Romanise/Modernise or not?

Growing from a workshop entitled "Romanisation in Comparative Perspective: Explaining Success and Failure," held at Bilkent University, Andara in September 2007, the latest special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Series 3, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2010) contributes to the current literature in the field from a comparative perspective. Six papers with an editorial introduction were published drawing prime romanisation campaigns, whether success or failure, in Turkey, Azebaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, and Japan (disappointed by the absence of China).

Who advocated romanisation? Who were the romanisers? Unsurprisingly, they belong to the political/intellectual elite. In his editorial introduction, İlker Aytürk identifies three distinct groups of romanisers. First and foremost were the colonial rulers "who wanted to bring order to local administration and believed that Roman alphabet could serve that purpose best in being the writing system of the supposedly superior overlords." Romanisation was considered as a beneficent policy "to improve the condition of the native people". Second were local advocates "who regarded their native writing system as problematic from a practical point of view only and aspired to join what they saw as a global trend of romanisation." It should be noted that "it did not in any way imply the inferiority of the adoptive culture". Last but not least, the third group were local actors "from underdeveloped or developing countries as a rule, who adopted an extremely negative attitude toward their own culture, religion, or civilisation, to the point of blaming them for the backwardness of their societies." (p. 5-8)