An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate reality. This use of poetry has existed in all cultures, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Pushkin’s compositions for ladies’ album books. Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues, in Occasions for Poetry, that this art form is the most important cultural element by which the Ottomans expressed themselves, more important than architecture, or history writing. Mustering an immense corpus of poetry from the turn of the 16th century, Aguirre-Mandujano successfully makes his case, though sometimes with the mass of citations he loses the forest from the trees.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.
Chie Ikeya’s InterAsian intimacies across race, religion and colonialism focuses on inter-Asian marriage in colonial Burma. Ikeya argues that over time these marriages became “the subject of political agitation, legislative activism and collective violence”.
China has been one of the leading sources of overseas visitors to the Maldives in recent years. Bin Yang, a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong, makes the argument in Discovered but Forgotten that this is to some extent a rerun of the situation in the 14th and 15th centuries when the Maldives were firmly on Chinese maps of places to visit.
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro’s photographs of Macau are certainly worth that and more. This latest collection consists of 100 photos taken during the last five years, a period which included Covid-19. The photojournalist, who been resident in Macau for well over a decade manages both to capture something of the inexpressible essence of the city, as well to provide visuals that will intrigue and engage anyone interested in either cities and the people that live in them. The “poética” of the title is apt.
Most people “collect” stuff, but Paul Bromberg is a “collector”, the difference being that he proceeds with intent and purpose, focusing on a relatively narrow group of objects.
The word miniature in fact comes from the Larin miniare or “to paint red”; early European miniatures—palm sized pieces that are parts of manuscripts and books facing a verse or an intense moment in a story or placed behind one—were initially delineated in that pigment. There was an Asian tradition of such painting as well, with Indian examples including illustrations in such texts such as the 12th-century Gita Govinda and 15th-century Rasa Manjari (15th century), as well as a great many Mughal examples.
It is a tribute to the literary diversity of India that this anthology of ten excerpted classics includes eight or nine different languages. They also represent four different religious traditions. Yet the texts are unmistakably Indian, sharing a love for words, sounds and images and exhibiting an exuberance rarely found in other cultural traditions.
Pirates and piracy seem to be about as universal as death and taxes, and Chinese and Western piracy bear much in common, from violence and hardship, to oppression from the authorities as both cause and consequence, as well as a certain amount of popular romanticism. In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J Antony provides an overview of the Chinese version of the phenomenon, situated “along the southern coast of China and in the South China Sea between the 1630s and 1940s,” which he places firmly in the broader sweep of Chinese history.
In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in particular—in what he’d hoped would be a sequel to his 2001 book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. But plans changed—radically. At the very end of 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerges in Wuhan, leading to chaos as officials frantically try to figure out how to control the new disease.