ASIAN ETHNOLOGY

Circus Routes

Indian big top circuses carry an ensemble of people, animals, and infrastructures over long distances. Interviews with circus managers and owners about their itineraries suggest their representations of India elude some regional conceptions of space that are widespread and prevalent in South Asian studies. While regions bind together nearby places with a history of exchanges and common practices, circus routes are one modality by which distant places and regions can be defined and connected through the history of the people traveling through them. This article surveys some of the spatial features that managers and owners consider when determining circus routes. Circus routes highlight dynamic and business-oriented ways of thinking about India’s territory, factoring in monsoons and droughts, ground availability and prices, and competition with other itinerant businesses. Building on ethnographic material, I show that business acumen in the circus community is primarily defined by a reading of space that successfully factors in this information. Ultimately, the development of circus geographies that do not readily map onto national, international, or subnational scales demonstrates how time and space can be configured in a specific way by one’s belonging to a professional community.

The Idea of Madhyadeśa in Early India

In the premodern world, many communities believed that they were located in the center of the world. The Hindu community, too, invented the idea of Madhyadeśa (Middle Country) in the first millennium bce. This space was as much a physical landscape as a set of cultural markers. The people of Madhyadeśa were believed to speak a “pure” language, follow the norms of a patriarchal caste order, and perform the right set of rituals. These cultural markers were contrasted with those of the people of Mlecchadeśa (Land of Barbarians). In the initial phase, the physical space identified with Madhyadeśa was fluid and malleable. The cultural markers, however, stayed the same or changed ever more slowly. Those cultural markers and ideologies continue to resonate in the lives of people. These ideas define the grammar of most marriages and political formations today. This can be demonstrated by comparing the performance of Madhyadeśa and Mlecchadeśa along a grid of indicators.

Female Collaboration at Regional Junctions

This article examines the material culture of Urdu action heroine films released in the era of Pakistan’s Islamization (late 1970s through 1980s) by a woman-led company called Shamim Ara Productions, which was headed by the illustrious female star, director, and producer of the Urdu screen Shamim Ara. With titles such as Miss Hong Kong (1979), Miss Colombo (1984), Miss Singapore (1985), Lady Smuggler (1987), and Lady Commando (1989), the action films released by Shamim Ara Productions bear the imprint of a traveling culture of production roving through urban South and Southeast Asia. Not only do we find here a mobile industry, headquartered in Lahore, fostering collaborations between small-scale film and tourism entrepreneurs strewn across South and Southeast Asian cities (Colombo, Dhaka, Manila, Hong Kong), but we also encounter a hybrid cinema led largely by women and cross-fertilized by global images of female action and public mobility flowing into Pakistani cities with the video trade and its piracy, and satellite television (video and VCR having come to the country in the late 1970s). In this article, I situate the gender politics of the ensemble heroine narrative Lady Smuggler (1987) in its material culture of production and reception, with attention to the diverse locations of that culture.