In the recent past, non-government agencies in several parts of south India have been active in raising issues related to the landlessness of the Dalit communities. (In the early 1970s, a group of radical intellectuals for the first time employed the term ‘Dalit’ to convey the militancy on the part of certain social categories, who had been regarded as ‘untouchables’ and had been the victims of upper caste domination.) These organizations with the support of civil rights activists have placed demands for the release of bonded labourers, implementation of minimum and equal wages and for the basic rights of Dalit groups. In Tamil Nadu, the nongovernment agencies have emphasized the importance of investigating into the local land records, publicizing the ownership details and exposing the loopholes present in the land ceiling laws. However, such activities have failed to protect the Dalit communities from verbal insults and physical abuses. In course of little more than a decade, the upper caste groups in several districts of Tamil Nadu have been involved in reasserting their claims over the Panchama lands (lands which had been kept reserved for the ex ‘untouchable’ communities, who for several centuries had been denied the privileges of land ownership) which for centuries had been utilized by the ‘untouchable’ agricultural labouring groups for residential purposes. In most cases, with the active connivance of the police officials, they unleashed a reign of terror on the indigent Dalit communities.

The first imitated action of Prometheus Unbound shows its title character doing something very appropriate for a divinity said to have, “[given] man speech, and speech created thought,/Which is the measure of the Universe” (II.iv. 72–3). It shows an uncharacteristically forgetful Prometheus struggling toward the fully recalled (and reheard) words of a curse he knows himself to have once uttered. And then when Earth responds to her dismayed son's, “Were these my words, O Parent?” with a terse, “They were thine,” he disowns them:

In building toward this palinode, the opening of Prometheus Unbound introduces its protagonist as a responsible but baffled agent of the word. “Be it dim and dank and grey/…[or] Be it bright,” Prometheus wants to get straight just what he has breathed forth into the “atmosphere of human thought” (I. 676–80). But his words have gotten away from him.

Orientalist scholars with specialist knowledge about an essentialist Orient were pressed into service as Western ‘territorial acquisition in the Orient increased’ (Said 1978: 223). This was especially the case as Britain and France parcelled out Asiatic Turkey between themselves; Said listed David Hogarth among the key ‘experts’ who aided this process. Hogarth was an academic whose Classical interests drew him to the Eastern domains of the Ottoman Empire, as confirmed by the title of his travel narrative: A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896). He began his travels there in 1887 and as a specialist with interests in the ancient Hittites returned in 1890. Academic recognition came with the publication of Phillip and Alexander of Macedon in 1887, and in the same year Hogarth was appointed Director of the British School of Athens. Confirmation of his fame as an archaeologist came when he was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1905. His interest in the Arab lands developed in the early 1900s and he published his account of Western exploration of that region, The Penetration of Arabia, in 1904. But it wasn't until the summer of 1916, when he went to Jeddah as part of a British delegation to negotiate with Husayn Sherif of Mecca, that Hogarth actually set foot on the Arabian Peninsula. By this time he was director of the Cairo Arab Bureau ‘of intelligence and diplomatic officers…[set up] to organize Britain's role in the Arab Revolt’ (Mansfield 1992: 168).

Introduction

Nepal is a landlocked country of 23 million people with an area of 147,181 square kilometers (km). The country lies on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, bordering only two countries: the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the north and India to the east, south, and west. The geographical situation facing Nepal presents a formidable challenge to domestic economic growth and development. Nepal has an open border with India, but for access to the world economy, the nearest seaport is that of Kolkata in India and is more than 900 km away from the country's border. Most of Nepal's terrain is mountainous or hilly, and only 20% of the total land area is arable. These factors contribute to country's high transport costs, hindering market development and creating a near-complete dependence on India for trading routes. The open border with India and the high cost of access to the markets of the rest of the world have been decisive factors in putting Nepal in this situation of de facto integration with India.

Nepal and the PRC have remained close friends and neighbors, with diplomatic relations being established in 1955. An agreement was signed between the two countries in 1961 to construct a 120-km highway linking Kathmandu to the border of the PRC's Tibet Autonomous Region and on to Lhasa.

GOLDEN HAND

It's a Sunday evening. There's uproar and laughter around a small pristine cottage next to the Derbinsk almshouse. Carousels are crushing fallen firtwigs, an orchestra of three violins and a make-shift clarinet squawks away, and exile-settlers are dancing the trepak. On a small stage a wizard and magician, “origins forgotten,” is chewing hot oakum and pulling a multicolored ribbon out of his nose. Corks are popping from bottles of kvas. Drunken voices resound from the kvas shop. From its windows you hear: “Bardadym. Dead, a ruble maza. Sheperka, a pip per bundle. Again. Again-again. A lady. Two on the side.”

The owner of this Sakhalin kvas shop, as well as the gambling den, carousels, dance school, inn and café chantant is the “peasant-formerly-exiled” Sofia Bloeffstein. She was famous throughout Russia and most of Europe as “Golden Hand.” At her trial, the table for material evidence glittered with necklaces, bracelets and rings—the evidence of her booty. “Madame witness,” a court official turned to one of the plaintiffs, “do you see any of your jewelry here?” With altered countenance a lady approached this “Golkonda.” Her eyes burned and hands shook as she touched and handled each piece. Then, “from on high” in the dock, a voice mocked, “Madam, don't worry. No need to be so gentle: the jewelry's phony.”

I remembered this event when, at six o'clock in the morning, I left to visit Golden Hand for the first time.

Lloyd George emerged from the war with his prestige at an all-time high. All the political crises he had provoked through his inept deviousness were forgotten. He was hailed as the “man who won the war” (not the least by himself), a characterization that was patently untrue. For one thing, the war was not won by Britain alone but by a coalition of powers. For another, there were factors that probably weighed more than Lloyd George's leadership in the final victory: the strangling naval blockade that hastened Germany's capitulation; Kitchener, who built a formidable army, which became the mainstay of the Entente after the spring of 1917; American help; and Haig, who learned from past defeats, and adopted a formula in 1918 that would produce a string of brilliant victories.

Still, there are many modern day historians who consider that Lloyd George was the indispensable man in the First World War, just like Churchill would be in the second. They argue that he brought talented men into government, cut through red tape to achieve his objective and conciliated the workers, and that he could withstand relentless pressure, maintain his composure in the face of adversity and possessed dogged determination, a fertile imagination, boundless energy and the ability to inspire those with whom he came into contact. In other words, there was no one else on the political scene better suited to cope with the myriad and complex problems stemming from the worldwide conflict.

When the Rapollo conference broke up, it only remained for the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel, to approve the decisions that his government had taken. Accordingly, the three delegations left by special train for Peschiera on Lake Garda, where the king had established his military headquarters. The British were surprised at his diminutive size, described as being not much taller than a dwarf (actually he was 4 feet 11 inches) and “rather a pathetic figure with his country tumbling about his ears.” But they liked him because he seemed sincere, resolute, plucky and good-hearted. He readily consented to the removal of Cadorna, but he was less accommodating over the choice of his successor. Foch and Robertson wanted the Duke of Aosta, Italy's most accomplished soldier, but the king, never very secure, was jealous of his charismatic and popular cousin and deemed him unacceptable. Instead, he appointed General Armando Diaz, a fifty-five-year-old officer who had been a corps commander for only three months. Very little was known about him and the fact that he had spent most of his career on staffs did not exactly inspire confidence among the British and French delegations. But while his résumé was not overly impressive, he proved to be an excellent choice. He was sensible, courageous, concerned about the welfare of his troops, possessed combat experience and was tactically astute.

My first move in this essay would be to problematize the notion of boundaries in the words ‘Canadian’ and ‘Indian’. This question becomes especially pertinent when we try to map the connections between these two countries, the most obvious of which is that both are ‘post-colonial’. However different the two post-colonialisms might be, the obvious common ground is in the condition of being what we might call the Other of the metropolis. A common refrain in ‘Canlitcrit’ is the trauma of being marginalized by the two metropolitan cultures of the ‘mother’ countries in Europe and the big bad brother to the south, nearer home. Our difference from the dominant culture of our erstwhile imperial masters and our continuing link with it is also the running theme of modern Indian culture and life. Both countries also share the sense of being marginalized and reduced to a state of inferiority because of such colonization.

In the Canadian imaginary, this feeling has led to what has been called the ‘cringe’ mentality. In his introduction to one such ‘standard’ work on the subject, The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, David Staines cites the correspondence of an early Canadian writer, Susanna Moodie. Moodie wrote two major books whose titles are nothing if not self-explicatory: Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearing versus the Bush (1853).

In his introduction to Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century, subtitled ‘Filling the Blanks Spaces’, Tim Youngs states that the motivation for travel in places like Africa and South America was to fill the blank spaces on the map and ‘once “discovered”, many of those places would be exploited for their commercial potential’; (Youngs 2006:2). To the imaginative draw of the blank spaces and the desire to exploit them economically should be added the urge to establish political control over them, directly or indirectly. The entire process is of course comprehended in the terms imperialism and colonization. Nineteenth century travel writing – especially in a region like the Middle East – is inextricably linked to the spread of European power, although that does not mean every traveller in this period set out on their journey with the express intention of building or adding to the British Empire. Nevertheless, the geographical and chronological divisions adopted in this volume largely conform to political realities. Britain's progressive entrenchment in India focalized the Middle East for her politicians. The Ottoman Empire, which comprised the lands known to European travellers as the Near East, included Egypt and the Holy Land as well as many of the sites of classical antiquity, but became as a result of Britain's imperial interests in India the nexus of her foreign policy.

Introduction: The Reward-Punishment Model

In traditional societies (by which I mean preindustrial societies in which religious notions were still authoritative, dominant cultural forms and where customary behaviour or ‘morals’ contained a strong component of psychological and social threat), good conduct on this earth was to be rewarded either by some form of life after death or by a beneficial release from the suffering of this world. By contrast, transgression of customary norms was threatened by eternal punishment, damnation or a miserable and indeterminate existence as a ghost or, literally, as a lost soul. There was a strong element of resentment in these conformity–reward moral systems in which the rich, who were seen to be proud and haughty, would suffer extreme miseries cheered on by the erstwhile poor. This spiritual resentment was expressed in the biblical maxim that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

This paper offers a reading of Joseph Hall's The Art of Divine Meditation as a Ramist treatise, analysing his rhetorical and stylistic practice. But it might be appropriate to begin with a general comment on the meditational exercise as a genre. Louis L Martz has demonstrated how the Protestant arts of meditation came into being in reaction to an intellectual movement fostered by the Catholic Reformation, and particularly by the Jesuit fathers. One of the best fruits of this movement was the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Its impact was felt all over Europe through a number of Jesuit treatises and manuals that followed in its wake, St François de Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote being a particularly influential one.

In a manual published in the nineteenth century, we are given in simple terms the procedure involved in an Ignatian meditation:

The immediate preparation consists in

1. Placing ourselves in a special way in the presence of God. St. Ignatius recommends that we stand for the space of an Our Father.

2. In a prayer to ask grace to make the meditation well, and in this prayer to make a little act of self-humiliation, and be sure to invoke our Lady and St Joseph.

3. Then follow the preludes and the points of meditation. After reading each point we should reflect.

Glance, stare, really see!

In fact, the logocentric era (in any case, as far as the transmission of news is concerned) waned long before the advent of the period that we now call the ‘audiovisual’ age. From the moment that Daguerre and Niépce observed the effect of a ray of light on silver, mankind (without yet realising it) began to prefer image over text. Newspapers still had priority, but illustrated journals, according to the authoritative evidence of Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, had already learned to make use of two advantages: their news could reach ‘the sticks’ via the traveling salesman's baggage and, even more, they could make ‘national advertising coverage’ a reality.

The illustrated journals of the times when the transmission of news over distance was still in an infantile state in fact fulfilled the role of the future small screen and were its direct predecessors. They delivered viewable news to the home and made it a part of familial and societal customs.

Our topic is a comparison of two 1930s journals: the Soviet Ogonek (‘Little Fire’) and the German Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (‘BIZ’). This will be a comparison on a basic thematic level, although this is not the only possible approach, and maybe not even the most interesting.

PORTRAITS OF SAKHALIN

It was 16 April. The piercing northwest wind was cold and gusty as the steamer lolled from side to side. I stood on the top deck and watched as the bleak, inhospitable rocky shoreline, still covered in snow, came into view. This first impression was gloomy, heavy and oppressive. The island stretched out like some kind of monster, dead and awaiting disposal, with ridges covering its back.

“This is where the Kostroma went down,” the captain told me.

I descended to the lower deck. Prisoners' faces crowded the deck's portholes as they gazed intently at the shoreline of the island where their lives would end. They gloomily muttered: “Sakalin!”

“It's still winter!”

“Let me see!”

“There's nothing to see. Everything's covered in snow.”

The steamer began to rock more violently. We were entering the La Perouse Straits. To the left was the Krilovsky lighthouse; to the right the roiling and frothing boulders of the submerged “Calamity Rock.” Straight ahead and drawing near, an ice floe. More ice floes obscured the horizon.

Here indeed was some bitter mockery: to transport people nearly around the globe, to show them a small corner of earthly paradise (magnificent blooming Ceylon), to give them “but a glance” of Singapore, that luxurious, divine, fantastic blooming garden a degree-and-a-half from the equator, to allow—near the entrance to Nagasaki—just a glimpse of Japan's magical and picturesque coast (a coastline you cannot tear your eyes away from), only to deliver them, after all this, to bleak rocky shores still covered in snow as of mid-April, to this land of blizzards, storms, fogs and ice floes—and then to say: “Thrive!”