, from a personal perspective, the experiences of working with Protestant missionaries, undergoing religious conversion, as well as individual transformations. Having established bases in the Himalayas, the Scandinavian Alliance Mission, the Tibetan Mission, and the Church of Scotland initiated education reform by establishing English-medium mission schools, studying Lhasa Tibetan, recruiting literate Lhasa Tibetan speakers, and translating texts to be printed in Lhasa Tibetan. These interactions embodied a unique modern character, emerging for the first time during the early twentieth century and stemming from the encounter between Protestant missionaries and Tibetans. The remarkable life stories recorded by Karma Sumdhon Paul, Trin Chen, and Ph & uuml;ntsok Lungtok present us with a rare Tibetan perspective into the historiography of Tibet and the West, a phenomenon predominantly shaped by written accounts authored by European missionaries, intellectuals, colonial officials, and travellers.
